We all know — or think we know — that boys behave differently from girls, even if our analysis progresses no further than some tautologous recognition that boys are more ‘boyish’. We are also inclined to think that the ‘problem’ child will grow out of his difficulties, but that so far as socially disruptive behaviour is concerned, boys, on the whole, are rather more seriously problematic than girls. Generalized notions of this sort contain elements of both truth and fiction which cannot properly be appreciated unless sex differences in behaviour shown by young children are analysed and placed in perspective. I hope here to consider how the disordered behaviour of boys generally differs from that of girls and to draw attention to some of the implications of this for their adulthood and for the social worker.

Under the Constitution of the Commonwealth of Australia, adoption is not a matter on which the Commonwealth has power to legislate. Accordingly, each State and Territory has its own legislation which is administered by its social welfare department.

The States have co-operated to draft “uniform” legislation, and during the period 1964-1970, new legislation was enacted in all States and Territories. A major aim of the uniform Acts was to curtail the practice of private, or independent, adoptions, where the child was placed in the care of a person with a view to his adoption, without any prior approval of the placement by a government department or an approved private adoption agency.

The Parent Education and Assistance Project (PEAP) is a pilot programme aiming to develop and evaluate a range of services for single parent families with pre-school children within Fremantle, Western Australia.

The Project is funded by the Office of Child Care, Department of Social Security under their “Alternatives to Residential Care for Children” programme, and is sponsored by the Western Australian Department for Community Welfare. The overriding goal of the Project is to support and strengthen vulnerable parent-child relationships with the aim of preventing the necessity for substitute care of the children.

The purpose of this paper is to provide one set of perspectives through which parents may wish to examine the ways in which they can assist their child's education. The remarks may apply equally to natural and foster parents, although special consideration will be given to the latter group where necessary. The paper focuses particularly on academic and social survival skills for children at school and the ways parents can extend and support this skill development at home.

Apart from the questionable connotation of disaster associated with survival at school, several writers (Adelman and Feshback, 1971; Greenwood et al., 1974; Hops et al., 1975) have attempted to define those behaviours which children need to display in order to succeed in the school environment. Though expectations may vary depending on age, class level, educational philosophy and so on, and though such a list may seem unnecessarily prescriptive, the skills mentioned below are generally required of children at school.

Children in Australia are spending more time with the mass media than with any other single activity, sleeping excepted. The average child spends three hours a day sitting in front of television and another couple of hours with films, radio and the press.

The considerable influence of television has been well documented. A summary statement in Children and Television, Senate Standing Committee on Education and the Arts, 1978, says:

“Clearly television has emerged as the dominant experience in the life of the average Australian child …”(4.33)

Thirteen Australian parents of stuttering children participated in a parent education program based on Thomas Gordon's Parent Effectiveness Training program. Tape recordings of parent-child conversations were made before and after the parent participated in the parent education program. The conversations were analyzed in terms of the amount of verbalization of the stuttering child with each parent and the level of fluency of a stuttering child with each parent. An analysis of the results showed the stuttering children to significantly (p <.0473) increase the number of words used when talking with their mother and significantly (p <.0218) decrease their percentage of stuttering when speaking with their father.

Generation 2000 is a package of resource materials to help people throughout Australia to gather together in groups to explore and discuss the wisdom that children have to offer adults. Generation 2000 is whatever happens in those groups as people meet, explore, discover, discuss and decide. Generation 2000 is about getting ready for the future with the liveliness, spontaneity, honesty and directness that children continually offer adults for their learning. It is an opportunity for adults to explore the world of children and to evaluate their values and attitudes.

The program is based on a series of four sessions which enable participants to work through and recall their own childhood and an examination of our current lifestyles and patterns of living and assessing how these affect the people close to us. It uses the strategy that as we re-enter the world of children, we re-experience the richness and value for life that children have to offer.

The world of the Aphasic child is a strange and confusing one. Imagine yourself wearing earphones, dropped into China, allowed to listen to one or two words per sentence, being told from that to understand the culture and language, learn to speak the language, and educate yourself. This is a milder form of the problem faced by the aphasic child, for unlike the child, the traveller in China already knows the use of language, has a well established internal language albeit in English, and a good background in how cultures operate.