Become a foster parent, provide a home for positive upbringing – MoSP urges

Residents within Region Five (Mahaica-Berbice) are urged to take a leap of faith and become a foster parent.

Acting Senior Probation Officer Lauristan Choy of the Ministry of Social Protection (MoSP), at a recent outreach, appealed for well-meaning persons to house the less fortunate, to provide them with a home for positive upbringing.
“There is a lot of children in institutional care and while we are equipped to provide them with necessary necessities … We would love for people to come and apply to be foster parents so that the children can become a part of a family setting for a positive life,” Choy is quoted by the Department of Public Information (DPI) as saying.
Choy stressed that the Ministry remained committed to bringing families together, and steps were being taken to achieve this goal.
According to the acting Senior Probation Officer, child negligence is the highest form of child abuse within the region, and the Ministry hopes to reduce it.
He explained, according to the DPI, that specialised parental training is one of the many programmes offered to parents to achieve the Ministry’s goal of helping parents to understand their roles and responsibilities. It was highlighted that this training is set to tackle all forms of child abuse.
“We [the Ministry of Social Protection] are trying to move from corporal punishment. We want to push positive discipline hence, a focus on alternative discipline. We want to change that narrative where parents can see that those same punishments lead to violence. Whenever the child gets older, they exhibit the same kind of behaviour to their loved ones. This often times lead to many unfortunate events, because of that mind-set.”
The acting Senior Probation Officer is optimistic that this narrative will help to create positive young people and, by extension, a positive Guyana.