FATHER of three Charles Harvey had to do it all, from combing his daughters’ hair to burning the midnight oil while assisting with school work, especially in the case of his 16-year-old daughter whom he has been raising alone since birth.

Harvey had to raise his oldest daughter Ruth alone until she went to live with her mother when she was about to begin secondary school. The situation was different for his youngest daughter Kerry-Lee whom he had to parent alone. In the case of his second daughter Aisha, he had more of a visiting-type relationship with her since she was mainly raised by her mother.

“My kids are very bright. I think it’s a family tradition, so it comes naturally. I teach them and sometimes I teach them and they come out brighter than what I expect. In the case of my big daughter, I thought she was a slow learner and gave her some hard things when it comes to learning,” he said.

His “big daughter”, who is now a registered nurse, had therefore pleasantly surprised him when she was successful in seven of her eight CXC subjects while attending the Norman Manley High School.

“I fathered her through basic school and she passed her Grade Six Achievement Test and then the mother decided that she wanted to play a role in her life and she would like for her to move from the community, so I said all right, no problem,” recounted the 47-year-old dad who lives in Whitfield Town in Kingston, which like most inner-city communities have witnessed regular bouts of violence.

All three of the girls, who now range from 16 to 27 years old, attended St Peter Claver Primary School in Kingston, and because he was a member of the Catholic church aligned to the school, it meant that Harvey was well known by the teachers at the institution.

While his two daughters attended Norman Manley High School where they excelled academically, his youngest daughter passed her GSAT exams for Excelsior High School.

“My main emphasis for my three girls is education and what I did was to expose them a lot in the different workshops and seminars that I have been through like kiddies workshops and workshops put on by Woman Inc and sometimes by the Women’s Crisis Centre and the Kingston Restoration Company,” he said.

Harvey is a founding member of Fathers’ Inc and is also aligned to several gender-based initiatives. He and his daughters also took part in a number of drama presentations put on by groups such as Children First and SISTREN Theatre Collective. He also does consultancy work in addition to his main job as a computer and machine technician.

He said he made it his point of duty to ensure that his daughters were both book and street-smart.

“I try to expose them because I said, living in the garrison, most kids don’t get a lot of exposure and so I try to give them that knowledge. My youngest daughter, for example, passed computer technology the first time she did it in class. She got 100 per cent and the teacher asked me how she knew everything about the computer and I told her that she sits down and watches me because I repair computers.”

All of his girls, he said, have differing personalities and he tries to appreciate them all. He refers to his youngest daughter as being the Barbie doll because she is very much into maintaining her slim physique, while his oldest daughter is very quiet and more into her books. His second daughter he said is more of a leader and currently does accounting and cashiering for a hardware store based in downtown Kingston.

“She is the tough talker, because she comes from Maxfield, so she sort of has a grass roots roughness with her. She just behaves like she is a tomboy, but she is not a tomboy, she just has a different personality,” he said.

Eldest daughter Ruth told Career & Education that her father was strict when it came to their education.

“He was the one who enforced the whole book thing,” she said.

“Once you see him at the end of the avenue, you had to go and run to get your books, even if you were not studying before.”

“I don’t force them to grow a certain way. I tend to let them experience their own way, rather than imposing stuff on them. But when it comes to choosing schools, I am the one who does that, because I choose the school that I want them to give me the grades for,” Harvey asserted.

He said he was the one who mostly took them for back to school shopping each year, but it was not a job he minded.

“I would buy the shoes and books and I always tell them, ‘you see how much money I pay for the books, I don’t want unnu to embarrass me. It’s book first before man’,” he said.

Now that two of his girls have finished secondary school, he said back to school preparation is not as financially stressful as in the past. He also has more time to further his own education. He just recently completed a course in web design and plans to enrol in a computer graphics and animation course being offered by Heart Trust/NTA come December.