Kingsley Okonkwo, the convener of Nigeria’s pioneer family life conference, and lead, family life and relationship coach of Love, Dating and Marriage (LDM), has tasked family life practitioners to upload professional ethics in their daily counselling duty.
Okonkwo disclosed that the purpose of the family life conference was to shine a light on the industry and equip the practitioners to uphold professional ethics.
Speaking at the two-day international family life practitioners conference centred on equipping marriage counsellors, relationships coaches and therapists, Okonkwo admonished counsellors on the need to act ethically, adding that there is a need to put in place support systems for families.
“Families are getting started every weekend in every country in the world but the issue is that we don’t have enough training and support systems for these marriages. There is a need to get qualified personnel to meet the demand to assist all these people. In Africa, we are used to our families giving us traditional advice. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t.
“There’s a science to what we do. We want Nigerians to start seeing it as a professional service. For us, we see it as a great opportunity to train and equip both the practitioners and also families.
“The statistics show a low level of practitioners, so that is why we floated this conference inviting coaches from America and sound professionals like Bisi Adewale, Christie Bature amongst others, so the whole essence is to equip practitioners for the task ahead,” he said.
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For an average of 200 couples, we need at least one counsellor. So, if you look at Nigeria’s population, we are not even close and most counsellors are not well equipped. Programs like this would help raise that support system so that every family can have that personal assistance”.
In the same vein, Mildred Kingsley-Okonkwo, the wife of the convener, who is also a family life practitioner said, “The first thing for practitioners is to understand the current state of families and the society. Society is suffering because families are broken; parents are absent, and children are confused, if we see how important these things are, we would take it seriously.”
Hasani Pettiford, a U.S based marriage expert, charged practitioners to become “the best version of themselves by being committed to education. The conference is the beginning of a long journey for them to become practitioners that make an impact all over the world.
“As my wife Danielle said, marriages and families are the foundation and backbone of a nation. A weak nation is a result of a weak household. A strong household produces a strong family, a strong family produces a strong neighbourhood, a strong neighbourhood produces a strong community, a strong community produces a strong nation, the strong nation produces a strong world”.
