Growing up in Santa Cruz, St Elizabeth, we would play anything that involved competition: from hopscotch, jacks, marbles and racing handmade wooden trucks to more traditional sports like cricket, football, track and even bicycle racing down the lane. As the youngest, I always had to be playing catch up to my bigger, stronger, faster… Read more →←
Sihle Atkinson is the 25-year-old U-Reporter who suggested the name U-Matter, voted by U-Reporters as the name for U-Report’s mental health chatline service, a collaboration with the Ministry of Health and Wellness and the Caribbean Child Development Centre at the UWI Open Campus. This is her story of overcoming and advice for… Read more →←
For anybody reading this who is a Jamaican taxpayer, your concern might be how those funds are spent and how they can achieve better outcomes for our children? In that case you might be happy to hear about something called Results-Based Budgeting (RBB), where ministries allocate resources on outcomes envisaged in the Government of… Read more →←
Tajaun and his mother benefitted from a UNICEF-supported parenting programme operated by the Women’s Centre of Jamaica Foundation, which is designed to help adolescent mothers feel more empowered and confident about themselves and the care, protection and support they give to their children. By investing in adolescent parents today,… Read more →←
Return to Happiness (RTH) is a psychosocial recovery programme developed by UNICEF to help children and adolescents build resilience and positive coping skills in response to emergencies by taking a culturally relevant, community-based approach, including the use of the arts as a therapeutic tool. During COVID-19, UNICEF is supporting… Read more →←
The only thing I can do now is just babysit my sister since I’m not going to school. I don’t have anything else to do. I prefer to babysit her then go out on the road and be around bad company. She’s teaching me a lot. She’s smart – anything people say she’ll understand and tell you. She might not tell you clearly, but I… Read more →←
When I realized that my sister’s children were struggling being out of school, I decided that when I have free time before and after work, I am going to help them with reading – so I started off doing phonics, with ‘th’ words and so on. I did my little research and found out what might be suitable for them and from there… Read more →←
The COVID-19 pandemic hasn’t been easy for many Jamaican families, but we count our blessings. My mum got her second shot of the COVID vaccine on June 13. As a senior citizen she is among the most vulnerable, and COVID-19 literally put much of her life on hold. Seniors were told to stay home so I started doing her grocery shopping.… Read more →←
At age 12, I learned a lesson about violence when I became a babysitter in my extended family. Growing up, I had already learned that the way to discipline was to beat, and so with my brothers, sister, and cousins, that was what I did. But then one day one of my brothers fought back and said, “Wait, when we get older, we are going to… Read more →←
Sometimes I feel like giving up but every time I think about it, the baby comes to mind. If he is safe, then I’m all right. For me, the next step is to keep trying with my CSEC subjects. Before COVID-19, I didn’t feel like I was in prison. But it’s been hard dealing with this – as a father and as a high school student. Not being… Read more →←