Parenting Talks
TThe Foundation hosts a series of Parenting Talks held in collaboration with Yale University. These talks are tailored for parents, Early Childhood Development (ECD) professionals, and the UAE community at large.
The program is currently on its second series and has covered a wide range of topics including: the Importance of ECD, Sibling Rivalry, Becoming a Parent, and Bullying.
Dr. Walter Gilliam, the Director of the Edward Zigler Center in Child Development and Social Policy at Yale University Child Study Center, who led the ‘The Importance of Early Childhood Development Programs’ talk, described the positive lasting impact of a high-quality early childhood development program, with studies that indicated children who receive a high-quality early education tend to have 59% greater earnings, are nearly 3 times more likely to own a home, and 31% more likely to have achieved higher education.
Dr. Michael Kaplan, a clinical professor at Yale Child Study Centre, who led the ‘Can’t You Get Along? Parenting Your Children Beyond Sibling Rivalry’ talk, offered advice to UAE parents on how they can take an impartial approach when parenting their children; highlighting how parents unintentionally compare children with one another by making statements such as ‘Why can’t you be more like your brother/sister’, which can elicit jealousy and weaken the bond between siblings.
Dr. Youngshin Kim, an Associate Professor at the Department of Psychiatry at the University of California, San Francisco, led on a talk titled ‘Bullying Experience in Youth: Nature and Intervention,’ which addressed parents of young children in the UAE on the misconception that bullying is common, thus a benign part of the child’s and/or adolescent’s experience.
The Parenting talk titled ‘Becoming a Parent,’ led by Dr. Ross Thompson, a Distinguished Professor of Psychology at the University of California, Davis, addressed parents of young children in the UAE on how attachments develop in new-born children and parents, why it is important, and what parents should know about their relationships with their children.
The final parenting talk of this series will be held on the 18th of May, 2015 led by Dr Kyle Pruett, a Clinical Professor in Child Psychiatry and Nursing at the Child Study Centre, Yale University, discussing ‘Children, Parents and the Media: Friend or foe for families in the digital and wireless age’.