Chair: Darren Ravenor
Speaker and facilitator: Beatrice Nabulya
Rapporteur: Peter Noble, NLTSG
This workshop was attend by 10 people and was for anyone who is a parent or planning to become a parent to explore how they can balance looking after their own health with providing a stable and supportive environment for their children.
Beatrice highlighted the main issues that contribute to achieving this and shared experiences from her relationship with her children.
This includes making sure the child is loved and knows that he or she is loved. It is also important to start communicating early, being honest and developing trust as children will ask questions. All this helps when parents come to disclose their status.
And developing these as the child grows older
This is a program run by FPA to help parents become more confident with regard to talking to their children about relationships and sex. It is one of the strategies for trying to bring down the high incidence of teen pregnancies by encouraging and facilitating communication between parents and children from an early age.
Speakeasy Tel: 020 7923 5237 www.fpa.org.uk
Treatment adherence for both the parent and the child/children. The challenges around this especially where disclosure hasn’t happened
Disclosure to children, one of the major fears for parents
Parenting teenagers
This was discussed to make parents/potential parents aware of issues that could arise because of HIV in the family:
Inability to care well for children due to ill health (missing school)
Not adhering to child’s treatment or withdrawing treatments due to side effects (without Dr’s knowledge)
Breast feeding
These could all be seen as neglect but Social Services are able to provide support.
Child care poses serious problems especially for parents in work or when ill. On a long term basis it would be ideal to identify appropriate foster care for when parents need time out. Even if not currently needed, it may be useful to do some forward planning and identify a key carer or guardian that could be called upon and also agencies to link to and work with.
Once a woman knows her status then planning a pregnancy is important to discuss and make decisions about HIV medication during the pregnancy and how to manage her health.
Disclosure to children is the main issue for parents
Developing and maintaining openness with children is important
It is also important to plan for the future
Support, information and advice is needed about how to communicate effectively with children (to build trust and enable disclosure)
There should be more education in schools to assist parents with HIV-positive children and the children of people living with HIV
Support is needed from social services to give families more independency
This workshop was evaluated by 9 people between the ages of 30 and 47 (average age 38).
Gender
6 female, 2 male, 1 not stated
Ethnicity
7 black African, 1 white, 1 not stated
Sexuality
8 heterosexual, 1 not stated
Usefulness
Very useful |
Useful |
Not useful |
67%(6) |
22% (2) |
11% (1) |
4 people set themselves action points
Educate teenagers and counselling those affected
Be more concerned
Have more kids
Practice good management
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