Give your Child a Hand this Christmas Holiday

Give your child a hand this Christmas holiday, teach them about support networks.

When adults are stressed they often forget things, like telephone numbers or birth dates and we reach out to our other adult friends/mates to help us remember. When children become stressed they also forget things. Their mind is so busy attempting to work out what is happening there is little memory room left for remembering. Both adults and children need a memory aid to assist remembering things – like a telephone or birthday book. Children can’t carry heavy books all the time so, over this Christmas holiday break, show your children how to use their hand as a memory aid.

Use the symbol of a hand to encourage having five support people that a child can contact at any time. It could be Mum, Dad, Teacher, Grandma, Aunty. The list of possibilities is endless. The idea is to ensure that your child remembers they can talk to these people about anything at all. In situations where you just don’t know enough trusted people, use the names of services like Kids Help Line or Police.

This needs to be continually reinforced so that when your child is feeling stressed about something, particularly if it is sexual abuse, they can look at their hand and remember what to do: to call and tell someone. Tell your child that if the first support person is not available, go to the next, or the next. Encourage children to keep telling until someone does something to help and protect them.

The Support Hand activity: Trace the child’s hand. On each of the fingers have the child write the name and telephone number of their five chosen support people. It’s best to tell the people they’ve been chosen so that if your child rings they will listen and do something. Stick the hand to a wall where the child will continually see it, and practise, practice, practice remembering who to tell if they need to talk about anything.

Another fun activity for reinforcing the BITSS element of Support Networks: Walkie Talkies.

Related article on BITSS of Support Networks: Click here. This article includes some other activities that you can use to reinforce the idea of having a support network to talk to.

FREE Copy of the Junior Fiction Protective Behaviour Book: Bitss of Caramel Marmalade on Toast

Three FREE copies of my Children’s junior fiction chapter book on Protective Behaviours: Bitss of Caramel Marmalade on Toast.

The first three people to leave a comment on this blog over the next 24 hours will receive a copy of the book.

No matter where you live in the world, I will send you a FREE copy with FREE postage included.

Once three comments have been registered I will post my email address and you can email me your address to post you the book. Please don't put your email address in the comment field. Who wants to be spammed up by Christmas Trolls?

Addresses will be used for no other purpose than sending you a complimentary copy of Bitss of Caramel Marmalade on Toast.

What a great Christmas present to help keep kids safe.

The clock is ticking. This free offer lasts for 24 hours from time of posting this blog.

To read a related article on using Bitss of Caramel Marmalade on Toast as Bibliotherapy, Click here.

Protective Behaviour Decorations for Christmas

Christmas is upon us. This joyful and peaceful time can be a horror season for a child who is being accessed by a sexual predator. Close proximity, a string of holidays and higher alcohol intake can lead to many children experiencing more sexual abuse at this time of the year than at any other time.

With this in mind, I take the opportunity to reinforce Body Ownership with every child who comes through my counselling room and with my own four children.

Here are two simple and cost effective ideas you can introduce this Christmas season to reinforce the protective behaviour element of body ownership.

Paper doll chains: Instead of the usual paper strips joined to make delightful circle chains, make a paper doll chain with your child. As part of the protective learning while making the Christmas chain, show how the dolls are holding hands or touching feet but not touching any other body parts. This is because some dolls and people don’t like being touched and we must respect that. Sometimes we don’t like being touched and we can use our words to tell, but dolls don’t have words so they have to tell us by allowing touching hands only.

Gingerbread person: Using a gingerbread person cutter you can show your child the out line of the gingerbread body. Explain that every person has their own body outline and that each of us is different. Our body outline is our boundary and protector. Nobody can touch us if we don’t want them to. We have a set of Gingerbread family: a male, female, girl and boy gingerbread cutters. I talk about the different sizes of people and how it is also an adults responsibility to protect children, not hurt them in any way.

From the moment we are born our bodies belong to us. They are our human signature. Babies may need to rely on adults to care for them but each baby’s body is still unique: unique skin, tone, imprints, hair, voice, size and shape.

A newborn baby has little realisation of where their body begins and ends, so as loving parents we engage in touch, good touch, to teach our babies what is theirs and what is ours. We stroke them, massage them and put clothes on them to give a message of body ownership.

Children who are at risk of sexual abuse, or who have already been sexually assaulted often don’t have a good idea of their body size or where their body boundaries begin and end. Too frequently they fail to recognise their real size in relation to a potential perpetrator. Sometimes they think they are as big as the perpetrator and sometimes they see themselves as much smaller and helpless than everybody else in their family. This size confusion is a result of lowered self-esteem and something that perpetrators may focus on in their grooming process. For this reason it is important to teach our children body ownership and to assist in ensuring they have a healthy self-esteem.

Can you share any other home-made Christmas decoration ideas that would be helpful in keeping children safe from sexual abuse?

A Mime of Early Warning Information.

Intuition is the grown up, fancy name for feelings in our body and heart. Our intuition is what starts our Early Warning Signs: physical sensations in our body that tell us that not all is okay. To protect ourselves from getting hurt, it is important that we listen to our early warning signs and remove ourselves from risky situations when they arise.

There are over 2000 feelings words in our vocabulary but typically, any of us will only use six words to describe our feelings. To give kids the best possible chance or recognizing and responding to sexually exploitive situations it is very important to teach them about feelings.

Here is a really easy activity to play with your children to help them develop new feeling words to attach to their body feelings – their early warning signs.

Mime: When the opportunity arises and the kids are bored with nothing to do, play a miming game. Silently act out a particular body reaction to any emotion and ask the children to guess what you are feeling. Offer a prize for correct answers. Gingerbread people make great food prizes because you can then naturally mention body ownership.

Remember though that food is a child’s right and food rewards do not replace good care and nutrition. A food reward needs to be something special: A real treat, not something that your child has a basic right to on a daily basis.

For more free game and activity ideas to do with Intuition and Early Warning signs have a look at BITSS of Intuition.

Let me know about how your Mime of Early Warning information went.

Good Touch Bad Touch

Teaching through play works. Work is children’s play: their business. Business needs reinforcing on a daily basis or business begins to fail. So too with the business of protective play, reinforce the protection by playing everyday with the five important elements of the BITSS model of Protective Behaviours – Body Ownership, Intuition, Touch, Say no, and Support network.

Touch is a difficult area to play protectively with if you do not understand the subtle difference between good touch/bad touch. Child sexual predators use normal touch (good touch) to desensitize a child and move them toward accepting bad touch. It happens gradually and sometimes without the child even realizing what has happened. If someone pats your child’s shoulder in friendship, it may be acceptable. If that same someone tomorrow pats your child’s breast and claims it was a mistake, it is a warning sign that they are moving toward bad touch and that your child is allowed to react, to come and tell you.

Our natural environment is useful for teaching about good touch/bad touch. When we look at the early warning signs in nature, we have a better understanding of how early warning signs work inside of our body and how a situation can very quickly move from being good to being awful. Many nature based activities can be designed around the below two discussion starting points.

Flowers: As beautiful as some flowers may be, they have the potential to turn from a good touch to a bad touch. Use them as an example. Running up to smell a beautiful flower may result in being pricked by a thorn, stung by a bee, or getting a rash on your face from poison leaves or petals. Some people too can be tricky. They start off being nice but it's a trick. They end up hurting us with their words or touch. When the good touch turns to bad touch it is okay to come and tell someone.

Animals: Many parents warn children about patting dogs, “Be careful! That dog might bite”. This is a perfect example of good touch/bad touch. Use these teachable moments to explain that sometimes, good things can turn to bad things and that children need to watch for changes and know when to back away. If you are patting a cat and its tail starts flicking it is the cat’s early warning sign to us that it is unhappy. Your child is at risk of being bitten or scratched by the cat. People have signs in their behavior too. When people move to bad touch, back away from them and tell someone what has happened.

Can you share a game idea that you use to teach about good touch/bad touch? The more we share, the quicker all of our children stay safe.

Say No to Hang Man.

Helping children say “no” to predatory adults is important. When a sexual predator attempts to convince your child that the behavior is acceptable, your child needs to know that there are situations where they can say “no” to an adult.

Despite many toddlers starting their vocal repertoire with the word “no”, we soon let them know that it’s not nice to say “no” to grownups. Umm…it is not nice that some grownups sexually abuse our children. Our children need to practice saying “no” so that when they really need to say it, they already know they can do it.

Play the following practice game to help your child understand that it is okay to say “no” in some situations:

Don’t hang the person: This game is a variation of the world favorite “Hang Man”. Pick a longish statement that both fits your child’s situation, and incorporates them being able to say “no”. For example, “When someone wants you to be low, you can turn around and tell them “no”!” It is important to pick a long statement with lots of different letters because you do not want your child to end up hanged. Make this impossible to happen. For the example statement, you would draw the spaces up as:
- - - - / - - - - - - - / - - - - - / - - - / - - / - - / - - -, / - - - / - - - / - - - - / - - - - - - / - - - / - - - - / - - - - / “- -!”.

As your child says a letter from the alphabet, you write it in the appropriate space. If the child picks a letter that is not contained in the statement, one part of the hangman stand with dangling stick body is drawn.

This game can include statements to fit any of the BITSS pieces. I always follow the statement up by asking the child how they will say “no” to someone bigger than them or in a position of power. I do this to help cement the ability to say “no” and to increase the child’s confidence that there are some things that big people just cannot do, no matter how much authority they have.

For further free games, activities and ideas on how to help your child say "no", click here.

What are your thoughts on helping your child practice saying “no”?

Walkie Talkies: Support Networks.

In protective behaviour speak, Walkie Talkies are our feet. Each foot has five toes representing a person we can walk and talk to if something feels yucky inside us. The “yucky” might be a sick feeling because we ate too many lollies or it might be a “yucky” feeling about someone else or maybe even something “yucky” they did to us. Two walkie talkies makes for a solid platform of ten people we can walk and talk to if we have to.

Most people will be aware of the symbol of a hand as a visual reminder of a support network. Each finger represents a safe person that we can talk to about anything. Feet are a variation of the hand and offer some different activities for encouraging children to remember their support people.

In BITSS of Support Networks, I have set out two simple art activities that you can use to encourage your child to walk and talk to people who can help them.

Have fun with your walkie talkies and remember: Nothing is so awful we can't talk to someone about it.

A Protective Play Tutorial for Grandparents.

Grandparent Sense, a Protective Play Tutorial, (funded by protective partner Cairns City Council) helps grandparents protect children in their care. Full of game and activity ideas, the tutorial booklets were free to Grandparents in the Cairns area. Filling a need, they went like hot cakes.


Protective Play is a term coined by Megan Bayliss (my mother) to describe everyday game ideas and activities to help keep kids safe. No requirement to buy expensive resources or spend scarce funds on protective behaviour trainings, the tutorials offer practical play advise and information about child sexual abuse.

An extract from Body Ownership in Grandparent Sense, a Protective Play Tutorial:

From the moment we are born, our bodies belong to us. They are our human signature. Babies may need to rely on adults to care for them but each baby’s body is still unique: unique skin, tone, imprints, hair, voice, size and shape.

A newborn baby has little realization of where their body begins and ends. As loving carers, we engage in touch, good touch, to teach our babies what is theirs and what is ours. We stroke them, massage them and put clothes on them to give a message of body ownership.

Children who are at risk of sexual abuse, or who have already been sexually assaulted often do not have a good idea of their body size or where their body boundaries begin and end. Too frequently, they fail to recognize their real size in relation to a potential perpetrator. Sometimes they think they are as big as the perpetrator and sometimes they see themselves as much smaller and helpless than everybody else in their family. This size confusion is a result of lowered self-esteem and something that perpetrators may focus on in their grooming process. For this reason, it is important to teach our grand children body ownership and to assist in ensuring they have a healthy self-esteem.

On the following page, there are some ideas you can play with to introduce and teach body ownership. It is not an exhaustive list, or in any order of importance, and you can redesign and change any of these to suit your grandchild’s personality and needs. Blend these suggestions into normal household activities and play. Make it natural and frequent: daily is best to help children remember that their body is their body.

Bitss of Caramel Marmalade on Toast. Written by my Mum, Megan Bayliss.

…there was a world sweeter than Marmalade.




Mum wrote this media release for her book launch in June 2006. The day was a blast. Around 100 people attended, the media too. Mum made the news that night.

CHILDREN’S BOOK LAUNCH

Caramel Marmalade: Made in Cairns.

The sweet smell of Cairns has been deliciously captured in a children’s chapter book written by Cairns author, mother of four, Megan Bayliss. The jam packed story jars against preserving the tartness of sour thinking and invites readers to sample a rare and safe sweetness found in the unlikely duo of Caramel and Marmalade.

With real Cairns flavour, the book conserves our freedom loving personality with the dunny humour typical of children in the north. The author has lived here for 30 years and her evocative mango and lime story is set in her own home street in Edge Hill.

Although written as a tall tell-tale and endearingly stirring children’s read, the book sensitively addresses important protective behaviour strategies aimed at protecting children from the harms hidden in our heavenly tropical paradise. The story gives children in the 8-12 year old age group an opportunity to growl against those seemingly sweet monsters that hide within our utopia but who may really want to change ripeness for life into a rancid, rotting mass of fly blown waste.

The book, Bitss of Caramel Marmalade on Toast, will be launched in Cairns on Tuesday the 27th of June. The launch will be a family focused, FREE, dog/cat themed party with story reading, games, competitions and prizes for the whole family. Excepting the author, all launch officiators will be VIP guests: children.

This is a launch for the children, by the children. All families are welcome as long as the adults are well behaved. Dog and cat dress is encouraged. A signed copy of Bitss of Caramel Marmalade on Toast will be awarded to the best dressed family arriving as dogs or cats.

This is definitely a book to include in the discerning child’s or adult’s Christmas stocking. For an insatiable northern appetite, put away a signed copy from the launch. RRP $15.00.