Kiddipedia
These days parents are spoiled for choice in finding resources and supports available to help them to keep their children safe. Fantastic protective behaviours programs such as My Underpants Rule, Daniel Morcombe Foundation’s Australia’s Biggest Child Safety Lesson, Love Bites and Bravehearts Ditto’s Keep Safe Adventure offer vital foundational information to help children to develop the personal protective factors that support their safety. But children and young people living in Rainbow Families (defined as any family with children in which there is one or more LGBTIQA+ parents) often face additional complexities and deal with issues that aren’t typically covered in traditional child protection programming.
In late 2019, community organisation Prosper (Project Australia) partnered with the peak group supporting LGBTIQA+ parents and their children – Rainbow Families, to work on a special project within the LGBTIQA+ community. The initiative, known as the Rainbow Families Family Violence Prevention Program is a multi-year effort to engage LGBTIQA+ families in the prevention of domestic and family violence, child abuse and other related forms of violence. It’s first project activity has been to address this unique gap in child safety programming by developing a tailored protective behaviours program especially for children and young people living in Rainbow Families.
“Our focus on children and young people reflects their importance as future community leaders. The behaviours they learn now, the attitudes they pick up at home and at school will shape tomorrow’s world.” said Prosper (Project Australia)’s Executive Director, Karen Craigie. “We wanted children and young people living in Rainbow Families to identify themselves in the pages of our programming and understand the vital role they have to play in preventing violence.”
This newly launched program helps children and young people to understand safety, develop protective behaviours and navigate the complex issues that all children and young people deal with, such as risk taking and early warning signs. However, it also deals with specific challenges faced by children in Rainbow Families such as responding to anti-LGBTIQA+ behaviour. The program has been developed by a special project team from the LGBTIQA+ community and the resources are beautifully visual in featuring LGBTIQA+ parents and their children.
Program content is user-friendly so that parents can deliver the material to their children at home and older children can read through the activities independently (although supervision and support is recommended). The resources have been designed for important stages in development with activity resources for each of the groups; pre-schoolers, primary-schoolers and high-schoolers as well as a parent guide to support caregivers in using the program at home. Prosper and Rainbow Families are soon to release an accompanying calendar of parent and child workshops for the program and the initiative will be expanded online and at a grass-roots level through Rainbow Families playgroups and events (open to all rainbow families!) across the remainder of 2020 and into 2021.
Families can download the free program resources directly from the Prosper (Project Australia) website at www.prosperprojectaustralia.org.
Prosper (Project Australia) is a multi award-winning community organisation founded to support disadvantaged children and their families; at home, at school and in the community.
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