Kevin Baldeosingh

In the Unit­ed States and oth­er de­vel­oped coun­tries, re­searchers have ex­am­ined par­ent­ing and fam­i­lies to try and fig­ure out what the best prac­tices are. These stud­ies have come up with ten ba­sic com­pe­ten­cies that good par­ents have, most of which are prob­a­bly al­so ap­plic­a­ble to Trinidad and To­ba­go. The ar­gu­ment is that par­ents who have these skills are more like­ly to raise chil­dren who are emo­tion­al­ly bal­anced, so­cia­ble, and in­tel­lec­tu­al­ly com­pe­tent.

Now this is so im­por­tant a task that you would think every so­ci­ety with the where­with­al would con­duct such re­search. But on­ly in 2009 did the Fam­i­ly De­vel­op­ment Cen­tre of the Uni­ver­si­ty of the West In­dies con­duct a sur­vey of child-rear­ing prac­tices in T&T, the first such in al­most 40 years.

The re­port, which must be re­quired read­ing for all pol­i­cy-mak­ers and per­sons in­ter­est­ed in chil­dren, was launched last month and is edit­ed by FDC di­rec­tor and ped­a­gogy ex­pert Car­ol Lo­gie and Caribbean-born US-based child de­vel­op­ment psy­chol­o­gist Jaipaul L Roop­nar­ine.

Of the ten skills iden­ti­fied by the Amer­i­can re­searchers, two stood out as es­pe­cial­ly im­por­tant. Yet these two pri­ma­ry skills are not what most par­ents would pri­ori­tise. A 2010 ar­ti­cle by Sci­en­tif­ic Amer­i­can writer Robert Ep­stein iden­ti­fied the fol­low­ing ten com­pe­ten­cies:

1. Love and af­fec­tion–mean­ing hugs and qual­i­ty time

2. Stress man­age­ment–you re­duce anx­i­eties for your child as much as pos­si­ble, and try to keep your­self calm.

3. Good spousal re­la­tion­ship– even if you quar­rel (and who doesn't) you make sure the chil­dren see you mak­ing up. If you are not to­geth­er, you nev­er badtalk the oth­er par­ent.

4. Au­ton­o­my and in­de­pen­dence–you en­cour­age your child to be as self-re­liant as ap­pro­pri­ate for their age.

5. Learn­ing–you ex­pose your child to ed­u­ca­tion­al ma­te­ri­als, and prefer­ably show your­self learn­ing as well.

6. Life skills–fi­nan­cial sta­bil­i­ty and se­cur­ing child's eco­nom­ic fu­ture.

7. Be­hav­iour man­age­ment–you use pos­i­tive re­in­force­ment and pun­ish on­ly as a last re­sort.

8. Health–you feed them healthy food and make sure they're phys­i­cal­ly ac­tive

9. Re­li­gion–you sup­port re­li­gious and spir­i­tu­al ac­tiv­i­ties.

10. Safe­ty–you pro­tect your child and are aware of their ac­tiv­i­ties and friends.

Now ob­vi­ous­ly some of these have to be mod­i­fied for our so­ci­ety. In re­spect to (6), for in­stance, we don't live in a de­vel­oped econ­o­my so fi­nan­cial sta­bil­i­ty is less un­der our con­trol.

There­fore, we have to pre­pare our chil­dren to cope fis­cal­ly in oth­er ways. In re­spect to (9), the FDC re­port found that "more In­do Caribbean care­givers en­gaged in re­li­gious and eth­nic so­cial­i­sa­tion than African Caribbean care­givers."

Ep­stein, how­ev­er, notes that most child de­vel­op­ment ex­perts do not con­sid­er re­li­gious up­bring­ing im­por­tant or even con­sid­er it harm­ful, and he ar­gues that the ex­perts are wrong.

So, of these ten com­pe­ten­cies, what are the two most im­por­tant things par­ents should work on? It turns out to be (2) and (3)–man­ag­ing stress and hav­ing a good re­la­tion­ship with your spouse. Un­for­tu­nate­ly, it ap­pears that most peo­ple are bet­ter at all the oth­er parental com­pe­ten­cies than this one.