The Extend Thinking about Parenting Leave
by Jennifer Chien
（Chinese Culture University social work credit courses）

 

In response to the endless incidents of school violence, civil society organizations have vigorously pushed for so-called paid parenting leave proposal to be second. I believe that this action needs to extend thinking about the structural meaning hidden behind it.

In fact, according to the latest statistics from the Ministry of Education part of the campus safety notification data in year 2023, there were 2.7thousand incidents of school violence and deviant behavior reported. It has increased of sixty presents compared the end of year 2022. Moreover, the children under the age of 18 and juvenile protection cases have increased 44% since last year. Among them, the largest group was in primary school violence incidents and deviant behavior, which accounted for 94%. As for junior high schools’ violent incidents and deviant behavior have also increased by 58%. According to these statistic it has urgently shown that the balance between protection of children or adolescents life safety and their rights during their education state should make some intervention. Most importantly, there is a parallel thinking from the preventive intervention of “pre-prevention” to the setting of “stop-loss” points for “post-prevention”. Also, how to deal with children with behavior deviation problems through the cooperation of family-centered ecosystem will have its own operational opportunities. Therefore, strengthening family education and promoting parent-care education is an urgent reform project.

This proposal of parental leave emphasizes that school safety must be through parent-teacher cooperation in response to the recent increasing numbers of school violence incidents. Also, it suggested that government amend the law to force parents to attend parenting education courses through administrative penalties or impose fines so that every parent with a child needs 8 hours of parenting leave lessons a year. Then, the schools will issue a certificate to the parents without deducting salary. Form this point of view, the meaning of proposal tries to use parents care lessons to decrease the number of school violent events; however, there are pointed out that this action lake of supporting operating processes and should be examined comprehensively.

First, the content of parenting lectures should cover cognitive and behavioral through all the school life. The lessons should help parents to understand their children’s physical and mental changes from the children to adolescents. Second, faced with complexity of the social environment, parenting education should be flexible and adaptable. For example, single parents raising retrograde teenagers, same-sex parents raising children, disadvantaged families raising children, or parents facing the intrusion of gangs into schools are not only 8 hours can solve problems. Third, parents’ lectures should be continuously, and require cross-professional, cross-disciplinary courses. When the lessons design, they need every area of professional instructors to cooperate, such as consultants, social workers, teachers, school nurses, etc.

Also, from one parent to both parents needing to have the literacy, from parents themselves to parent-child interaction, from personal dynamics to parent-child dynamics, from family dynamics to external system dynamics, from encouraging participating to mandatory attendance, from educational promotion to psychological consultation, and from paid public leave to self-funded personal leave all need to be considered factors within the courses. This ideal reveal that these social organizations try to shift all the school bloody misbehavior events to the parent leave courses and think parental disciplinary could solve the problem of school violence. However, these incidents is not only a single issue phenomenon, but also a complex, profound, and multiple entangled extend thinking which should include and design within the lectures. After all, there are several considerations should be included when people design the parenting courses.

Eventually, this action pushing parents’ education reinforced family-oriented strength, we need to take serious thinking about family support function can be hold or cannot be hold. It may present positive or negative results in which we do not want. So, promote the educational internalization project of parenting lessons that is a multi-treatment measure to support, maintain, protect, rehabilitate, and replace the traditional family. Moreover, the concept from People-Oriented, Family-Centered, to School Based requires major institutional change on Children’s Guardian Network. It requires drastic institutional changes.

Therefore, in addition to promoting the parenting literacy leave for children, there is also needed to include conceptual cognition, caring skills, and professional knowledge into the parenting lectures. In fact, the real crux of this project is lacking competence of attitude, skill, and knowledge. As social workers strongly suggest the organizations take these factors into deeply consideration when you design the courses.