HELEN KELI ON RAISING 14 YEAR OLD DAUGHTER AND BEING A GBV CHAMPION FOR CHANGE AMBASSADOR

Selina actor Helen Keli spoke to Buzz Central about raising her 14 year old daughter. Speaking in an interview, Keli said parents should not over protect their kids, “I have a 14 year old daughter and she is the love of my life. There is no one who comes before her apart from God. She’s a true demonstration that I must have done something right in my life. To be blessed with a human being such as her.

I think kids give you the best character development. I always say to people, parenting is not the education of a child, it is the education of the parent because you are learning on your feet. There is no manual because there are no set rules as to how it works. Every child is different in the same way as we are different as grown ups. First of all, as a parent, you want the best for your child, but you also don’t want to give them too much of the best, so that they don’t know how to work for something.”

She added, “Teaching your child how to work for it, how to earn it and the value of things. The value of things that are intangible versus the things that are tangible. It is not easy. We are all given a blank slate in our children, as human beings we are innately good and there are things  that happen to us along the way that change us for the better or for the worse.

The role of the parent is to hold the hand of the child and walk with the child through life. It’s not protecting the child from every single challenge. Yes, we have to protect them from certain things fully and completely. But there are some things that we have to let our children go through. It’s like the butterfly, if you help it out of the cocoon, it will die. You have to let them struggle a little bit for them to value the things that they have and the things that they learned and the relationships that they have later in life.”

The mother of one who is also a gender based violence (GBV) champion for change ambassador, explained why the cause is important to her, “I’m very passionate about GBV. I see so many things happening to both men and women. When I was at the theater, I met this man who used to come and volunteer doing backstage stuff and every time we were going out, he would never come with us or sit with us at the restaurant. 

He would finish his work and go straight home. After a year of being at the theater. I realised his wife used to beat him. It doesn’t happen only to women. It doesn’t happen only to grownups. It happens in places where you find a child is being beaten like a thug. They are things that I’ve seen and I’ve heard that make it impossible for me to ignore.”