Are you a parent, carer, guardian or professional looking to build your capacity to better support your young people?
Many of the parents and carers we worked with often feel ill-equipped in how to support their children and young people in an increasingly complex world. Parents and carers often struggle to tackle challenging topics like sex, consent, respect, safety and wellbeing with their young people.
Our Feeling Safe and Free programs for Parents & Carers are specially designed to support parents, guardians, carers and grandparents and focused on building their understanding about some of the challenges facing our young people and give them helpful tools so they can better support their young people.
To find out more about our program, contact us here:
More and more parents are concerned about raising their children with healthy attitudes, ideas and roles when it comes to gender.
We know that for children, play is essential and toys are the tools of early learning. Choices that parents make around toys can be a useful way to introduce healthy ideas around gender. We know from research that gendered toys do shape children’s play preferences, styles and choices. They limit the range of skills and attributes that children can explore through play, and hence limit them from developing a full range of diverse interests, preferences and skills.
Choices of toys can open up or close off what children see as possible interests and activities for themselves, and how they start to rule things out for themselves. Research also tells us that by late primary age, children already have very clear ideas about the jobs that are suitable for boys and girls, and these ideas are very hard to shake later on.
So modelling healthy gender roles and introducing gender balanced toys and activities as well as actively challenging gender stereotypes are all powerful ways parents can support their children to explore more possibilities and ways of being in the world.
Latest research by the Children's Safety Survey (2023) tells us that only half of Australian children and young people feel safe all the time, and 4% of children and young people reported never feeling safe.
Importantly, the research shows that young people that they would seek support from a parent or a friend if they felt unsafe. Parents feeling equipped to support their children when they reach out for help is critical. Our Feeling Safe & Free programs for Parents & Carers are designed to equip parents and carers with the knowledge and tools they need to support their children and young people to feel safe and free.
What’s unique about our program is the use of a range of interactive and creative storytelling tools, resources and media such as art, sand play, theatre, puppetry, animation, storytelling, and different forms of creative arts for children and young people to explore difficult experiences and emotions that are hard to put into words.
The Feeling Safe and Free program builds on and harness the amazing skills and resourcefulness that children and young people already have about how to navigate the world safely. What they need is a community of support (parents, carers, peers, schools, community) who are equipped with better understanding of the challenges young people face and the skills to support them.
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