What is this that irks us about how different forms of families are and continue to evolve?
Why do we continue to selectively choose the values that suit us and the community we come from? Why do we continue to discriminate against part of the communities, families, and groups of people because of the structure of their families?
Family means a lot more than we think, see and experience.
No one should be deprived of essential benefits because they are in a form of relationship which some people disapprove of.
What does a family mean to you? Let us change the narrow meaning of a family.
A family is not only a father, mother and child. Families are evolving and it's okay.
We have seen single mother headed households, father headed households among others.
Stop pressurising persons that they must be in the nuclear sort of structure.
Families are supposed to be the safest haven for all of us, whether you’re the father, mother or even the child.
But for the longest time, families have become sources of struggle, pain, abuse, neglect, disintegration, hate and violence.
Laws and policies should be inclusive and embrace the fact that families are evolving and will continue to.
Discriminative laws, structures, and programmes will continue to discriminate against other forms of families that would not appear as the typical structure that society has approved.
Our laws should move away from the idea that there is one ideal family form and value all families as they exist.
People should be at liberty to create family relationships with the people who provide us with the meaningful support that they need and deserve.
What does family mean to you? As the world celebrated The UN Day of the family on May 15, let us challenge the narrow meaning of family.
My family has single mothers, divorced parents, polygamous families, adopted children, sex workers, persons injecting drugs, and people in rehab who we miss and wish them well.
We also have child-headed households, LGBTQ+ members, Intersex children, relatives we took in from the HIV scourge, kids with different dads and surrogate mothers.
Others are children born outside marriage and many other groups of people. Messy to you, well not to me, I value them all.
We love them all and this should be embraced. This is the alternative, real and the African narrative of families.
Embracing different forms of family and their structure remains key to ensuring no one feels discriminated against for what life has to offer.
Stop silencing the new, diverse and emerging families because of your perceived structure of what a family should be or look like.
Our families will continue to be diverse and stop invisibilising issues of the different forms of families within laws and policies.
What are we really afraid of? What are these family values, and community values that we continue to uphold that continue to leave people, groups, and families out of the current system?
Groups that continue to push for the exclusion and discrimination of emerging families must be shut down.
I continue to urge you to embrace, and nurture, the different, diverse emerging families, it could be within your family, yourself and your extended family
Youth activist
Edited by Kiilu Damaris
