Articles

Let's talk about love and affectivity. Everyone

More than 40 experts from different countries and specialties and topics such as affectivity, talking to teenagers about sexuality, pornography, and relationships, come together at Love Talksthe digital Congress of the IFFD.

Maria José Atienza-September 8, 2022-Reading time: 2 minutes
love and affectivity

Original Text of the article in Spanish here

More than 40 speakers from different countries and different specialties, an easy, adaptable and affordable access. This year's IFFD Love Talks congress takes advantage of the best of digitization, with a lineup of talks between 10 and 20 minutes long, addressing topics such as infidelity, pornography, talking to teenagers about sexuality or falling in love.

A completely adaptable congress: this is how we could define Love Talks on sexuality and affectivity. It is the digital congress promoted by the International Federation for Family Development (IFFD), an independent non-profit NGO whose primary mission is to support the family through training and which is present in more than 70 countries.

After the experiences of its face-to-face congresses, held in cities such as New York, Rome, Mexico City and London, the arrival of the pandemic and the possibilities of digitization led the organization to launch a much wider and more accessible Congress format. In this way, access to high-level training is provided to thousands of people around the world, as IFFD director Leticia Rodriguez explains to Omnes.

"At IFFD we developed the training programs based on the case method," says Leticia Rodriguez, "but we saw that many people were demanding other types of dynamic that would give them keys and show them the beauty of the family."

As a result, IFFD has opened up its training courses, something that is also reflected in this congress, which is aimed at all kinds of people-"from 18 to 98 years old", jokes Rodriguez.

Among the topics to be discussed by the different experts, there are areas of interest for young professionals, singles, couples, married couples with few or many years of relationship behind them, fathers and mothers with children of all ages, and also grandparents, educators, trainers... etc.

Why sexuality and affectivity?

"There's a lot of concern about this issue on the part of parents, relatives and even among young people themselves," says Rodriguez. In addition, "we saw that a lot of training in this field is closely linked to religious areas, which is fine and very necessary, but we have to go further. In our congress we wanted the speakers not to base their presentations on a religious theme, so the list is very broad, both in number and in specialties."

Talks to be seen in 6 months

The congress is also very "atypical" in the way it works.

Once recorded, the talks will be available for "two days from June 4 for those who register in the standard model, and for six months for those who register in the premium model," says the IFFD director.

"That way, if someone's only interested in a few talks, they can watch them in forty-eight hours, while for a little more money, other people can spread them over six months, to think about them and listen to them with more leisure, between now and December."

Among the speakers we find names like Meg Meeker, the American pediatrician and parenting expert; Carolina Sánchez Agostini, the director of the Integral Sexual Education Studies program of Austral University in Argentina; Emerson Eggerich, the American author and speaker on marriage and parenting; and the Spanish psychiatrists Carlos Chiclana and Marian Rojas. As Rodriguez points out, "three committees were created to select the speakers, one from Spain, one from Latin America, and one from the rest of the world, and this is more or less the distribution of speakers and attendees."

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