While working unceasingly in the field of education for the past four decades, especially with the schools from lower income groups, Parisar Asha has realized that the major unresolved issue of today is the “Parenting Style” which is majorly contributing to the chaos in a child’s life. Today’s parents, youths and children are experiencing many problems, including issues related to families (nuclear , joint or broken ) time management ,late working hours, work stress, overexposure to media & mobiles, economic crisis, materialism, high academic expectations, comparison among siblings, peer pressure, single child policy, cut throat competition and many more. In the context of the parents, most of the times the young parents are not able to handle the situation themselves and put the blame on their child. This situation is more serious in the underprivileged section. This also leads to the labelling of the children and damages the child’s confidence for a life time. These children are then vulnerable to the negative forces of our society. Children have many challenges as well which often go unnoticed by the parents and this affects their development. Understanding this need, Parisar Asha had started Positive Parenting Helpline- a free helpline as a pilot project in 2015 to address these issues by experts. The purpose of this helpline was to provide free expert solutions to such parents who can’t afford it but need it desperately. This helpline was the first of a kind in India and was a confidential service. The system worked in such a way where parents gave a missed call or SMS and our expert counselors call them back, understood their issues and provided guidance. Between 2015-16, we resolved more than 500 cases. After running this helpline for a year, we realized that the programme needed to be intensified. The problem was grave and the support needed was much bigger. In 2017, we received support from Capgemini India. With their unstinted support we started the first toll free helpline called “Positive Parenting and Child Helpline- 18005322244”. This helpline is being handled by a team of professional psychologists and psychiatrist. Apart from extending the benefits of this initiative to the parents and children we decided to work for youths. As an extension of this helpline, we also conductadvocacy workshops through which we have reached out to more beneficiaries. As we have progressed in our mission, we have also started attending to critical cases at our centre which are being attended personally handled by the psychologists. The counselling services rendered are focusses towards helping parents with their child related problems, be it behavioural or scholastic. Further to this we also extend help to youths to deal with mental health issues, work related problems, relationship issues, suicide prevention and addiction. We have also worked in the field of substance abuse to help children and youth with various kinds of addiction. In 2021, we have launched a digital application, Positive Parenting to scale up the project and extend our mental health support to anyone and everyone across the globe. This application is now available for free download on google playstore for android phones. In the last six years we have reached out to more than 4.5 lac beneficiaries and we will continue to strive in our mission.
