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The idea comes from a national assessment of the parenting landscape in Belize, and over one hundred stakeholders from the government, civil society and the private sector were in attendance this morning at the opening ceremony where we found out more about what they hope to get out of the event:

Lliani Arthurs - Acting Director, Human Services
"We're having what we called a national parenting workshop, and it actually a process where we're bringing together local and regional partners to begin to discuss where we go as a country in terms of parenting. We recognize family as the cornerstone of our society, and recognize that our families are facing increasing challenges especially where societies are changing. And we believe that parents must be engaged to understand the critical role that they play, in terms of ensuring maximum development for children. And we hope that this workshop will begin that dialog with our partners to identify who is doing what, and where do we go. We have various organizations from both Government and civil society. We have invited 2 consultants from the Caribbean to kind of share their expertise and experiences in the Caribbean, and kind of understand best practices, as we look at how should Belize do this because we have to be realistic in what is our condition. We also have beneficiaries, parents who have actually gone through some of the parenting programs to share their experiences, kind of guide us in what they need, and we also have a couple children who also are beneficiaries of parenting. We have our partners, UNICEF, and various organizations. If we just look at our society, we issues of poverty, unemployment, absentee fathers, and more and more single-parent households, and this alone adds to the challenges of parents. We will all recognize that being a parent, nobody gave us a manual in terms of what to do, and as the minister highlighted in his opening address, sometimes we get more training in being employees, rather than being a parent, even though being a parent is the most important thing for the development of our society. And so, we want to look at how do we begin this engagement process to kind of show parents of the role they play, that they don't take any of it for granted. In my address, I kind of highlighted that we recognize the age old giving the child the eye, and how traditionally the child would shape up, but today's generation, and they look at you and say, 'Mommy, is something wrong with your eye?' So, we're dealing with a different set of kids who are equipped for this technological age. So, how do we parent these kids? And I think that our parents need help in order to do that."

The 3 day parenting workshop is being held under the theme, "Parenting: The Cornerstone of Development."