By Tyler Wright
Parents in the hills have the opportunity to receive advice at an upcoming seminar held by ECHO at St Luke’s Church in Cockatoo.
Supported by Anglicare Victoria, the federally funded Hills Community Strengthening Initiative and Child Safe Victoria, the seminar will teach parents about the Confident Parent Project which focuses on parents evaluating how they communicate feelings to their child rather than berating their child’s behaviour.
A video from Dr Jenny Brown, who shares tips and tricks on how to observe your partner’s parenting patterns and parenting cohesively, will be shared.
“it was really just for me a good insight into how I parent, my children, and what maybe I need to do to help that situation, so that I can come up with a better solution for my kids. And I’ve used a couple of them since. And I’ve been actually really surprised with how well it’s turned out,” facilitator Karen Geoffrey said.
The four-part seminar, starting Tuesday May 10, will also involve role playing with parents.
“If they have any ideas they want to talk through, ‘what about this situation?’ or ‘what about that one?’ then we can do it live, face-to-face… we’re still going to try and have group discussions, round circle tables,” Karen said.
The workshops’ location at the local church is accessible for parents and guardians all throughout the hills, Karen said.
“It makes it a central point for us so then that way, you can get families from different parts of the the hills being able to attend and hopefully make their way up there,” she said.
“It’s just to probably reflect on your own parenting skills and how we can better them…
“Getting [children] down at their eye level and really discussing [your] feelings and saying ‘I would really be grateful and so happy if you could do this for me’ – by making it to your child about ‘you need to do this’ and ‘you need to do that’ it’s putting a lot of emphasis on the child and what they have to do and then perhaps it’s too much weight on their shoulders,” she said.
The seminar will run for four weeks from 7:30pm to 9:30pm and you can contact Karen Geoffrey on karen.geoffrey@echo.org.au for more information.
St Luke’s Church is located at 1 McBride Street, Cockatoo.
