Don Highlights Measures to Tackle Women’s Marital Challenges

Gbenga Sodeinde in Ado Ekiti

A university don and professor of Guidance and Counselling at the Ekiti State University, Ado Ekiti (EKSU), Joyce Olufunke Ogunsanmi, has advocated measures to tackle women’s marital challenges at the home front.

Delivering the EKSU’s 78th inaugural lecture titled ‘That The Home Be Happy: Marital Adjustment and Economic Participation of the Women’, Ogunsanmi recommended guidance and counselling as two sides of a coin that can be employed in helping or assisting individuals to overcome challenges and live happily.

She described guidance and counselling as a process that is developmental in nature, through which an individual is assisted to understand, accept and utilise his or her temperament, abilities, aptitudes, attitudinal and other psychological disposition patterns and interests, personality traits and values in relation to aspirations.

Ogunsanmi explained further that the process of guidance presents services to individuals based upon needs, an understanding of one’s immediate environment, the influence of environmental factors and unique features in the environment.

Ogunsanmi described counselling as an enlightening process through a person, who helps another person by facilitating growth, development and positive change through exercise of self-understanding.

Ogunsanmi described marriage as an institution that is legally or formally recognised by the union of two people as partners in a personal relationship.

Ogunsanmi recommended “productive women should develop a harmonious, effective and mutually satisfying behaviour pattern that encourages good and effective companionship, affectionate intimacy, agreement on basic values of life and accommodation between a husband and a wife.”

She advocated further that marriage programmes should be regular in community counseling clinics and centres to encourage high marital adjustment between spouses in communities and remedial therapy sessions. Also, that, the issue of conflict resolution strategies should be emphasised to resolve conflicts in the home when they occur.

She called on the government at all levels to improve reproductive health services in communities, which in turn will help the employed women, particularly, the young ones who are still in their reproductive ages, on how to have easy access to health facilities and reproductive aids.