THE Department of Social Welfare and Development Region III (DSWD-3) is enjoining stakeholders to celebrate the 26th National Children's Month themed: "Isulong: Tamang Pag-Aaruga Ng Bata Para Sa Lahat," which is focused on positive parenting.
Positive parenting is one of the key strategies identified in the Philippine Development Plan of Action to Eliminate Violence Against Children (PPAEVAC). It is the non-violent approach to parenting and caregiving for children in their behavior while the parents acknowledge and respect their rights to healthy development, protection from violence, and participation in their learning from infancy to childhood.
The 2015 National Baseline Study on Violence Against Children (NBS-VAC) revealed that most of the Filipino children experience and are vulnerable to physical, psychosocial and sexual violence that is significantly high in the home. An alarming three in five children suffer in one or two forms of violence at home, while, often, their common perpetrators are their family members.
The Unicef report in the Systematic Literature Review of Violence Affecting Children showed that violent discipline is the most frequent form of violence against children in the home, driven by factors including social norms, around the use of and ineffectiveness of discipline, authoritarian parenting, and parents' level of education.
It also notes of the lack of supervision, single headed household, and absent parents increase the vulnerability of children to sexual violence at home; emotional violence from parents increases children's negative behavior, which increases the risk of experiencing violent discipline and perpetrating aggressive behavior towards others.
The Unicef report also revealed parenting practices that include the use of coercion, threats, insults and a frightening tone increase the risk of child maltreatment and set the state of similar patterns of behavior in parent/child and other relationship; experiencing childhood or familial sexual violence is also a driver of all forms of intimate partner violence victimization for females; and experiencing or being exposed to violence in the home also increases the risk that children will use or experience violence against partners, peers and family members. (PR)