Welcome to the United Nations
1. Details of your organization, work, regions and accomplishments.
IFFD’s work on courses for parents began in Spain in the mid-sixties with the development of Family Enrichment programmes based on the case method: a useful way of promoting dialogue about real family situations, which avoids imposing our own ideas or dismissing other people’s experiences. After more than 30 years’ of carrying out these courses, the International Federation for Family Development (IFFD) was founded in Orlando (Florida) as a union of non-denominational and non-profit Family Enrichment Centers. The Headquarters of the IFFD is in Spain, where the first courses were conducted.
At present, our courses and other activities reach approximately 50,000 people from 65 countries around the world, each year. IFFD also has Consultative Status with the UN Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) and works in different international bodies along with other organizations and institutions, such as FamiliesAndSocieties, a European Commission research project with 25 academic partners from 15 European countries and three transnational civil society actors.
2. Focusing on families is an approach to addressing many persistent development challenges, such as poverty and inequality. How can Governments, the UN system and civil society organizations work to break the family cycle of poverty and address inequality and social exclusion?
In my opinion, family-focused social transfer programmes in developing countries that provide cash transfers and basic services for their recipients are not sufficient if they do not, additionally, guarantee access to quality education. To use a metaphor, fire extinguishers can be used to put out a fire, but if you want a building to be fireproof, you need something else. In many countries, including some developed countries, education systems need to be improved so that everyone has equal access, and human and financial resources are adequately allocated. This would also help address many related inequality issues, such as ending child marriage, preventing violence against women and ensuring that women are able to make decisions in matters that affect their lives.
3. What measures can help achieve work-family balance, advance social inclusion and promote inter-generational solidarity?
The key word for achieving work-family balance for me is flexibility: moving from a market aimed at single breadwinner families towards a more flexible one in which the responsibilities of parenting and maintaining families do not fall mainly on women.
For example, Scandinavian countries are a good illustration of this situation, with female employment rates in the 25-54 age group of over 80% and high fertility, which is always a guarantee for a good future. Of course, this also means considering the social costs involved as an investment for the future: a “pay now and pay less” solution.
In terms of social inclusion, I believe that lawmakers and civil society organizations should keep in mind what has been called the ‘new exclusion’: exclusion from the lives, the understanding, and the caring of others. The decline in families’ stability over the last few decades means that adults and children are today increasingly faced with obstacles to not only their material, but also their emotional, well-being, and this is especially true in the least advantaged sections of society and, particularly, for the weakest members of these: namely, the elderly, women and children.
All of this means that inter-generational solidarity is now more necessary than ever. The financial crisis has dramatically reduced access to decent jobs for young people in many parts of the world. This has negative implications for the whole of society, because societies lose their investment in education, governments fail to receive contributions to social security systems and are forced to increase spending on remedial services, parents have to maintain their children financially for far longer than before and, furthermore, future generations are being denied the right to start a family, to which they are entitled.
It is true that we have managed to achieve longer life expectancy in good health conditions for many, but the imbalance of this delay in terms of emancipation and work-family conflict forces many people to continue their role as parents for longer than they should have to.
4. What are key international norms that could effectively promote the well-being of families, worldwide?
We need to start with the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, especially art. 16 when it says that “the family is the natural and fundamental group unit of society and is entitled to protection by society and the State”.
And this year we celebrate the 25th anniversary of the Convention on the Rights of the Child, where we can find so many ideas to promote the well-being of families. It is worth remembering that it similarly states that “the family, as the fundamental group of society and the natural environment for the growth and well-being of all its members and particularly children, should be afforded the necessary protection and assistance so that it can fully assume its responsibilities within the community”.
I know some people consider family to be a controversial issue nowadays, but I believe it is, instead, a meeting point for all. We all know what families are and what our own family means to us. In this sense, the principle of “the best interests of the child”, mentioned in several articles of the Convention, should guide the resolution of any related disputes.
5. How can innovation and technology positively impact families?
By taking advantage of their immense benefits. There are risks and negative aspects, especially for children, but this should be just one more reason for parents to talk to their children and learn from them about how to keep up-to-date with the use of new technologies, while at the same time guiding their moral and emotional development.
Technology has also dramatically improved the ability to communicate with no distance barriers. Think, for instance, of how many migrants can now keep in contact with their families, or how children and adults can have access to information that would have been unreachable just a few years ago, or how parents can feel secure while their children go out because they have the use of a cell phone to contact them…
Concluding words
Let me finish by saying that we need to help parents in their task, but then trust them to do their work without trying to replace them. That is why I believe that the preventive action of parenting courses should be much more widespread than reactive conflict intervention; there are many good reasons for minimizing institutional intervention as much as possible. Several studies show how expensive, and usually ineffective, intervention is compared to effective parenting.