Eve Sullivan recently came to Atlanta to visit one of her sons. We talked about parenting, the organization she started, her hopes, and an upcoming event in her home of Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Kindergarten was once an unusual innovation, and now it is everywhere. Sullivan hopes parenting education will become as common as kindergarten. Sometimes people associate parent training with failure, and that kind of thinking makes people reluctant to seek support or education about parenting while problems are small. Yet solving family problems early is valuable to family members and to society.
Sullivan says, "Parents need a union!" When her sons were teenagers, some of their experiments and rebellions truly seemed to endanger them. She said her family "really went around the garden…What really helped was support from other parents." Learning how to talk about emotions was the most important skill she developed. "Watch Your Words and Your Silences" is chapter six of her book Where the Heart Listens: a handbook for parents and their allies in a global society, available at http:www.parentsforum.org/book. The goal of "raising good parents" is vital to every culture, and her group provides workshops, tools, connections, ideas, and resources to help parents.
Sullivan founded PARENTS FORUM , a 5013c organization for parenting education, in 1991. She has seen national parenting initiatives burst onto the scene and then wither. Some had too great a focus on cyberspace and too little personal connection. "Nothing can take the place of person-to-person meetings," she says. PARENTS FORUM offers free or low-cost workshops led by trained volunteers, always with refreshments, and often with prizes or donated services. PARENTS FORUM chooses to use volunteers to lead events because volunteers model peer support. The Forum wants to maintain an amateur status, yet they want a parent who contacts them to find qualified, knowledgeable people.
People Worldwide Doing Terrific Things
Sullivan has a master's degree in education from Harvard University. She has presented parenting information around the world, including the Family Support America Biennial Conferences, in Chicago, Illinois, and the International Federation for Parent Education conferences, in Burkina Faso and Mexico. Twice a year she goes to the Vienna Committee of NGOs on the Family, where she meets "a lot of people around the globe doing terrific things" for parenting education. In 1994, the United Nations Year of the Family, she went to Montreal for one of the related conferences, and came to know the International Federation for Parent Education (French acronym FIEP). She now serves on its board.
Since visiting Switzerland with The Experiment in International Living as a teenager, Sullivan has loved international involvement and civic involvement. The Experiment published this story on their Web site: As a board member of FIEP, she was invited to Tehran in 2000. Because of the tensions between Iran and the U.S., she hesitated to accept. "I called my eldest son to ask his advice and he answered, 'Do it, Mom, you make friends wherever you go!' I went and had yet another amazing cross-cultural experience that further inspired my passion for parenting issues. Willingness to take risks and experience life outside of one's familiar circle is the key element of the Experiment, and I believe it is central to my current volunteer work with parents."
For more information: see http://www.parentsforum.org or contact esullivan@parentsforum.org or call 617–253-7182.
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