Can Any Children’s Book Provide Advice?

Yes. The process of providing advice through books, any book on your bookcase, is called bibliotherapy. While expensive self-help books, with structured steps for life improvement, are a form of adult bibliotherapy, quality junior fiction offers a range of problem solving options for our children.

The advice contained within children's literature is only as good as the parental involvement of structuring follow up activities toward integration of the child's need for advice or social information. This need could centre on sexual abuse protection, bullying, fear, temper tantrums, disabilities or any other concern of children.

To turn children’s fiction into helpful learning, follow the nine easy steps of bibliotherapy.

You don’t have to buy self help books – you’ve already got them.

What book are you reading your child today?

Chatterbox Play: A Touching Experience.

The concept of good touch/bad touch can be difficult to explain to children.

Here’s two more play ideas to weave into everyday protective play.

Chatterbox: Make a chatterbox out of a square piece of paper (for instructions, click here). Most children know how to make one so ask the experts for assistance here! On the inside faces, include statements about good touch/bad touch. Children love a bit of rot so don’t make it all serious. Put something like, “You cuddled a koala and it pooped on you. / Boo Hoo, Poo Poo”. The aim is to get it into the child’s head that sometimes, good things turn to bad things and that it is okay to react when this happens.

Miming: When the children are bored and ask you what they can do, as a fun alternative to suggesting they clean their rooms, play a miming game, similar to Charades. Mime out a good touch that turns to a bad touch and then mime going to tell someone what has happened. The good touch/bad touch mime does not need to be around abuse. It could be greet kissing a friend who has very bad breath and the kiss turns into a breath holding session. If you choose to mime a cuddle that turns to a sexual touch please follow it up with a discussion about body ownership and the importance of telling someone what has happened.

If you would like to know more about Protective Behaviours and the BITTS model of Protective Play, click here.

If you have some protective play ideas, I'd love to hear them. Don't be shy, share them and help children and families all over the world.

My Space – A Protective Barrier.

Looking for some simple discussion ideas to begin talking about the importance of Body Ownership? Here are three discussion starters suitable for all ages. The sooner you introduce the BITSS way of protecting children from sexual abuse, the better protective play will work. Children are never too young, or too old, to have protective behaviours reinforced.

Fences, windows and doors: Explain to children that the reason we have fences, windows or doors is to give a message of defensible space: space that belongs to us and says “Private. No entry”. That is why we shut the toilet door when we go to the toilet! Sand play is a great way to reinforce defensible space. When your child builds a sand castle tell them that strong walls and moats were a castle’s protection and that a sun hat and sun cream are the child’s protection now, just like wearing swimming costumes to protect private parts.

Atlas/Globe: Using maps or a globe show that every state/suburb/country has a boundary. The boundary shows the body of the country. Most of these countries have armies that help to protect the boundary. Our clothes are like an army. They help to protect our body and give a sign to other people that certain parts of our body are private – the parts we wear underwear or swimming costumes over.

The Great Barrier Reef: One of the seven natural wonders of the world, the Great Barrier Reef is a nature given protective behaviour barrier. The reef acts like a safe house, giving protection to millions of different marine life. The reef has many predators too and different species of marine life have adapted protective behaviours to escape the hungry jaws of predators. Nature gave us brains and mouths – these are our protective ways to escape from dangerous predators. If someone is doing something to you that makes you feel like a jellyfish, it is okay to sting them by using your mouth and telling someone. Make your body a Great Barrier Reef, a special place that is protected by laws that say, you cannot touch the fish, coral or shells on this reef.

Game Rules of Touch

In Good Touch Bad Touch we saw how sexual predators use everyday touch to trick, confuse and desensitize children. Flowers and animal activities were suggested as easy ways to help your children learn the sneakiness between good touch turning into bad touch.

Here’s another two super easy protective play ideas to weave into your everyday life. Remember that the more you protectively play, the better the chance that your child will not be hurt by those horrible people that try to trick them with touch.

Rule poster: Make up a poster collage that depicts good touches that turn to bad touches. Even an ice cream on a hot day leading up to a melted ice cream and a sad child is a great example of good touch to bad touch and is something that most children would be able to identify with. Draw a big red line through the middle of the collage, through the behaviours that are beginning to become suspicious, and tell your children that it is at this point that they must tell the person that they are going to tell on them. This is not tittle-tattling or dobbing. This is you protecting your children against the possibility of sexual abuse.

Traffic Lights: When teaching children colours many parents use some sort of reward system for when the child gets the colour right. If you show behaviours as traffic lights, where green is good touch, orange is suspicious or iffy “I’m going to tell” touch, and red is “No way! I’m telling now” touch, it is easy for them to remember that behaviours can change from go to stop. Reward your child for correct guessing of behaviours. A sticker, or a story, is better than a food reward as food and good nutrition is a child’s right, not a treat.

Related articles:
Understanding Protective Behaviors in keeping Children Safe
BITSS of Touch

Intuition and Early Warning Sign Activities

Intuition is the funny body feelings (early warning signs) that we all get at different times. Sometimes intuition is nothing more than our fears taking over our body and thoughts but often intuition is our body screaming at us to listen to what is really happening around us.

Intuition needs to be clearly taught to our children. Far too often, I have heard children and women say, after the fact, “If only I’d listened to my intuition.”

Here’s two simple art activities I use with children in therapy to help them understand what their early warning signs are. Recognizing and acting on early warning signs is a way to prevent our children from being sexually abused. These therapeutic activities can be easily blended into your every day play with your children. Protective Play is the most unobtrusive way to keep our kids safe.

Drawing/writing exercise using prompt pictures: Show your child a picture from a magazine, photo, or card. Ask them to draw/write the way their body would react to the situation in the picture. When, and if, children respond by saying they would punch/kiss the person, trust them because they look nice or run away, ask them to draw/write what would be happening inside their body where nobody else can see. This process is a bit like peeling an onion. There are layers to get through to help connect with body reactions, emotional layers that are deeper than the behaviours children show us.

Art collage of different faces: Cut faces out of magazines and glue to a sheet of paper. Ask the child to say how they think each person is feeling. Learning emotional language will help your child throughout life. When they can express emotions, children have a better chance of telling you if something happens to them. Because children don’t have an extended emotional vocabulary they act out their emotions as a way of telling us something is wrong. As parents, we often miss these messages, and ask the child to stop being naughty/silly/annoying. If your child cannot find words to express their emotions, they have body stances. Mix the pieces up and have the child match them together. While the child is matching, give hints about what a person’s legs might look like if they’ve got an angry face and have their arms crossed, or what a face might look like when the arms and legs are hanging limp.

Can you imagine yourself doing this with your kids? What other things do you do to teach intuition (early warning signs) to your kids?

My favorite book for teaching about Intuition is: Jelly Legs by Colin Varney.

Other activities to protectively play around intuition and early warning signs:

A Mime of Early Warning Information
Game to Develop Emotional Intelligence.
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Body Ownership Games and Activities for Protective Behaviours

Body Ownership is an important Protective Behaviour concept to teach your children. When children are trained to understand that their body is theirs and that nobody can touch it if the child does not want them to, our children have greater protection against sexual predators zeroing in on them.

Protective Play makes personal safety training super easy. Here’s two activity ideas to reinforce the protective behaviour element of Body Ownership.

Body outlines: As an activity to display different body size, have your child stand against a big piece of paper with their legs together (Stick the paper to the wall to do this exercise, don’t have it on the ground because a lying down position places a child in a vulnerable position). Draw around the child’s body. Then have the child draw around yours and compare sizes. Stick the body outlines to the wall as a way of visually displaying the difference in size between an adult and a child. Tell the child that it is an adult’s job to look after children because adults are bigger and can do more things. WARNING – never draw around a child’s genital area. Children who have experienced sexual abuse may interpret this as a sexual behaviour and become confused about it. Also, perpetrators may use this exercise as a way to desensitize children against having their private parts touched or looked at.

Photo collages: Using pictures cut from magazines, make a people collage. Talk about the difference in size between adults and children and stress that adults look after children, not hurt them or do adult type things with them (like making them do all the housework or kissing like Mum and Dad).

Related art activity blog on Body Ownership: Protective Behaviour Decorations for Christmas.

Does anybody have any other Body Ownership game ideas that I can pass on to parents who are concerned with keeping their children safe from sexual abuse? Sharing ideas helps others and lessens the isolation experienced by families whose children have been sexually abused.

BITSS of New Year Resolutions: Imaginif there was a World Without Child Sexual Abuse!

Imaginif there was a world without child sexual abuse.

Imaginif 2007 was the year where you decided to provide your child with awareness and skills around what to do if someone tries to sexually abuse your child.

Imaginif “Happy New Year” meant just that for all of our children.

The BITSS model of Protective Behaviours provides you with a structure to protectively play around the important safety BITSS of:

Body Ownership
Intuition
Touch
Say no, and
Support Networks

Matching games and activities around each of these five important protective behaviour BITSS is easy, educational and can help to keep kids safe. Just click on the links for some jam packed ideas of spreading BITSS of child safety across the globe.

Still deciding on a New Years Resolution? Make it a protective resolution. Do your BITSS to Protect your child, my child, our children.

Support 2007 Children to Have a Happy New Year. It’s easy, if you’re up for a BITT of a challenge.

Recognition of the BITSS model of Protective Behaviours from the Australian Centre for the Study of Sexual Assault:
Good Practice Programs, BITSS of Protective Play - A skill based workshop for family and child workers