BreefNuk

27/01/2022

MANFA'AT DAN CARA MENGUNAKAN CIPLUKAN :

1. MEMBANTU MEREDAKAN FLU & BATUK .
Potonglah tumbuhan ciplukan 3 - 4 cm kemudian dijemur , setelah kering bungkuslah supaya tidak lembap. Cara membuat obatnya : ambilah kira-kira 9 - 15 grm kemudian rebuslah sampai mendidih . airnya diminum. Lakukan sebanyak 3 kali sehari secara rutin.

2. MENGATASI KENCING MANIS ( DIABETES ). Sama dengan nomor satu. Tetapi pada saat merebus, rebuslah dengan 2 gelas air, hingga tersisa 1 gelas. Setelah dingin disaring, minum sekaligus pada pagi hari. Ampasnya bisa direbus sekali lagi, guna diminum pada sore harinya.

3. MENGATASI SAKIT PARU-PARU.
Sama dengan nomor satu. Saat merebus, gunakan 3-5 gelas air. Setelah mendidih, dinginkan dan saring, minum airnya 3 kali sehari.

4. BUAT EPILEPSI ATAU AYAN.
Langsung dengan memakan buah ciplukan yang matang 8 - 10 butir setiap hari. Selain untuk penyakit dalam,

INFO TAMBAHAN :
Ciplukan juga bisa digunakan sebagai obat luar. Cara pemakaiannya :

1. BISUL
Ambillah Daun Ciplukan sebanyak 1/2 genggam, cuci bersih lalu digiling halus. Turapkan pada bisul, lalu dibalut. Diganti 2 kali sehari

2. BOROK
Ambillah Daun Ciplukan sebanyak 1/2 genggam dicuci lalu digiling halus. Tambahkan air kapur sirih secukupnya, lalu diturapkan ke borok. Ganti 2 kali sehari.

27/01/2022

Policies in South Africa must stop ignoring families’ daily realities
What is “a family”? In South African law, the answer – or rather, answers – are broad. For example, it’s not considered unusual or unacceptable for children to move between kin and to be raised at different stages by grandparents, parents and other relatives. Kinship care is a widespread and customary practice in South Africa, as it is elsewhere in southern Africa.

The reason for this is partly cultural and partly historical. The apartheid system literally capitalised on the role of extended family, particularly women. It forcibly fragmented families and separated children from parents.

The result of this can be seen in international comparisons from the World Family Map: according to this report, South Africa has one of the lowest rates of parent co-residence with children in the world. Over 12 million of the country’s 19 million children don’t live with their fathers. Four million don’t live with either of their biological parents.

Across the world, families are changing: marriage rates are falling; single parenting is on the rise. In some ways South Africa follows this trend. But it differs in the case of parental absence and the fact that most children’s parents don’t live together.

Apartheid imposed legislation to fracture families. Its policies saw many men leave their families to work in mines or cities, and to live in single-sex hostels away from their wives and children. Forced removals and a lack of suitable family accommodation in cities presented huge obstacles to family life. Many of these obstacles persist today. The country’s policies don’t, by and large, address them meaningfully.

The diversity of families is one of the important underlying themes of the South African Child Gauge 2018, launched on November 20 to coincide with World Children’s Day.

The Child Gauge describes childcare as one of many, often competing, family strategies. It recommends that policies and services should be more sensitive to the realities of South African family dynamics.

Policies ignore reality
One of the hangovers from apartheid is the entrenched idea of the nuclear family – heterosexual mother and father living together with their children – as “ideal”. This notion has remained remarkably persistent; its privileged status is sometimes implicit in policies and in the attitudes of those who implement policy.

The White Paper on Families consciously departs from assumptions about nuclear families as a normative model. It acknowledges the diversity of family forms and living arrangements.

Yet much of its content suggests an underlying vision of the ideal family as a stable unit built on the foundation of marital union and biological parents living together with their children.

This ignores global and South African realities. Marriage rates are declining across the world. In South Africa, they have been dropping since the 1960s.

The laws and systems for birth registration are oriented to nuclear arrangements. This makes it difficult for unmarried fathers and grandparents to register children in their care. An astonishing 60% of children don’t have their father’s name on their birth certificate. That can have real consequences: it’s difficult to claim maintenance, and if the child’s father dies it’s difficult to prove orphan status and claim the associated benefits and protections.

And while the law states that children have a right to family care and grandparents have a duty of care, some of its policies undermine this. The state places orphaned children who already live with family members (mostly grandparents) in foster care with their family. This formalises an existing arrangement, but introduces an enormous amount of paperwork and red tape.

The foster care system is resource-intensive. It requires investigations and reports by social workers, formal placement by the courts and regular reviews. It’s meant to be a temporary arrangement for children who are removed from their families because of abuse or neglect.

By insisting that orphaned children living with grandparents should be monitored by social workers, the state seems to regard extended families with suspicion. This is an inappropriate use of resources given that extended families care for much larger numbers of children whose parents live elsewhere, and are not subjected to the same scrutiny. It has also reduced the state’s capacity to protect children who are abused.

Such policies suggest that the state doesn’t realise kinship care isn’t always a choice. It may sometimes be a necessity as families strategise to maintain multiple households, to secure adequate housing at migration destinations, to further the education of their members and to find work and provide income.

Addressing the issues
What can be done to improve this situation?

First, demand-driven responsive services need to be strengthened so that families can rely on an efficient response when they need urgent assistance. All services should be delivered in a way that enables equitable access for families who need them, irrespective of their structure or household form.

The Draft Care and Protection Policy, published for comment in 2018, proposes that for children living with kin whose parents live elsewhere, the kinship carer and parent must formalise the arrangement by concluding a “parenting rights and responsibilities” agreement.

Rather than trying to regulate families, the current state structures should support families to achieve their desired living arrangements and childcare choices. It needs to address the structural constraints by providing services and infrastructure – like adequate housing, safer environments and quality childcare facilities – that make it possible for children and parents to live together if they wish.

It is only in this way that the Constitution’s progressive and inclusive vision will be fulfilled.

27/01/2022

Weighing up South Africa’s family policy: what does and doesn’t work
South Africa is one of a small number of developing countries that’s formulated a national policy focused on families. A family policy, broadly defined, refers to everything a government does to promote the well-being of families, such as social grants, family services, or social housing.

The country’s policy – known as the White Paper on Families – has three priorities. They are promoting healthy family life, strengthening the family and preserving the family. The intention of the policy is to promote and support families, many of whom are currently facing huge financial and social pressures.

Implementation of the policy is supposed to result in well-functioning and resilient families able to nurture, support and care for their family members.

But a policy on paper is only as good as its implementation and monitoring. Our review of the implementation of the policy suggests the country faces challenges getting it off the ground. The biggest relate to capacity, political will and funding.

We identified some critical gaps that need attention. These include clarification of intended outcomes, the ex*****on of robust monitoring, evaluation and reporting systems, the allocation of realistic budgets, employing staff with the right knowledge and skills, and renewed political will to promote the plan.

What works and doesn’t
The White Paper goes some way to acknowledging the historical context and current key factors that negatively affect families in the country. These include the apartheid migrant labour system, which separated families; massive unemployment, persistently high poverty rates and income inequality, the HIV epidemic, and high levels of interpersonal violence.

It seeks to enable broad family support through the state welfare system as well as non-governmental services. The idea is to ensure that families don’t “get lost” in the maze of social policies, and their well-being is explicitly promoted.

The policy lists a variety of family structures. Nevertheless it remains too skewed towards heterosexual, nuclear, and marriage-based family norms. Another problem is that it’s vague and contradictory in its formulations. This will make policy implementation more difficult.

More attention needs to be paid to aligning the White Paper with realities of the everyday lives of families. One such reality is that single parent and extended families are the dominant family forms.

Policy improvements also need to focus on the integration of services. And the importance of training, supervision and coaching of both officials and front-line service workers can’t be over emphasised.

Gaps that need filling
Our review combined literature and document review, consultation and roundtable reportage. We didn’t find evidence that lessons learnt from training that’s been done at national level has cascaded down to local government levels and non-governmental service agencies. There is no evidence that this is happening to a sufficient degree. Rectifying this is critical.

Clarity of information - on matters like staff numbers and budgets – is also missing. Budgets appear to be inadequate and are not aligned with a strategic plan or an implementation plan. And there doesn’t appear to be a separate budget to implement the policy.

Another area of weakness is that there has been no consistent performance monitoring of staff or evaluation of the programmes against established or standardised metrics.

Family forums – a key tool of the policy – have been established at National and Provincial levels. But there’s no standardised reporting. Where it does exist it’s unaudited, making it difficult to assess what the outputs and outcomes are. Interest in these forums has declined and there is little to no coordination between provincial and local level forums.

We found that South Africa’s approach to family policy fills an important knowledge gap as there is a dearth of research on family policies in the global South compared to the North. But, the broad net that it casts – incorporating other policies of various departments – fails to make clear the synergies and strategies that the country should be working towards. And coordination and integration are left unspecified.

The White Paper endorses a combination of private and public support for families. But it falls short of clearly identifying priorities in promoting family and social cohesion. It also creates a capacity issue for itself – especially in monitoring and evaluation of implementation.

Empowering families
Looking forward, an audit of the family-focused interventions and support provided across different parts of the government would, we believe, be a productive first step to assess what family assistance South Africa is currently provided, what resources are allocated for this purpose and how this might be used for maximum effect. Loss of fiscal resources through corruption and mismanagement has eroded much needed resources for family well-being.

It would also help develop the right metrics to measure success.

In addition, critical questions need to be asked about what the best ways are to empower families to tackle the country’s inequality gaps.

Thomas Englert, a research assistant at the Centre for Social Development in Africa, collaborated on the research and this article.

27/01/2022

Screaming into the void? Us too. Coping tips for stressed-out families in the COVID-19 pandemic
Talk to any parent during these dark winter days and you’re likely to hear a mix of fear, anger, exhaustion and defeat. These are tough months when many politicians have moved to a living-with-the-virus model despite millions of our youngest citizens being ineligible for vaccines.

There seem to be endless immediate stressors of unpredictable child care, school closures and isolation requirements. What can you do when there are truly no good choices? Here, we offer coping tips to help push back on parenting-during-the-pandemic despair.

As psychologists (and parents), we’ve focused on understanding families’ experiences since the onset of the pandemic. We know that so many parents are struggling with burnout, loneliness and mental health problems. Based on the science of stress, we describe why this should feel hard and strategies for taking back control when you dread the challenging day ahead.

Why is this so hard?
There are three core components that make up the concept of “stress,” and the pandemic has served parents up a textbook example of each:

Unpredictability: When you’re faced with something unfamiliar or the future feels uncertain.

Uncontrollability: When it feels like you can’t change your circumstances or protect your loved ones.

Social-evaluative threat: When you fear being judged. For example, “Am I a bad parent for giving them so much screen time?”

Stress takes a toll on our bodies through activation of our stress response system, the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis (HPAA). The HPAA is designed to help regulate our energy and metabolism.

Shared with our evolutionary ancestors, the HPAA is great for helping us respond to urgent threats to family safety or tricky social settings by mobilizing our attention to respond effectively. However, the adrenaline surge is less helpful when it persists long-term or results in late-night anxiety about decisions like keeping your kid home.

Chronic stress has downstream effects on health, including altered sleep, appetite and mood dysregulation (like anxiety, depression and anger). However, you can also push back to bring your stress system in check and reduce the mental health burdens of the pandemic.

Infographic with strategies for coping with stress
Coping strategies parents can use during the pandemic and beyond. (Leslie E. Roos), Author provided
What you can do:
1. Say “Help!” out loud. You probably know that being able to see friends helps your mental health. This is aligned with research highlighting the “stress-buffering” effects of social support.

The trick in the pandemic is that you need to tell your people that you’re struggling. Before 2020, allowing people to see your tears, rage or nervousness would signal a need for help (a key function of emotions), but now they probably won’t know that you’re struggling unless you tell them because we’re interacting less in-person.

It is helpful to be direct about asking for what you need:

I’m feeling crappy and sad, do you have a minute to talk? My kids are driving me bonkers, any chance you take them for an outside play? I really need a hot shower to unwind, could you Facetime read a few books with Devin?

We know it’s not the warm hug or shared meal you are craving. It can still be helpful, especially when you’re managing pent-up inner chaos.

2. Do something (anything). Taking 10 minutes to move your body (stretch or walk, keep it easy) and purposely seeking out good news can help shift gloom and doom thinking. Behavioural activation, an evidenced-based treatment for low mood and stress, emphasizes that in the midst of lifestyle disruption, finding pleasurable daily activities — ones that are really important to you — significantly impacts health and well-being.

Choosing to engage in any sort of activity can provide positive reinforcement, which decreases stress and improves mood. The activity may not be the gym class you used to love, but substituting an online class (even better if it’s with friends) or a 10-minute walk can be helpful.

3. Be kind. When things are hard it can be tough, but incredibly important, to offer yourself compassion. What do you say to your friends when they are feeling defeated? Likely, you meet them with warmth and kindness:

This is so hard. You are doing your best in an impossible situation. I totally lost my cool yesterday too. Being a great parent includes having bad days.

Most of us are less generous to ourselves than we are to others. Take a moment to reflect on supportive words that you can offer yourself next time those tough thoughts creep in. Evidence shows that re-framing self-critical thoughts and working on self-compassion can improve mood and facilitate positive coping during these challenging times.

How you can support your child’s mental health:
1. Lower expectations. Children have a tough time with unpredictability and can sense parent stress. Keep things simple and familiar to help them know what to expect. For online learning, this could look like setting a short period for engaging (do 20 minutes, then take a break). Offering praise or small rewards for their efforts not abilities promotes a growth mindset, which helps children take on challenges. If you have the energy, try a visual schedule to let children help plan their day.

2. Sit on the floor. Getting down to your child’s level and giving them your focused attention for five to 10 minutes a day can offer an emotional reset, strengthen your relationship, and prevent challenging behaviours. You can even try lying down and see what your child wants to do. (Read? Pretend your belly is a racecar track?) Your presence and connection, even through short bursts, can help kids manage stress and feel confident to do things independently later in the day.

3. Say what you see. Big emotions and behaviours are normal ways children react to unpredictability. Pointing out what you notice and naming emotions helps children make sense of their own experience and develop socio-emotional competence.

Your fists are balled up and your voice is loud, are you angry your tower broke?

If your child is safe, all you need to do is sit with them calmly (even if you’re not feeling your calmest) and let them know you’re here. If they are actively doing something dangerous, feel free to move their body first. The saying, “That’s not what you wanted to happen, is it?” can apply in most situations.

When it comes down to managing stress as a parent right now, there are no easy solutions. Sometimes a good cry in the car is a necessary release but try not to keep these feelings to yourself. Occasional team screams (or pack howls) as a family can offer a surprising mood boost at the collective challenge of it all. It has been a difficult two years, and acknowledging the challenges of parenting during the pandemic is part of coping.

27/01/2022

27/01/2022