Doing Right by Our Kids–empowering parents to be child safety and abuse prevention advocates
It has taken me a few weeks to get my feet on the ground in the New Year, but I am excited about 2012. I an writing a new book with Kidpower co-founder Irene van der Zande, Doing Right by Our Kids: Protecting Child Safety at All Levels of Society. I have been doing much of my blogging over at www.DoingRightByOurKids.com and I encourage you to follow my evolving work there, as Irene and I craft a new book and involve readers in the process. We just can’t wait to start sharing key skills and information with you, so online outreach will pave the way for the book.
Irene and I have been committed to the core idea of “Protecting Child Safety at All Levels of Society” from the inception of this project, but it was a bit hard to explain until the Penn State abuse scandal broke last fall. Now people understand why parents need to know what to do to prevent abuse AND that schools, faith communities, sports teams, and all child-serving organizations need to be actively involved as well. Secrecy and silence is so much a part of the cultural umbrella that allows abuse to happen that I have truly come to believe that if you are not part of the solution, you are part of the problem. Doing Right by Our Kids will give you many tools to be part of the solution and to gather allies to create grassroots pressure “up” the ladder of command when you need organizations to be more aware and involved. We empower kids as well, drawing on the skills that Kidpower has already taught to over two million people worldwide, and beyond that, the new book will emphasize the organizational change and cultural change that is needed to allow children to truly move with safety and confidence through society.
One thing I really love about Kidpower is that it is so positive. I don’t think I could spend years of my life just fighting against a negative. Working as a Kidpower instructor allows me to fight against abuse while teaching kids safety skills in a positive, effective, realistic way that operates through success rather than fear. I highly recommend Kidpower workshops for EVERYONE. However, this year I am stepping back from my own role of teaching workshops in order to write the news book and create other resources that can reach hundreds and thousands of people at once, rather than 10-20 people at a time. Our book project is evolving at a good time, as Kidpower has launched the One Million Safer Kids Campaign, which DoingRightByOurKids.com is participating in as an official partner.
Since last July, the campaign has already reached over 155,000 children!
So keep your eyes on MojoMom.com for news and updates related to all of my work–I will be doing a renovation to the website for 2012 to bring all my writing and teaching interests into one site. And in the meantime, I hope you will check out what we are offering through DoingRightByOurKids.com and all the resources offered by Kidpower’s One Million Safer Kids campaign.
What’s next for Mojo Mom? Introducing DoingRightByOurKids.com
As I have written about previously, 2010 was a rough year for me, but I feel like I am getting my mojo back and I wanted to share a major step in answering the question “What’s next?” for me professionally.
You’ve seen me write about child safety issues on the MojoMom.com blog, and I have taught classes as a certified Kidpower instructor. I am very proud to announce that Kidpower Executive Director and Courageous Parents, Confident Kids contributor Irene van der Zande and I are launching a new independent research project called Doing Right by Our Kids — Protecting Child Safety at All Levels of Society.
We plan to develop this into a book, but we are starting out by launching our new website www.DoingRightbyOurKids.com which allows us start writing about these issues right now, and creating new resources for parents, educators, and other adults who work with children.
On the new website, we’ll analyze current issues related to child safety, and also share timeless safety strategies that you can start implementing now. I hope you’ll check out what Irene and I are writing about child safety and how work toward a world that is free of bullying, abuse, and other forms of violence. Our kids deserve no less! The good news it that there are clear ways to get started, and each step along the way represents real progress.
We’d love to get your comments and thoughts on these issues. I am looking for ways to capture your questions and in the short term, if you have a safety-related question you’d like to see answered in our book, you can email me at amy@mojomom.com. To be honest and realistic, I cannot promise any personal replies at this moment but you can help us shape book and make sure we address your real-life concerns. If all goes well, in the near future I will be able to share some answers regularly on the blog at DoingRightbyOurKids.com
A reminder of my upcoming training this week:
On Wednesday January 19th, I will be teaching “Safe Kids in an Uncertain World,” a workshop for parents and other caring adults, at the Montessori School of Raleigh. As the sponsor, MSR has graciously opened up this workshop to any parents who wish to attend, for no charge.
Here are the event details and RSVP information for this Wednesday’s seminar in Raleigh. Please be sure to note that this particular seminar is for Parent education, and other adults who work with kids. We talk about these issues on a different level when it’s just adults in the room, therefore we cannot accommodate children at this training.
Montessori School of Raleigh Presents
Safe Kids in an Uncertain World: A Kidpower Workshop for Parents and Teachers
Dr. Amy Tiemann, Kidpower child safety expert and award-winning author and educator, has designed this seminar to give families the skills needed to become Savvy Parents, who make abuse prevention part of their family’s education and Resourceful Kids, who are well-versed in safety skills and know when, how, and whom to ask for help.
Topics include:
· Preventing abuse, molestation, or abduction by strangers or acquaintances
· Teaching children HOW to talk to strangers
· Identifying two simple warning signs that a situation presents an increased risk for abuse
· Making Kidpower safety skills part of daily life, increasing a child’s confidence while reducing anxiety
When: Wednesday, January 19th [Note updated date]
7:00pm – 9:00pm
Where: Montessori School of RaleighThis event is free and open to the public. To register, please contact Stephanie at 919.848.1545 or sh@msr.org. Due to the nature of the discussion, we are not able to accommodate children at the seminar. Childcare will be available only for currently enrolled Montessori School of Raleigh families.
About Dr. Amy Tiemann
Dr. Amy Tiemann is an award-winning author and educator who plays a central role in today’s parenting conversation. She has helped women embrace motherhood as an opportunity for reinvention with her book Mojo Mom: Nurturing Your Self While Raising a Family (Gotham Books, 2009). Her writing has catapulted her MojoMom.com movement into what is now one of the most popular online parenting resources. Tiemann has written her Mojo Mom blog since 2003 and has continued to find new ways to reach out to readers online. Visitors have logged more than 125,000 downloads of her Mojo Mom Podcasts alone. A sought-after speaker and commentator, Tiemann is a frequent guest expert on parenting websites, national radio tours, magazines from Redbook to Glamour, and TV including ABC News, the CBS Early Show, and NBC’s Today Show.Tiemann combines her multiple points of view as a scientist, educator, author, and parent when she addresses child safety issues. She is a certified Kidpower instructor and is the Center Director for Kidpower North Carolina. Kidpower helps kids be successful in learning and practicing personal safety, confidence, self-protection and advocacy skills. The skills taught by Kidpower helps participants prevent or stop most bullying, molestation, assault and abduction.
Please pass this invitation along, and I hope you’ll join our great group of Raleigh-based parents! If you are not in my local area you can still visit the Kidpower’s international headquarters website for a ton of great information and resources on child safety, including Irene van der Zande’s new e-book, Bullying: What Adults Need to Know and Do to Keep Kids Safe.
Schedule an interview: Dr. Amy Tiemann is a frequent guest expert on parenting websites, national radio tours, magazines from Redbook to Glamour, and TV including ABC News, the CBS Early Show, and NBC’s Today Show. To schedule an interview, please contact her publicist Jill Dykes, jill (at) jilldykespr.com or (919) 749-8488
Mojo Mom teaches parent workshop on child safety–rescheduled Jan 19, Raleigh
Weather Alert! The ice storm in Raleigh has caused our hosts to delay this seminar. The workshop will take place next week, Wednesday January 19th.
Learning Kidpower skills can help parents worry less and lead their kids more confidently.
All parents have questions about child safety–How do I know when my child is ready to go to a playdate alone? How about a sleepover or summer camp? What does my child need to know, and what as a parent do I need to check out when it comes to choosing a babysitter, school, or camps? How do I teach my child about safety with people we know as well as “stranger safety”? How can we maximize our kids’ opportunities to explore the world freely, while staying safe?
Many of us parents have a “knowledge gap” when it comes to these issues–it’s just not a part of our general parent education the way it needs to be. If you just watch media coverage that focuses on tragedies rather than everyday successes, it’s easy to feel overwhelmed. The good news is that it doesn’t have to be that way. I have been teaching parenting education seminars for about seven years now and have found that when you give parents information they can trust and act on, their anxiety goes down and confidence goes up. Since 2006 I have been teaching as an official Kidpower instructor. Kidpower’s workshops for children present the best teaching tools I have found for working directly with kids. You’ll hear more about how my work is evolving in this direction very soon, but for now I want to highlight a Parent Education seminar I am teaching in Raleigh next week, Wednesday January 12th. The talk is free and open to the public, thanks to the sponsorship of the Montessori School of Raleigh, so I hope my local readers can join us!
Here are the event details and RSVP information for next Wednesday’s seminar in Raleigh. Please be sure to note that this particular seminar is for Parent education, and other adults who work with kids. We talk about these issues on a different level when it’s just adults in the room, therefore we cannot accommodate children at this training.
Montessori School of Raleigh Presents
Safe Kids in an Uncertain World: A Kidpower Workshop for Parents and Teachers
Topics include:
· Preventing abuse, molestation, or abduction by strangers or acquaintances
· Teaching children HOW to talk to strangers
· Identifying two simple warning signs that a situation presents an increased risk for abuse
· Making Kidpower safety skills part of daily life, increasing a child’s confidence while reducing anxiety
When: Wednesday, January 19th
7:00pm – 9:00pm
Where: Montessori School of RaleighThis event is free and open to the public. To register, please contact Stephanie at 919.848.1545 or sh@msr.org. Due to the nature of the discussion, we are not able to accommodate children at the seminar. Childcare will be available only for currently enrolled Montessori School of Raleigh families.
About Dr. Amy Tiemann
Dr. Amy Tiemann is an award-winning author and educator who plays a central role in today’s parenting conversation. She has helped women embrace motherhood as an opportunity for reinvention with her book Mojo Mom: Nurturing Your Self While Raising a Family (Gotham Books, 2009). Her writing has catapulted her MojoMom.com movement into what is now one of the most popular online parenting resources. Tiemann has written her Mojo Mom blog since 2003 and has continued to find new ways to reach out to readers online. Visitors have logged more than 125,000 downloads of her Mojo Mom Podcasts alone. A sought-after speaker and commentator, Tiemann is a frequent guest expert on parenting websites, national radio tours, magazines from Redbook to Glamour, and TV including ABC News, the CBS Early Show, and NBC’s Today Show.Tiemann combines her multiple points of view as a scientist, educator, author, and parent when she addresses child safety issues. She is a certified Kidpower instructor and is the Center Director for Kidpower North Carolina. Kidpower helps kids be successful in learning and practicing personal safety, confidence, self-protection and advocacy skills. The skills taught by Kidpower helps participants prevent or stop most bullying, molestation, assault and abduction.
Please pass this invitation along, and I hope you’ll join our great group of Raleigh-based parents! If you are not in my local area you can still visit the Kidpower’s international headquarters website for a ton of great information and resources on child safety, including Kidpower founder Irene van der Zande’s new e-book, Bullying: What Adults Need to Know and Do to Keep Kids Safe.
Mojo Mom inspiration of the Day–Irene van der Zande
Yesterday’s blog post featuring the poem “One Woman Awake” was inspired by my friend Irene van der Zande, who for more than twenty years has taught people around the world how to keep themselves safe through the Kidpower personal safety programs that she has developed as co-founder and Executive Director of Kidpower Teenpower Fullpower International.
Irene founded Kidpower when she was a young mother of two school-age children. Now, two decades later, Irene is mother of two grown children and a grandmother who is proud of both her family and the fact that Kidpower has taught over 1.2 million people how to protect themselves from many forms of violence, bullying and abuse.
Irene is a wonderful collaborator and mentor, and she does love to get up early to work. Yesterday I scrambled on the East Coast to get ready for a morning call that was three hours earlier in California, where Irene was ready and raring to go. So “One Woman Awake” makes me think of Irene on that literal level as well as appreciating the amazing work she has done by spreading Kidpower strategies far and wide in the world.
I recommend that you check out the Kidpower website for a wide variety of safety education resources, many of which are available for free.
And here is an encore posting of the poem that made me think of Irene:
One Woman Awake
Awakens another,
The second awakes the next door neighbor
And three awake can rouse the town,
And turn the whole place upside down.
And many awake
Can raise such a fuss
That it finally awakens the rest of us.
One woman up
With dawn in her eyes
Multiplies.
–Author unknown
Change the way you look at strangers with Kidpower “Stranger Safety” strategies
It is time that we turn our old notions about “Stranger Danger” upside down. My second post is up on the TODAYMoms blog and I was honored to be able to share Kidpower strategies about Stranger Safety.
Read my complete TODAY Moms post, Beyond ‘stranger danger’: Real safety rules for kids
I am thrilled to be able to spread the word about Kidpower through our new book Courageous Parents, Confident Kids, featuring a chapter by Kidpower Executive Director Irene van der Zande. Kidpower personal safety training is revolutionary because it gives parents and kids new tools that will help all of us explore the world with enhanced safety and confidence. I don’t blame parents for getting stuck on “Stranger Danger”–it’s what many of us were taught as kids, even though it’s not an accurate or helpful concept. But thanks to Kidpower’s work over the past twenty years developing an excellent safety curriculum, now we have much better resources available to us. Irene has a wonderfully ambitious goal of sharing this information with everybody in the world and I am doing my part to help!
You can learn a lot more about Kidpower training and access many useful resources at the international organization’s website at www.Kidpower.org
As Irene and I were working on our TODAYMoms blog post, at the same time the latest news about the Catholic Church’s abuse scandal was unfolding at a rapid rate. It seems like the time has finally arrived to talk about abuse committed by people we know within organizations we trust. Irene and I are working on an outreach to address this very difficult but extremely important issue, and we are starting with the basic strategies and articles posted blow. The revelations of abuse and the mishandling or cover-up of abuse reports are very disturbing, but it’s important not to single out any one organization in a way that could lead us to ignore the issue in the many organizations we are part of. Organizations may be in denial about abuse for a number of reasons, even well-meaning groups who might just think “we are a close community–this could never happen here.” We as organization members and leaders have to be willing to be aware of potential abuse and speak up when necessary, no matter how uncomfortable that may be. The truth is this is an issue that every parent needs to become educated about and learn how to teach personal safety skills to every child.
This can be an intense and lengthy conversation, but to get us started, Irene shares the following strategies and Kidpower resources:
To keep young people safe from harm by making it hard for anyone in a position of trust and power to abuse this authority, everyone needs to know–
1) What is safe behavior and what is not.
This needs to be clearly defined. See article on Touch in Healthy Relationships
2) That sometimes important people have problems that cause them to do things that are unsafe. See article on Sometimes the People Kids Love Have Problems
3) That unsafe behavior, especially by an adult in charge, should NEVER have to be a secret. See article on What Kinds of Secrets are Okay to Keep and What Are Not
4) That it is NEVER the child’s fault if an adult does something unsafe.
5) How to speak up and stop unsafe behavior.
6) How to be persistent in getting the help you need.
***
These articles provide an important start, and as a trained Kidpower instructor myself, I highly recommend taking a Kidpower workshop if you can. Kidpower training is positive, success-based (not fear-based), interactive, and effective. Irene says of the workshops, “Kidpower has found in our research that people under stress tend to do what they’ve practiced rather than what they’ve been told. This is why we have children practice making wise choices in a wide variety of situations—from de-escalating confrontations with bullies, to being aware enough to leave a situation before trouble ever starts, to getting away and running for help if necessary.” Personally, I will add that a great thing about Kidpower skills is that find myself and my family using the training all the time in everyday life, especially being aware of our surroundings and what is going on. I also appreciate boundary setting skills, which often comes up with people we know in everyday life. Even as parents it is good role-modeling to show our kids that we can set boundaries with them, as we teach them to set boundaries with other people.
The Kidpower website can help you find a Kidpower center near you. And don’t forget to sign up now on MojoMom.com to receive the free digital download of our new book, Courageous Parents, Confident Kids when it is released on April 19th.
Can you help us spread the word about Kidpower? Use the “ShareThis” button below to email this article, or share a link on Twitter, Facebook, or other social networking sites.
Mojo Mom Podcast and Kidpower — Skills for Safety and Independence
I am having a great time talking with my Courageous Parenting contributors on The Mojo Mom Podcast. We’ll be mixing things up in this series, not doing all of the Courageous Parenting interviews back-to-back, but I hope to have everyone on before the book comes out. We are just putting the final manuscript to bed, so this is a big week, hooray!
I always love talking with my colleague and mentor, Irene van der Zande about the personal safety skills she teachers as the co-founder of Kidpower. Her training is amazing–I am doing my best to tell everyone about Kidpower, and I teach classes in the Triangle area as the Center Director of Kidpower North Carolina. I taught four Kidpower classes myself this week, which was a wonderful opportunity to get into action with kids in my community, after doing six intensive days of instructor training in Santa Cruz, California earlier this month.
So I encourage you to listen to the podcast, check out the international organization’s web site, and consider getting real-life Kidpower training.
Listen to the podcast now:
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Here is the description of this week’s show, Courageous Parenting Series: Mojo Mom and Kidpower
How can parents teach their kids to be independent and safe? Kidpower personal safety skills are designed to do just that, for people of all ages. Listen in and learn how to “co-pilot” your kids (without becoming a “helicopter parent”) as they take their first steps out of the nest.
You can register to get a free electronic download of Courageous Parenting when it is released in Spring 2010 by signing up on MojoMom.com.
Kidpower founder on How to Respond to Verbal Put-Downs
Kidpower founder Irene van der Zande shared ideas of how kids can respond safely to verbal put-downs, standing up for themselves while de-escalating the situation. Another great segment on The View from the Bay.
Irene is a chapter contributor for my forthcoming anthology, Courageous Parenting. You can sign up on MojoMom.com to receive a free electronic download of the new book when it comes out.
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