Title Helping with cultural changes and parenting
Funding round 2
D.A. was born in Turkey and has been living in the U.K since 1992. She describes herself as a Turkish Kurd. She is a 40 year old mother and has two children, who are 12 and 18 years of age. Before attending our parenting group, she had difficulties coping with her children. She particularly struggled with her 18 year old son, because she did not have enough understanding of teenage behaviour. She was advised to join our parenting group by a counsellor at Derman. She wanted to gain more information on parenting strategies particularly as both her children are adolescents. She was very punctual and had been very keen on the sessions and was a very enthusiastic member of the group.
Here she describes how she felt about our parenting groups:
" ... I think some families do not have enough knowledge on how to bring up children and they are not ready to face the mistakes they are making. There might be so many reasons why we make such mistakes in our parenting but it is hard to face the fact we make mistakes. ....Derman's parenting programme has reminded me of the way I was parented and made me think about the way I parent my children. İ can see much clearly where I have gone wrong and in where I was right..."
D. has benefited from our programme in many ways. She had the opportunity to compare her own culture with the new environment she now is in and she realised that the parenting she had learnt from her parents was not exactly the way to parent her own children due to the difference in time, generation and culture.