THE PARENT OUTREACH PROGRAMME (0-3 YEAR OLDS)
Parent Outreach Facilitators encourages a parent to breast feed on a home visit.
THE PARENT OUTREACH PROGRAMME (0-3 YEAR OLDS)
Parent Outreach Facilitators encourages a parent to breast feed on a home visit.
SERVOL has always been guided by the finds of social and behavioural scientists. There is general agreement among all experts that so dominant is the influence of home life and early upbringing that it accounts overwhelmingly for the good or bad character and personality traits of the person. Psychologists and psychiatrists are almost unanimous in saying that by the age of three the character of the child is substantially shaped and by the age of six, it is resistant to change. Despite this nothing was being done at the national level to provide quality day care services for children of disadvantaged areas. As a result, SERVOL decided to intervene respectfully in that area through the establishment of a Parent Outreach Programme (POP).
This programme was based on all the research findings already mentioned and was strongly influenced by two additional historical facts: first, parents generally bring-up their children in the way they themselves have been parented; if they had experienced abusive parenting they will tend to repeat this pattern of behaviour with their children; second, with the steady disintegration of the extended family due to the twin forces of urbanisation and industrialisation there has been a steady increase in single-parent families (usually female-headed) with no support from grandparents, aunts, etc.
To initiate this programme, 21 trained ECCE teachers were offered in-depth training in one-to-one encounters with parents. Their mission was to go to the remote villages and ghettos of Trinidad and Tobago and to meet parents by going from house to house, making friends with them and helping them to deal with problems they were having with their small children and life in general.
Subsequent to this, meetings were held with small groups of parents in which they shared common problems and helped each other with possible solutions. In addition the parents were taught a number of crafts and many became proficient in making marketable items. The idea behind this is that parents (particularly single parents) were able to stay at home with their small children and earn income at the same time.
HOW EFFECTIVE HAS BEEN THIS PROGRAMME?
To say that POP has been enthusiastically received by parents and communities is an understatement. It took a little time for the mothers to welcome these young facilitators into their homes but when they saw them day after day going up and down the streets from house to house they soon dropped their defensiveness and opened their doors to them.
The main reason for this is that the facilitators had been carefully trained not to project the image of a "professional" who had all the answers and who had come to share this wisdom with "ignorant parents". Experience has shown that this approach does more harm than good as it lowers the already battered self esteem of parents. Rather, the approach was to praise the parents for what they had already achieved and to convince them that they could solve their own problems, particularly if these were shared with others.
The facilitators quickly discovered that many parents suffered from a sense of isolation, particularly if they were pregnant, and were only too eager to pour out their troubles to the facilitator, who by this time had become a trusted friend. Slowly, parents became convinced that they were indeed the primary educators of their small children and were encouraged to dialogue with the children while cooking and sweeping and above all to look for alternatives to physical punishment when children were naughty.
Facilitators link-up with personnel from Health Centres in the area and are able to give accurate information on subjects like breast feeding, diet and basic sanitation. Each year the POP facilitators reach out to over 2,000 families comforting, encouraging and bringing a sense of hope in their lives. It is hoped that with the linear expansion of the programme, there will be significant improvement in the level of care and attention offered to children in their early years, which will be the foundation stone of subsequent efforts to alleviate poverty in disadvantaged areas.
EARLY CHILDHOOD PROGRAMME
Despite the best efforts of the POP facilitators, it is
evident that there are thousands of children who will not be reached by this
programme and who will reach the age of three with battered egos and low
self esteem. For those, SERVOL offers hope through a high quality Early
Childhood Care and Education programme that touches the lives of over five
thousand three to five year old children.
To facilitate this programme, SERVOL built a Regional Training and Resource Centre in 1980 to respond to the appeals both of communities in Trinidad and Tobago as well as other Caribbean territories to train teachers, field officers and administrators for an expanded Early Child Care and Education (ECCE) Programme. The need for expert on-going training, was evident when it is recalled that the type of ECCE being espoused by SERVOL was not just any type of nursery education but one which was community based and parent oriented. The crucial aspect of such a programme is that it encourages the teachers and field officers to make contact with those adults responsible for the bringing-up of children and to influence their child rearing practice in such wise, that subsequent groups of children who enter the school will have benefited from the heightened consciousness of parents and community vis-a-vis child development. In other words, the programme aims at having a cumulative effect on parental practices over a period of time.
Through contact with a trained teacher and sharing experiences with each other, parents learn that children can be corrected without being physically punished, that the tendency of toddlers to touch and explore should be encouraged rather than suppressed, that in these early years children need the constant presence of the same adult figure to make them feel secure, that fruit and vegetables are to be preferred to junk food or sweets, that kissing and hugging a hundred times a day is a must, that should the child fall down or be afraid there must be always someone on hand.
To ensure that the teacher training programme was of the highest quality, SERVOL, by persistent lobbying was fortunate to acquire the services of Oxford University as its external examiner and over the last twenty years no fewer than 600 teachers have been trained from all over the Caribbean including Anguilla, Antigua, Barbados, Dominica, Grenada, Guyana, Haiti, Montserrat, Nevis, Panama, St. Kitts, St. Lucia, t. Vincent and Turks and Caicos.