Weekend Parenting Training Sessions

Successful training trial run this weekend! I'm exhausted! What fun! All the children came with the moms to the training, and unlike parent meetings or classes at home, the children run in and out of the room, babies are fed and cared for, etc, all the while. Plan the agenda on Africa Time! I feel very accepted after a weekend of getting to know the moms. By this afternoon they were translating their jokes and the local gossip. These moms had willingly come to the training and really wanted to learn. They also agreed to tell me if I suggested things that absolutely did not work with their culture, which did happen a couple of times. I enjoyed teaching parenting styles - renaming the styles to Positive Parenting, Bossy Boots, Spoilt Child, and I Give Up Parenting. It was great to see how much sense this made to them, and rather than me giving examples, to hear their stories of families they knew who fell into each of the categories. I felt very clever explaining that warnings to remind children of the parents' expectation were like the yellow card in soccer, and consequence like the red card. I was not prepared, though, to answer the following question. "Jan, what then is an appropriate consequence if your child burns down the house?" We moved from there into safety and how to prevent accidents before they happen. Fire is a terrible thing here in the townships. It spreads so quickly and typically burns all the adjacent houses as well. They have asked me to next prepare a class on coping with tantrums. Sounds just like parent needs at home, but here there is less feelings related vocabulary to use, and parents are expected to tell their children what to do rather than helping them to sort out feelings and express their own ideas on how to solve problems. This week's challenge for me will be to sort out how to do this within the cultural context. I've also been invited to visit the moms at their homes. I hope to be able to do this before I return home. One more cool story for this post - regarding last weekend's braai (cookout) at my friends' house in Nyanga - the event made the township newspaper! The headline read, "Whites Spend Night Ekasie." We did have a great time sharing experiences with the locals folks in Nyanga.