New Curriculum for Parents
Siyafundisa has just discovered a new (to South Africa) programme to complement and reinforce its on-going HIV youth prevention programmes (Peer Education and Life Skills) and the training of priests that it does in conjunction with these. The programme, “Families Matter,” was developed and tested by the Centers for Disease Control (a principal partner in the U.S. government’s fight against HIV and AIDS) there. Research has proven it effective as a prevention programme for the youth.
It’s been run in the U.S. for years and has been shown to produce behavioral change on the part of parents. It has been introduced into Kenya and Botswana over the past couple of years. It is just getting started in Tanzania and Zambia. At the same time, CDC/Johannesburg is introducing it into South Africa. Mozambique is scheduled for introduction next year.
The basic thrust of the programme is to prepare parents of 8/9-12 year olds to talk with their children about sex and HIV (pregnancy, STI, etc.) prevention. Research shows that when parents share information about sex with their youngsters, it gets mixed with a healthy dose of values (though the programme itself is value-neutral), but when children get their information about sex from their peers it may/may not get mixed with a values message – or it may not be the one that parents intend. Also, when youngsters have access to sound information about sex, it appears to “immunize” them (to some degree) from the sort of experimentation that often accompanies more-informal sources of information on sex.
Siyafundisa now has the materials to initiate its own community assessment at St. Michael’s in Khayelitsha this winter and, when appropriate, at St. Mark’s in Lavender Hill – both in the Diocese of Cape Town.
Under the Siyafundisa Project, AAHT is charged with training parents, as well as priests, and it makes sense to incorporate this new, research-proven programme into our portfolio. Assuming an assessment that confirms community interest between now and September, Siyafundisa would like to initiate the training of trainers as soon as the training materials have been adapted and are ready for use – possibly by late November/early December. The actual training of parents could then, conceivably, start shortly after the first of the year – January 2010.
