Our Program for Parents: Building Stronger Family Support

"Effective parenting provides a powerful opportunity to influence adolescent development." According to a UNICEF study, parents’ active involvement is one of the strongest levers in helping adolescents succeed, build confidence, and thrive.

We believe that too. Even though our core program takes place in schools, we've always seen parents as our key partners. That's why, back in 2014, we launched our “parents program:” participatory workshops for parents — both mothers and fathers — of students at our partner middle schools.

Looking back on the parents program to date 

The idea was simple: help parents better understand the physical and emotional changes their kids go through during puberty, so they can talk openly and confidently with them through this pivotal stage of life using positive parenting approaches.

Each workshop is led by a CSE educator, following a structured curriculum full of hands-on, interactive activities. Groups of 30 or so parents come together for about 4 hours per session twice a year.

Over the last three school years, 19,389 parents have taken part.

But for us, this has never just been about the numbers. We're proud of the difference this has made in participants’ lives.

98% of parents who attended said what they learned would be useful going forward, and 97% said they now planned to talk to their kids about puberty after taking part in the workshop. (These numbers come from the surveys the facilitators run at the end of each workshop).

One father shared this with us:

"I'm ready now to talk to my kids about puberty and sexuality. To be honest with you, after the workshop, I realized my older daughters didn't get as far in life because they got married too young, and that's partly my fault. Whenever they had questions about this stuff, I'd just send them to their mother. I figured it was a taboo topic, and her job, not mine. Now I know that was a mistake. I'm going to be the one to talk to my younger daughter about puberty, periods, and the risks of becoming sexually active too early."

Rethinking things, and making a big change

We're proud to have engaged tens of thousands of parents over the years, and to have built something that's made a real, lasting difference for young adolescents and their families. 

But… we also never stop asking ourselves how we can do better.

It's only become clearer and clearer that getting parents on board is essential to helping youth succeed — and we need to go further if we want to amplify the effectiveness of our school-based CSE program. Just like in many contexts, harmful parenting habits, gender inequality, and misinformation at home can hold back our program's impact.

We decided that we need a fuller, more robust program to engage parents. And more than anything, parents kept telling us they wanted workshops that happened more often, and more regularly. Students told us that, too.

So we're making big changes!

After digging into our data and revisiting our objectives, we decided to adopt the Parenting for Lifelong Health program. It was developed in South Africa by the University of Oxford, the University of Cape Town, the WHO, UNICEF, and local partner NGOs. Studies show it helps reduce violence against children and boosts parental involvement. Researchers have also seen improvements in mental health and household financial management.

Our goal now is to adapt, test, and integrate a reimagined, evidence-based, gender-transformative parenting program into PJL's CSE model.

So what makes this different from the parents program we've run since 2014? Why are we so confident this is the right move? What did we do to make sure it fits Madagascar's context? And how did the pilot go — what did we learn?

We'll answer all of that in part two, once the pilot phase wraps up. Stay tuned!