Minister of Youth, Sports and Community Empowerment Charles Griffith believes Barbados has a “parenting crisis” and has promised that his ministry will try to help find a solution to the challenge.
He was responding recently from the Well of the House of Assembly during the Appropriation Bill, 2025 debate to questions from Member of Parliament for St James North Edmund Hinkson.
Hinkson asked about community level parenting programmes and said he thought “it is now generally accepted that parenting at community level needs to be enhanced”.
“I don’t need to go through all the adverse effects the lack of proper parenting has brought and potentially can bring on our society.
And I’m just wondering what programmes you have in place to try to impact better parenting skills at the community level in our country,” he said.
Griffith said he was very concerned about parenting in Barbados, asserting that “I believe that there is a parenting crisis on island”.
“All that we are seeing on a daily basis clearly indicates that there is a need for a parenting programme. I know that there is a parenting programme under the Peace Programme that is very, very impactful in terms of what it seeks to deliver,” the minister said.
“The mere fact that we are targeting youth, I think the onus is on us not to duplicate what is happening with that particular programme, but if necessary, we are prepared to stage parenting programmes as well to buttress what we are doing in a number of our programmes.”
Griffith said his ministry was “actively looking to see how we can do our own [parenting] programme, not . . . to reinvent the wheel, because that [Peace Programme] programme I went to the launch and the components of it are very, very detailed and I think it will serve our country well in terms of the implementation”.
“We too will do what is necessary, or we will piggyback on that particular programme to ensure that we have best practices as far as parenting is concerned. It is absolutely critical, and I don’t think anybody on island would say no to the fact that we do have a parenting crisis on this island,” the minister added.
