Cool Parent Guide

The School Health and Nutrition Programme of Save the Children Malawi has developed a "Cool Parents Guide" for parents and children. This guide helps parents to clarify their own values and expectations for their children and to communicate these to children at an early age. The guide suggests topics of conversation around delaying sex and ways that parents can support their children to do this. It proposes that establishing the lines of communication in younger adolescents will help them to continue dialogue as children grow.

The guide was developed in response to participatory research conducted with adolescents and the people who influence them around the topic of HIV/AIDS prevention. The programme found that the age of sexual debut is extremely young for a variety of reasons. Adolescents wished they had delayed sexual debut and believed they could still abstain if theycould receive parental support. The research also found that adolescents under 12 years said that they trust only their parents, particularly mothers. Parents shared that they are scared of what HIV/AIDS is doing to their children and would like to do something to prevent infection in the younger ones. They asked for training in what to do and in facts about HIV/AIDS.