Modern family life can be complex and tense, and it can sometimes feel like being in a battlefield. Parenting can be stressful and, for parents who are so busy and can hardly relax, mutual support and understanding among peers can be priceless.
Ying, from Kowloon in Hong Kong, found herself troubled by family issues and an inferiority complex. She hadn’t studied to a high level of education, and she lacked self-confidence and social skills.
She found help through the companionship of Wah-wah and Jojo, her friends in The Salvation Army who are parent counsellors. With their help, Ying found a way to express her emotions and she has slowly opened up to these two friends.
‘My daughter was diagnosed with a brain tumour when she was two,’ explains Ying. ‘She would have cramps a few times a day, sometimes the whole body and sometimes just the legs. At that time she was too young to have an operation so she could only take medication to control the cramps. I was so worried that she might be unable to wake up again.’ Her daughter’s medical condition also made her progress slower than other children at school.
Constantly worried about her daughter and what others think about her condition, Ying felt intimidated by social situations, which in turn made her even more stressed.
One day, Ying was invited to join a stress management group co-hosted by the Social Welfare Department and The Salvation Army’s Chuk Yuen Children and Youth Centre. There she met Wahwah, a peer counsellor who acted as the facilitator of the group. Their friendship began when Wah-wah initiated a conversation with Ying. When Ying was too timid to try something at the centre, Wah-wah would first demonstrate a few times to show Ying how to do it, and then encourage her to try until Ying gained enough confidence.
Since both of them have a daughter, Ying felt a connection and was willing to share her own concerns and worries with Wah-wah.
Later, when Ying asked to learn Zoom in order to help her daughter, who was having online lessons at home during the COVID-19 pandemic, the centre matched her up with Jojo, another peer counsellor. Jojo taught Ying with great patience how to use Zoom, which helped Ying’s confidence grow as she was able to teach her daughter at home the Zoom skills she had learned from Jojo.
‘I appreciate their enthusiasm and attentiveness very much,’ says Ying. ‘They never minded that I took so long to learn. They gave me a sense of security and strength.’ With the companionship of her peers, Ying’s confidence is growing gradually and she is willing to step out into the world.
For Wah-wah and Jojo, the experience of being peer counsellors is not just one that can help fellow parents with difficulties but also one that can help themselves.
Before becoming counsellors, they were both required to complete the ‘Walk with You’ peer parent counsellors programme, from which they have learned a lot. According to Wah-wah, ‘Every lesson we learned something useful. I remember particularly that one time our instructor asked each of us to read the instruction written on a card word by word, and yet we found that we all had different interpretation of the instruction. From that I understand that people can have different interpretations even of the same thing, and that’s why we need more time to communicate and clarify what we mean. We also need to learn how to see things from other parents’ angles to better understand them.’
This has made a difference in her own home. Now, instead of scolding straight away, Wah- wah’s new approach with her daughter is to first try to listen without judgement, then further communicate with each other after better understanding the matter.
As a member of the parent-teacher association, Jojo found that what she learned from the programme has allowed her to deepen relationships with other parents in the school. She has become more active in listening to other parents’ concerns, which allows them to release emotions.
Her relationship with her son has also improved.
‘Last year, due to the pandemic,’ she explains, ‘my son’s international school switched to online teaching. He hated it so much that he was angry all the time, feeling he was trapped at home, which was “as suffocating as in funerals” according to him. Being a teenager, he refused to listen to whatever I said and I felt so uncomfortable about it.
‘Then I applied what I learned from the programme – that we should treat young people as equals and really listen. With the change of attitude, I finally found that the reason my son was so unwilling to undertake online learning was that he was worried the camera might make him look fat. So, we gave him space to take in the situation and, with reasoning and encouragement, he gradually got used to this lesson format.’
With their relationship improved, mother and son now share hugs and they have become much closer to each other.
Article originally published in Army Scene, for the Hong Kong and Macau Command. Articles are printed side-by-side in English and Chinese.
