Dr Renee Rattray (right) in discussion with Douglas Orane (left) and Greig Smith at a forum for parents mounted by the National Child Month Committee, at Alhambra Inn in St Andrew, recently.

Fewer children are going missing, but there has been an overall increase in reports of child-abuse, says Greig Smith, registrar at the Office of the Children's Registry (OCR).

Smith's presentation to a forum for parents mounted by the National Child Month Committee, (NCMC), at Alhambra Inn, in St Andrew recently points to advances made, along with the continuing challenges for Jamaican parenting. Other speakers addressed the critical role of parents in the educational system and the nature of parenting.

"We have now seen a 21 per cent reduction in children missing in Jamaica," the registrar said. This was based on a comparison between the 984 children reported missing between January to June 2014, and the same period the previous year, he explained.

This information came against a background in which more than 11,000 reports of child abuse were made to the OCR last year. Regarding such harmful situations for children, Smith said, "Parents need to take responsibility to break the cycle."

He added, however, that the phrase 'It takes a village to raise a child' also has implications for individual behaviour. He said Jamaicans needed to report child abuse when they saw it, as a recent survey showed that only a small fraction of the community was doing so.

Dr Renee Rattray, education programmes director at Jamaica National Building Society Foundation, told the audience that her work involves turning around the management and programme delivery in underperforming schools; and, one of the key factors in these initiatives was getting parental involvement in the institutions.

As a former school principal, she acknowledged that parents are often blamed when they fail to participate in school activities. She said, "There is a relationship between parenting and student achievement. This is an indisputable fact."

Parental participation is a complicated issue, however, and, "A lot of the issues revolve around leaders not incorporating parents sufficiently," Dr Rattray stated. She also indicated that the cycle of underperformance had been broken at several schools where parental involvement was part of an overall programme of improvement.