Family is the primary unit for providing care and support to children. Providing a safe and enabling environment at home leads to formation of good habits which are often projected throughout their adult life. Due to various stressors, oftentimes caregivers are unable to adequately tend to their younger ones effectively. Thus, by providing children with emotional security, satisfaction of basic needs and developmental stimulation among other things, families can prevent risky behaviours and mental health problems, including substance use and delinquency early on.
According to various researchers, parental and familial factors have a major role in the long-term pathways leading to substance use. While it has also been recognized that an adolescent’s choice of peers is greatly affected by the relationship they have with their parents so it is coincidentally directly proportional that when adolescents have a positive relationship with their parents, they are more likely to choose peers who are a positive influence in their overall life choices.
It has been perceived that major risk factors for substance use have been due to a lack of structure of family life and a chaotic home environment. Moreover, parent-child relationships and families characterised by indifference, non-responsiveness, emotional insecurity and lack of consistency by parents in caring and comforting children during the early years of development are associated with higher risks of depression, anxiety and relationship problems among children and adults. Childhood depression has been further associated with drug use in early adolescence.
Each and every child lives in different circumstances based on the environmental and social factors they are born into. Some of the challenges could be living in underserved areas where adequate services such as safe drinking water, sanitation, electricity or access to education is low. Society puts an immense amount of pressure on caregivers to be good and rightful towards their children without providing them the necessary tools and skills. Due to unhealthy relationships they might have had with their parents, they pass on the generational trauma to the next person. To break this cycle, it is important to provide necessary assistance wherever possible. Good parents are not born overnight, they have to be made. Some days they will fail and on other days, they will sail through the storms flawlessly. Keeping in view the various needs and family dynamics one might have due to external and internal factors, programmes should be tailor made.
To build on the skills and provide tools to improve positive family relationships, family skill training programmes come into play. When family skills training programmes were compared with other prevention approaches, they were found to be the second most effective approach after in-home family support, and approximately 15 times more effective than programmes that provided youth only with information and self-esteem, and approximately three times more effective than life or social skills training.
The long-term results of family skills training programmes in parents show positive results including sustained improvement in family and child management skills (setting standards, monitoring of behaviour and consistent discipline). In fact, family skills training programmes may be more effective over time compared to youth-only skills training programmes, because family skills training programmes include training for parents as well and may therefore change the family environment in enduring ways. Adding family focused interventions to community-based interventions or school-based interventions increases the overall effectiveness of a programme, as more risk and protective factors are addressed at the same time.
UNODC has a number of effective evidence based programmes being run for providing skill training to the families in the form of Strong Families, Family UNited and Listen First. ‘Strong Families’, is a selective family skills programme developed for families living in challenged and humanitarian settings (including the internally displaced, refugees, those in conflict and post conflict situations and in very rural settings) originally designed and piloted in Afghanistan, it has evolved to a global version.
The findings reflect that it improved upon the caregivers confidence in family management skills, parenting skills, increased capacity to cope with stress, reduced aggressive and hostile behaviours and hence improved mental health outcomes in children and parents overall. Whereas, Family UNited is a Universal Family Skills Programme for Prevention of Negative Social Outcomes in low and middle Income Countries. Overall this Programme consists of 4 sessions (1 per week) addressing the essential core needs of parenting skills of not more than two hours.
Such programmes teach parents to be responsive by helping them recognise their strengths. Identifying the core problems in the family and community to better protect their children. Building better patterns at home pushes the caregivers to work on core issues of child-rearing, parenting style and family life and put them into practice. Moreover, It is important that parents should also connect with their inner child and heal their own wounds so that it doesn’t reflect on their children and hurt them in the process. Portrayal of positive relationships and practising empathy, compassion and being good listeners have a positive response on the overall development of a child.
By appropriately expressing emotions, parents can help their children to recognize their feelings and emotions in turn. They can identify and model behaviour that corresponds to the values and norms they want to transfer to their children. Parents are just like any of us, just older versions with extra responsibility of taking care of a younger version of themselves. By healing ourselves and understanding our shortcomings, we can avoid situations that our younger selves couldn’t recover from. Being kind and accepting our flaws can provide a better clarity and perspective to create a warm, safe and secure home for the children who will further develop into responsible adults.
United Nations Office on Drugs & Crimes. (2009). Guide to implementing family skills training programmes for drug abuse prevention. Vienna. ISBN: 978-92-1-148238-6.
United Nations Office on Drugs & Crimes. Facts for Prevention Workers Factsheet, Listen First.
United Nations Office on Drugs & Crimes. (n.d.). Family Skills. Retrieved from https://www.unodc.org/unodc/en/prevention/family-skills.html
United Nations Office on Drugs & Crimes. (n.d.). Listen First. Retrieved from https://www.unodc.org/unodc/en/listen-first/
