Family Life Education
As achievement oriented outlook is given precedence in today’s society, often someone who is strong and bold in his professional front is socially awkward or at a loss regarding how to be or act in their relationships. Family acts like a cushion and shock absorber in times of such emotional distress. However, nowadays even families are becoming increasingly vulnerable to the rising restlessness, unbridled want and uncontrollable emotional outbursts of the youngsters.
It is common these days for the children to not get quality time with their parents. They are not only missing out the love and validation from their family but also informal education about family, family life, family relationship. They do not receive guidance about many other vital matters like values that should guide one’s action and conduct. This is contributing to the emotional gap between the children and the parents. The children feel uneasy to talk about intimate issues with their parents. Parents too feel less inclined to talk regarding such issues and hope that in natural course of time those will get resolved. This often makes way for unintended outcome or undesirable outcome.
It is here that change has to come from within and family life education plays a vital role in this sphere. The question arises, who should provide this education? Certainly family. But family also needs support in this work and here comes the relevance of external agencies providing such educational services.
Difficulties of the adolescents and youths are mounting but resources are scarce to deal with them. Hence, one alternative, may not be the best, is to see if some work can be done to prevent some of the malaise that are afflicting the youngsters. At least, if they can learn the ways of dealing with their lives’ situations, they can hope to have command over their own affair in the subsequent phases of life.
With this understanding the Centre for Family Life Education and Youth Activity of the Santi Trust has focused on the adolescent and youth, groups both at the institutional level like schools, and the community level with the youths and adolescents of various young men’s clubs. They are made to go through a process of doing and learning at the same time. But to bring home the points the methodology adopted is a combination of tools like lecture, demonstration, filing up of questionnaires, (unsigned,) on aspects like physiological differences between male and female, normal challenges of adolescent period, perception about marriage and issues related to marriage, knowing one’s own self. These are imparted through short duration workshops, normally two-day’s duration followed by discussion sessions after an interval of one / two months depending on the availability of the participants of the specific workshops.