A 15-year-old high school student said yesterday that the solution to problems that plague teenagers today – including pregnancy, substance abuse, sexually transmitted diseases and negative peer pressure – lies in the restoration of the family unit.

“The family impacts directly on the child, and if we restore the family, we save the child,” said fourth-form Meadowbrook High student Rani Sittol.

The young boy said the fundamental problem was not in the structure of the family per se, but in the roles that it plays.

He added that the make-up of the family, whether it includes heterosexual or homosexual parents, grandparents, aunts or uncles, have no significant bearing on the types of values that are passed on to children. Instead, he said, they (values) are affected by the amount of time families spend together as a unit and it is from this lack of quality time that the breakdown in the family stems.

Sittol was presenting a paper titled ‘Restore the family – Save our children’ at the annual national youth forum hosted by the National Child Month Committee at the Stella Maris Pastoral Centre yesterday.

Chairperson of the committee Dr Pauline Mullings told the Observer that the forum was part of plans to get away from the stigma that children are only important during the month of May which is observed as Child Month.

“The importance of this forum [today] is to get the views of or young people. We believe as a committee that we should plan for them and to do that we must be able to know what they think and how they feel. We also want the media to spread their ideas so everyone can be aware of them and for the Ministry of Education to incorporate some of their ideas into the national curriculum,” she said.

Addressing the group, made up primarily of students, Sittol said: “Even as the form of the family has been changing, so too has the function of the family been changing. The relatively modern phenomenon of two-income families which has become very popular and necessary in recent times, has had a far-reaching impact on the family’s ability to properly socialise children and perform its traditional functions.”

Young Sittol suggested ways in which family restoration can be accomplished. He said that economic empowerment at the family level where parents or caregivers balance their children’s emotional needs with their economic ones is critical. He also suggested that restoration be sought through community channels.

“It takes a community to raise a child. The bus driver who plays vulgar music for children to hear, promoters who put up posters of nude women on the walls of schools, inconsiderate media personnel who run age-inappropriate commercials during G-rated TV programmes for children, are all involved in the community and are reversing the messages that the family is trying to pass on to children. If the family is to be restored, these practices must cease,” said the youngster.

Education Minister Maxine Henry-Wilson brought greetings and endorsed the committee staging of the event. “We need to stop portraying youth as a problem and see them as a promise. Their failure is our failure [so] we have to pass on positive values,” said the minister.