families
I had a conversation today with a friend who is serious about helping her fellow countrymen in Mexico. She talked about lots of successful ideas that haven't come to fruition because they aren't fed through existing infrastructures. She also talked about how you can't change a kid's self-esteem unless you change the home environment. And as she got down to what she was talking about, I was realizing something that struck me forcibly this summer: the FAMILY is the basic unit of society, and any intervention that is going to be successful will somehow integrate the FAMILY.
Social workers face the same frustration. They work with kids and get them to trust the environment of the therapist for two hours each week. But where are the kids the rest of the week? With their family. And so all the progress that has been made won't be sustained unless there are substantial changes made within the family.
Let's return to microcredit for just a second. Microcredit has typically targeted women in communities. I like the community idea (refer to the previous blog), but I have had real issues with the focus on women. I feel like while it gives the women needed confidence, it gives the men excuses to not be responsible fathers and husbands--they just let the wife do the work. And what does that teach the kid? So an intervention needs to take into consideration the family, whether explicitly by including the entire family, or implicitly by realizing the implications on the family.
Social workers face the same frustration. They work with kids and get them to trust the environment of the therapist for two hours each week. But where are the kids the rest of the week? With their family. And so all the progress that has been made won't be sustained unless there are substantial changes made within the family.
Let's return to microcredit for just a second. Microcredit has typically targeted women in communities. I like the community idea (refer to the previous blog), but I have had real issues with the focus on women. I feel like while it gives the women needed confidence, it gives the men excuses to not be responsible fathers and husbands--they just let the wife do the work. And what does that teach the kid? So an intervention needs to take into consideration the family, whether explicitly by including the entire family, or implicitly by realizing the implications on the family.
posted by Tricia at 6:56 PM
2 Comments:
Wonderfully stated. You have really articulated one of my biggest concerns with microcredit programs. I have seen the empowerment that women can gain through some sort of microcredit program, but it often seems that as the women become more empowered, the husbands or fathers fade into the corners. Sometimes the women become the main breadwinners, and the importance of men in the families begins to fade and grow musty. What does that do to a society if the women run the show and the men are shadows? Although I am all for empowerment of women, I don't think it should occur at the expense of the men's role in societies.
Agreed. Couldn't there be a microcredit group that required family participation? You know, like how a family puts a budget together, a family could put a microcredit plan together. Each family is different and would require a different set-up, but the base could be that the family is participating. It would be interesting to try out, anyway.
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