Protecting Your Child’s Personal Safety

Preventing child abuse is a community responsibility. It’s a tough subject to talk about, but all adults have a part to play in acting protectively for children and young people and creating a safer community. 

At St Matthew’s Primary School, the Protective Behaviours programme is run annually in each classroom. Protective Behaviours is a recognised program worldwide that aims to promote personal safety skills for children and adults. By creating an awareness of ‘safe’ behaviours, people are empowered to use strategies that will help to prevent abuse, reduce violence in the community, and promote positive health and well-being. The programme has several important safety goals. We want children to speak up and speak out about their safety. We want children to build the confidence to share what is happening in their lives and to tell someone when they are worried or scared and when good things happen. We need to teach our children to build respectful, healthy relationships across all ages. 

What can you do? You can: 

• Talk about safety with your child
• Help your child identify their early warning signs
• Identify your child’s safety network
• Practise ‘What ifs’
• Encourage your child to be assertive
• Talk about personal safety concepts and body safety
• Discuss personal boundaries
• Talking about staying safe online
• Respond when a child discloses something
• Create a family safety plan

This booklet is for parents and is distributed by the ACT Government. It provides the key skills, concepts and strategies outlined above that promote personal safety for children and young people. Drawing on the concepts of the Protective Behaviours program, this information can empower children of all ages to deal with difficult, unsafe or abusive situations. This booklet aims to inform you about how you can help children develop skills to talk to a safe, trusted adult about anything in their lives. We encourage you to read it.

Friendology - Kind-on-Purpose

St Matthew’s is proud to be a URSTRONG school. URSTRONG provides a friendship skills curriculum, Friendology 101, that helps students establish and maintain healthy relationships, manage conflict with kindness, and increase their overall resilience. As part of the programme, we teach our students how to manage conflict. To keep things super simple, we define conflict into two categories: Friendship Fires and Mean-on-Purpose behaviour. By teaching children to respond to conflict in a healthy way and stand up to Mean-on-Purpose behaviour, we can create a culture of kindness.

But it doesn’t stop there! We can get even more intentional about creating kindness by introducing students to Kind-on-Purpose behaviour. Studies show that children who exhibit kindness are more socially accepted by peers. In other words, kind children are more well-liked and have more friends. Not only that, children who engage in acts of kindness improve their own well-being.

We encourage you to join URSTRONG for free and support our school by sharing the same messages and teaching the same skills we teach here at St Matthew’s. URSTRONG provides simple but meaningful language and skills to open a dialogue with your children. Parents can join URSTRONG for free at https://urstrong.com/. We particularly love the blog! 

Petra Cole

Assistant Principal ┃Child Safe Advocate┃Classroom Support Teacher