The end of year festive season is upon us and the busy roads, especially highways and city centres attest to this. For many families, it will be a full house with most of the learners back home from school for the third term holiday.
This time presents an opportunity for family members to spend more time together and strength family bonds and relationships. Unfortunately, a lot of conflict is also bound to be experienced during such seasons because of differing points of view in the same space.
It is not uncommon for conflicts to arise during this time, especially between children and parents. This is why any initiative that is aimed at improving family interpersonal relations is more than welcome, especially at this time of year. In May this year, Uwezo, in partnership with Assessment of Life Skills and Values in East Africa (ALiVE), conducted community dialogues in Sheema , Tororo, Oyam, Kanungu, Kampala and Mukono, focusing on nurturing life skills and competencies in areas such as self-awareness, collaboration, problem-solving, and respect at home, in school and communities.
Over 10 weeks, parents, guardians and caregivers engaged in weekly discussions on how to model and support these skills, more specifically problem. For some of the families that participated, the lessons have bridged generational gaps, replacing conflict with cooperation.
Ms Faridah Nassereka, ALiVE’s systems coordinator in Uganda and a senior programme officer at UWEZO Uganda says that after reflecting on the low life skills proficiency among young people in Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania, ALiVe set out to engage parents and communities, to strengthen problem solving skills particularly.
Some of the children say they are now closer to their parents. Some of the parents were encouraged to engage more closely with schools. Because of this, some of the parents took initiative to visit the schools to understand their children’s academic challenges to identify the support they need.
A Local Council 1 chairperson of one of the participating areas, Francis Turyamureeba says parent-child conflict has reduced significantly. Some parents have also attested to the lessons teaching them patience, empathy and respect for children’s rights.
While it is easy to dismiss such programmes as trivial and not what the populace needs, we must acknowledge that such programmes help to give birth to peace and stability in various areas, especially at the smallest but core unit of community, which is the family.
Even as we call upon travellers to be kin on road safety and party-goers to drink responsibility, we must also call for deliberate and intentional use of skills such as problem solving as this contributes to how well or how poorly the festive season will go. The participants of the 10-week weekly dialogues if they put to good use the skills learnt will definitely have a more peaceful and enjoyable festive season.