Counseling -To rewrite the story

As Benter Teenage Mothers’ CBO, we attempt, through our counseling programs, to address the real challenges of teenage mothers including:

• Disconnections with their family members or friends
• Their involvement in their children’s development
• Being victims of sexual abuse
• Their physical, emotional, and mental health
• Performing activities of daily living
• Discontinuation of school
• Concern for future contribution to society.

We organize workshops and individual counseling sessions. In most cases, teenage mothers come to us with serious needs that need special attention.

By giving birth at an early age, they become victims of social prejudice, are rejected, and are often associated with failure. They arrive at Benter Teenage Mothers CBO with the strongest desire to get someone who not only can listen to them, but also help them out of their crises. In cases like these, we engage professional and qualified counselors. Through counseling we also target to help teenage mothers discover themselves; their strengths, failures, talents, weaknesses, capabilities and potentials. Once in every month (during a weekend) we organize a forum that brings teenage mothers together and simply make them talk and share their stories and experiences with each other. The main aim of these forums is to help these teen mums create and develop a trusting relationship and find in each other a source of encouragement.

It has always been fulfilling to watch them chat freely, sing, dance, play games among others. Benter Teenage Mothers’ CBO looks at teen mums as young people in search of a meaningful life where love, care and understanding are realities to be lived. And since they too are human just as we are, this meaningful life for them can only be achieved if we surround them to assure them our love, support and mentor them. Teenage mothers are traumatized by the very fact that they got pregnant as teens. Some of them got depressed when those who impregnated them disowned the whole situation. Their psychological, emotional and physical health is damaged. Those who became mothers after an abuse have issues with trusting anybody. Still others need to be informed about the dangers and consequences of unstable and unhealthy relationships; they need to gain more knowledge of sexuality and sexually transmitted diseases.