Kids ran and played in a room decorated with streamers and balloons for a graduation party in the Bernice Sayese Community Centre Monday afternoon.
If a child misbehaved, there wasn’t screaming or hitting — parents calmly talked to their children, explaining why they were behaving inappropriately and giving them options to fix the situation.
It was the graduation party alone that showed the success of the traditional parenting class that ran in the centre for the past 10 weeks.
“Yelling and hitting, they learned that wasn’t traditional parenting. They learned that there are other ways of communicating with a child respectfully to teach them self discipline and self control,” said Leah Dorion, an elder’s helper for the traditional parenting program.
“Through those teachings a program was delivered to these parents so they could learn the good cultural teachings of child rearing and apply those teachings to their contemporary parenting.”
Daryl Benson is the father of a four-year-old, but hasn’t had much time to spend with his son.
“When the program came up, I jumped at it,” he said.
Learning about traditions and communication helped him want to share and be more open to people he meets, Benson said.
“I’d like to teach my son the traditional teachings.”
This is what Dorion hopes will happen — that the parents will learn good child-rearing skills and pass them on to their children — the way parenting hist-
orically occurred in the community.
“So many of them have been through the child welfare system, they’ve been through residential school … the traditional parenting skills were lost,” Dorion said.
Machelle Banhegy had just moved to Prince Albert when she heard about the course. She signed up with the support of staff from the Bernice Sayese Centre and took home a lot of information about relationships.
“The most I got out of it was about the relationships with people,” she said.
“There is a strong belief that we are all together.”
The program is free to the participants, who leave with a certificate, and the centre hopes to be able to offer it again because they had to turn people away the first time.
One of the graduates was rewarded for perfect attendance during the course — Charlotte Ballantyne received the award sponsored by the River Bank Development Corporation.
ahill@paherald.sk.ca
