SAFE: Sexual Awareness and Family Empowerment
This seminar will challenge parents to think about the facts they must teach their children about such important issues. Even more importantly, we dive into the “why”—the narrative-- that provides the substance for these facts and how they fit inside your family’s unique story and belief-system. It requires some intentional thought and action, but it is necessary to help our children alongside this journey of being a holistically healthy human being.
We will discuss how we become the primary transmitters of information about sex and safety to our children. We will discuss the many facets of child safety including education about sexual development and sex education, teaching body awareness and empowerment to our children, and eliciting a strong supportive adult network to help us with this heavy responsibility of keeping our children safe. Please contact me for more information.
SAFE: Sexual Awareness & Family Empowerment
- Module 1: Introductions: Setting Ground Rules and goals for time together, take pre-test.
- Module 2: Sexual Development/Sexual Education: Reviewing stages of sexual development and talking about sex during each stage of development using your family’s unique worldview and narrative. Suggestions are also given as to how to respond to questions from a curious child and how to initiate conversations about sex with a more reluctant child.
- Module 3: Normative sex play vs inappropriate peer to peer sexual contact/boundaries: Teaching appropriate boundaries and body empowerment to children, gender roles and how they play into development.
- Module 4: Intuition and Children: How to use it as a preventative measure as well as using and trusting your own intuition about your children’s safety.
- Module 5: The Circle of Safety: Building a community of other trusted adults to help protect your children.
- Module 6: Common Safety Myths: (example: stranger danger, myths of sexual abuse).
- Module 7: General Safety Information: (example: questions to ask before a child visits a friend’s home, sleepovers, and what knowledge your child should have before allowing them to walk to school or ride their bike in the neighborhood).
- Module 8: Creating a Family Manifesto: The “what now” in the form of a family action plan.
- Module 9: Closing: Take post-test and complete evaluations, Final Questions and Wrap-up.
SAFE Seminar Reviews
SAFE Seminar teaches parents how to talk to their kids about sex
Interview and story on the Columbia, MO news:
"Gardner is a social worker and mother of two. She has led Sexual Awareness and Family Empowerment, or SAFE, seminars throughout the country for about a year. She has worked in sexual abuse prevention for almost a decade.
The seminar's goal was to show parents how they can be their kids' main resource for information about sex, bodily development and safety. Gardner and the parents and caregivers who attended the seminar discussed teaching children about sexual development, body awareness and the importance of telling kids to trust their intuition to prevent unsafe situations and sexual abuse.
"That was one factor I did not see in any other programs, was how to help kids recognize what's already in them, which is their inner guide--their intuition--to keep them safe," she said."