Parisar Asha launches Positive Parenting Helpline to address Parental Woes

Parisar Asha is a 33 year non-profit registered public trust committed to serve children through a unique learning approach ‘ESAL’- The Environmental Studies Approach to Learning. It was founded by Late Gloria de Souza, an Ashoka fellow with a mission to provide a joyful, holistic and child-centric environment-based quality education to empower children to be creative, sensitive and successful global citizens.
It is committed to serve India’s multi-cultural diversity of human communities through an environment– related learning system, replacing the popularly adopted ‘rote-learning’ method. The system works towards transforming the existing standardized learning methods for schools. Its approach translates the state curriculum into an experiential learning system by incorporating ESAL which is a problem-solving alternative to the cramming of meaningless facts and provides an opportunity for intelligent internalization of concepts, skill development for applied learning and sensitive growth in attitudes and values that makes the learner conscious of the environment.

After working in the field of education for the past 33 years, Parisar Asha has realised that parents are also an integral part of the school space and it is also important to look into their well-being for the sustainability of the mission. Numerous close encounters with the parents have helped us undergo the ‘reality –check’, where parents often tell that; “I don’t know how to handle my child”. “I get a lot of complaints from the teacher about his non-performance in the class and disinterestedness in completion of homework”. “It is always a tussle, to meet our needs but still understanding the importance of education, I somehow manage my resources to send him to a good tuition”.

These are few of the examples of parental woes that Parisar Asha’s CEO; Ms. Aarati Savur shared with us. She says the list is endless. Hence, Parisar Asha has decided to be the pillar of support for these troubled parents by providing them with a helping friend who is always at a call away to resolve their problems and provide them with solutions. This unique initiative is known as ‘POSITIVE PARENT HELPLINE’. This is a pilot project, in which Parisar Asha’s expert counsellors provide free and confidential telephonic solutions to all child related issues between 2 to 12 years.

Abnormal behaviour has become a common phenomenon among children who are reared in normal family conditions and this is putting on the panic button among most parents. Continuous interaction with children and parents have led Parisar Asha to derive that often parents’ behaviour towards their children determine the children’s behaviour. Additionally, environment plays an important part in moulding an individual’s behaviour and one’s personality gets carved based on his/ her interaction with his/ her physical, social and emotional environment. This is the core philosophy of Parisar Asha, an NGO working to provide joyful learning system for the past 33 years.

Parisar Asha has been closely working with more than 800 government and private schools in India and has successfully upgraded more than 10,000 teachers from being excellent teachers to accomplished professionals, leaders, role models and change makers. Moreover, Parisar Asha also helps schools to uplift their learning system at par with international standards while working with the state board curriculum framework.

‘Positive Parenting Helpline’ was initiated as a part of our Eco-tech World School Program to help all our parents. However, we realised that the need becomes more for children who don’t receive education based on the pedagogy followed by all our Eco-tech schools.”, reiterated Ms. Savur. Eco-tech World School Programme is a unique programme based on the pedagogy of ESAL (Environmental Studies Approach to Learning), in which schools are supported to work on academic, emotional, spiritual and social environment leading to academic excellence. Hence, this learning system resolves most of the problems which parents face.

‘ Positive Parenting Helpline’ is a free and confidential online and telephonic service which can be availed by parents to seek help for their children between age group 2 to 12 years. This service is available between Monday to Friday from 9 am to 5 pm. Parents can call or send an sms at 8828233443. All queries will be resolved by our expert counsellors. Parents can also email their queries at [email protected] / [email protected]