Our First Parents' Seminar
Expansion International Africa recently held their first High School Parents’ Seminar in many of our communities. The parents of each sponsored student were invited along with their friends and neighbors to discuss the challenges that arose during the COVID-19 pandemic.
After touching on general parenting topics, the meetings finished with an open discussion about godly parenting and living lives as examples for their kids. The E.I.A. staff was extremely pleased by the turnout of the parents in each community with over 400 participants in total.
Just as many parents in the U.S. have experienced hardships of lost jobs, adjusting to their children being home, and navigating remote learning, Kenyan parents have had similar difficulty finding ways to engage their children and keep them positively occupied. They found that the children were becoming more disrespectful with conflicts in communication. Collectively, parents' main concerns were to ensure that their children were kept from negative influences and not wasting away their time on technology.
Solutions discussed at each seminar were to engage the children, taking time to make sure they were doing okay processing the current global situation in a healthy way. This included finding activities for their children whether that be additional help or work around the house or involvement in church. They agreed that if they spent time in prayer for their children and intentionally demonstrated to them that they cared about their well-being, the kids would feel more comfortable being authentic and honest with their parents.
All in all, these meetings were very beneficial to the families in our program. Parents asked that these seminars take place annually from now on.