Her friends and colleagues showered her with congratulations. One enthused: “You are a super woman and an inspiration!” Thembelihle Mkhwanazi had been capped at a UNISA graduation ceremony for having successfully completed her Social Work Masters. Her research abstract was officially approved by the conference committee of the 8th International Conference on Gender and Sexuality (2025), held in Thailand, where Professor Linda Shirindi of UNISA’s College of Human Sciences presented it on Thembelihle’s behalf.
A busy mother of two is also the team leader of The Domino Foundation’s Early Childhood Development programme which partners with 51 ECD centres catering for more than 3000 beneficiaries. She had to learn to balance the extra demands her academic work brought with those of home life and of the work place as she looked into the complexities of and made suggestions for social work support in the area of parental readiness to provide sex education to their children.
Thembelihle explained that the study had been conducted in the targeted community of Amaoti. Her initial goal was to find out why there was a higher rate of adolescent pregnancies and youth cohabitation in that community. “I interviewed 15 participating parents and got a wealth of stories about discussing sex with their children. Most parents feel uneasy about discussing sex with their offspring. The young people go on to make poor decisions based on wrong understanding of life issues for which the parents then blame their children.”
This dynamic lady explained how she believes her research will benefit the ECD programme she leads: “My debriefing sessions with the team are often used to train them on how to deal with life issues like these. They have scheduled visits to all the centres every month, during which they monitor each centre’s situation. Sometimes, they hear about child sexual abuse, children witnessing gender- based violence and other physical turmoil at home which the children then imitate at the ECD centres.”
With 18 November being World Day for the Prevention of and Healing from Child Sexual Exploitation, Abuse and Violence, Thembelihle is passionate about seeing parents take up the challenge to teach their children in word and by example about healthy attitudes and understanding of the birds and the bees. The scriptural mandate Thembelihle’s ECD programme has is “Train up a child in the way they should go so that, even when they are old, they will not depart from it.” (Proverbs 22:6). “Children are never too young to learn respect for others and themselves, and parents should never try to avoid their responsibility to teach their sons and daughters how to value themselves and others.”
