International Day of the Girl Child: Need for Family Life Education for the Girl Child
Early in the week the world
celebrated the International Day of the Girl Child and all fathers of girl
children around the globe were happy, bearing in mind the traditional belief
that a girl child is a ”nation.”
October 11, 2012 was the first
day to be observed as the Day of the Girl Child. International Day of the Girl
Child is an international observance day declared by the United Nations; it is
also called the Day of Girls and the International Day of the Girl. The
observation supports more opportunity for girls and increase awareness of
gender inequality faced by girls worldwide based on their gender. The
inequality includes areas such as access to education, nutrition, legal rights,
medical care, and protection from discrimination, violence against women and forced child marriage. (From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia).
According to Wikipedia, the Day
of Girls helps raise awareness not only of the issues that girls face, but also
of what is likely to happen when those problems are resolved. From this point
of view, educating girls helps reduce the rate of child marriage, disease and
helps strengthen the economy by helping girls have access to higher paying
jobs. Similarly, protection from violence against women will not only protect
women from assault and abuse from men but will help to create happier families
when the problem is resolved. Also ending all forms of discrimination against
women and girls is not only a basic human right, but it equally has a
multiplier effect across all other development areas.
However, there are unnoticed
adverse development consequential to the gains of gender equality in various
areas of awareness being created by the United Nations in support of the Girl
Child. One of these issues is that of increasing trend in Single Parenting,
particularly single motherhood. The adverse effect of this phenomenon is more
prominent in developing countries where the level of girl child education is relatively
low.
Common causes of Single Parenting are:
- Divorce
- Death (widowhood)
- Early Pregnancy (Premarital birth)
- Adoption
- Donor insemination
(listen2articles.com)
Other causes could also be:
- Husband’s abandonment of family without formal divorce, and
- Career ego.
According to a report from
European Policy Brief, Single Parenthood is on the rise everywhere in the
world, including the European Union (EU). Single parents now constitute about
19% of the households with children in the EU. In the overwhelming majority of
cases, this phenomenon concerns women. Only 15% of single parents are fathers,
and their socioeconomic condition is better than that of single mothers. This
issue has inspired a significant number of academic investigations and analyses
that have highlighted the individual and collective difficulties related to
this phenomenon. Not only are single mothers on the rise, but their situation
is in many ways more problematic than that of other women. Indeed, single
mothers are more likely to fall into poverty (their risk of poverty is 30%,
compared to 17% for couples with children), to be unemployed, to have taken a
part-time job in order to combine professional and family life, to have poorer
physical and mental health – the rate of depression is particularly high among
single mothers – and to have difficulties in building lasting new relationships
(Sophie Heine).
Although there is no strong
empirical evidence to support that children of single mothers in Africa fare
worse than those with married mothers; existing evidence continues to show that
single motherhood is associated with higher risks of poverty, reproduction of
poverty and other negative outcomes that affect the well-being of single
mothers and their children. A recent analysis covering 13 countries across
sub-Saharan Africa found that for seven of them, more than 20% of women aged
14-49 had already experienced a union dissolution ( (de Walque and Kline 2012)
With the likely adverse
implications of single parenthood for well-being, family-oriented programmes
and studies have become more imperative. Hence, the need for Family Life
Education in our national and international educational curriculum for the
children, particularly the girl child.
Family Life Education is the
practice of equipping and empowering family members to develop knowledge and
skills that enhance well-being and strengthen interpersonal relationships
through an educational, preventive and strengths-based approach.
The skills and knowledge needed for healthy family functioning are
widely known:
- Strong communication skills
- Knowledge of typical human development
- Good decision-making skills
- Positive self-esteem
- Healthy interpersonal relationships
(ncfr.org)
The importance of happy family in
relation to socio-economic well-being of a nation cannot be over-emphasized.
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