Home education and personal safety

The BITSS model of protective behaviours teaches personal safety using every day household items found at home. Using doors, windows, plates, cups, pictures, fans, etc as positive protective triggers, the easy curricula teaches your children how to be safe.

Homeschoolers are in a perfect situation to embed protective curricula across all other core areas of learning. We need to learn from them and replicate their ability to mesh curricula with child and family needs. While state education departments struggle to impart protective behaviours (particularly personal safety) our children are often not getting important child safety messages at school. Busy parents rushing in the evenings to get home tasks completed before the following work day may equate to little time to learn how to teach protective behaviours.

The debate around whose responsibility it is to safety educate our children is moot. Child protection is everybody’s responsibility. Everybody includes schools, teachers and we parents. Simply complaining over what is/not taught in school does little to protect kids. It teaches them to operate from an external locus of control (it’s the schools fault), to blame others and to negate any personal responsibility. Complaining about an issue you are uncomfortable with only works if you then replace the annoyance with an alternative. If you don’t want school to teach your child about personal safety, then teach your child yourself. If you want school to teach protective behaviours and personal safety then help them by modelling how easy it is to teach and protect our children from sexual predators and bullies.

Every parent and every adult in your child’s network has the responsibility of teaching protective behaviours. Protective behaviours are a common sense, down to earth approach to child protection. In Australia, protective behaviours cover all manner of safety: road, poison, water, sun and personal. Every time we put a hat on our child we are protecting them. Each time we shoe up the kids, we are protecting them. Every time we tell our child that nobody has the right to touch them in private places we are teaching personal safety.

Massive government and non government programs exist to help educate the Australian community around some areas of safety (see Kids alive do the five, Bravehearts or Giddy Goanna as examples). Television campaigns, jingles, glossy advertisements, comic books, private business donations; all designed to keep child safety on the public agenda. At Imaginif we applaud these programs and encourage you to use them.

Personal safety struggles though because it remains an almost taboo subject that we all think somebody else is better at addressing. STOP! The job of educating your child about personal safety belongs also to you. Once every six or twelve months at school is insufficient safety preparation. By taking a home schooling approach to personal safety, protective behaviours can be easily taught by you at home. It is then a bonus to your child when and if they attend protective behaviour lessons at school.

Take the free curricula behind this link – this parent sense guide to home school your child in personal safety. Play is children’s work. Play is how children learn. Protectively play with your child and you are teaching an evidence based home school curricula of child safety.

Looking for other ways to home school personal safety and protective behaviours? Try these resources:

• Bitss of Caramel Marmalade on Toast. Written by me, Megan Bayliss. RRP $15.00 and available for purchase in our protective play shop,
• Bibliotherapy: Are children’s books providing them with enough advice,
• Grandparent Sense. A 24 page curricula with game and activity learning suited to grandparents declining mobility or dexterity.