Parents undergo training

A RECENTLY-opened early childhood school in Kiunga, North Fly district in Western has conducted a parenting seminar last Monday for parents, prospective parents, teachers and young people living in and around Kiunga town.
Cross Country School of Excellence principal director Elias Wranga said the school had more to offer than just teaching early learning lessons to children.
It had identified the need to teach parents good parenting skills and ran a full-day seminar on parenting.
Wranga said parents faced new and sometimes frightening situations concerning their children and they were often not prepared to handle the issues or solve the problems.
Parents sometimes push the responsibilities to the teachers who cannot spend school hours to discipline students.
The participants learnt how to become better parents and teacher at home.
Teachers were also taught how to take on the responsibilities of parents at school.
The seminar presented Biblical insights on parenting and how parents should correctly respond to their children’s needs as they grow up.
“Parents must take the responsibility to discipline their children well so that teachers will not spend time on discipline measures but on academic lessons,” Wranga said.
He said using abusive words and spanking a child without love and explanation would create a psychological tremor in the child’s early years, hindering progress in the child’s learning.
Participants also learnt that every child is intelligent, however, the upbringing and environment makes the difference.
Wranga explained how the multiple intelligence worked and how they can be harnessed or sometimes suppressed.
“Every child is born with one of the following intelligence – verbal/linguistic, logical/mathematical, visual/spatial, musical/rhythmic, body/kinesthetic, interpersonal and intrapersonal,” he said.
“If we can correctly identify this in a particular child, he or she can be provided specialised skills and activities to stretch the intelligence or apply for necessary training in tertiary institutions later on.
“The school will run course modules for parenting on areas such as, discipline, counselling, correction, hygiene and basic phonics home schooling programmes for parents.”
The school’s motto is “Creative Ability” and the education given to the children is about excellence in their creativity and not pass or fail, which is discriminatory.
“The school believes that every child deserves the best possible start for a lifetime of learning – and to acquire godly values and characters, good parenting is a must today for children to achieve what they are possibly capable of working to achieve in life and to progress,” Wranga said.