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.

“My mother once came and told me that she didn't know if Mick and I had sex but that if we had a loving sort of relationship then good — but she thought I was still a bit young for it”, a 16-year-old Canberra girl — let's call her Jane — said.

She lit a cigarette. A budding woman-of-the-world who seemed to know a bit about life and its facts.

But after admitting she had been having sexual intercourse with her boyfriend of almost a year, she said she was not on the pill, nor used any contraceptive.

The Parents' Help Centre is a child abuse prevention unit which began operation in Perth on 9.1.1976. The Centre is administered by the Western Australian Department for Community Welfare and is jointly funded by the Office of Child Care and Department for Community Welfare.

The Centre aims at preventing the physical abuse of pre-school children by offering a non-professional family-type support service in a warm accepting atmosphere to parents who are having difficulty in controlling their behaviour towards their (pre-school) children. The Centre is available to parents 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

Every year, but particularly in this International Year of the Child, many words have been spoken about children — their needs, their health and their happiness; and of the responsibility all must assume of seeing to it that young lives are nurtured.

The purpose of this paper is to examine an issue which pertains to the very survival of the child — safety legislation.

This year in Australia about a million children will be hurt and some thousands will die as a result of accident. What can be done to stop this epidemic? Does the law have a role to play?

Behaviour change can and should be designed for children in a residential care setting/s. The achievement of these behavioural goals will be contingent on the skills of the cottage parents.

The purpose of this paper is to describe a planned ‘change’ programme for a behaviour problem child in a residential cottage home.

It should be noted that this is an outline of treatment for the specific behaviour problems displayed by a young child and in no way discounts the importance of fulfilling the physical and emotional needs of the child.

We will be looking at the specific skills required in modifying behaviour, how they are applied to both extinction of inappropriate behaviour and teaching of new and appropriate behaviour.

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)

In this the International Year of the Child the law relating to children's rights has come very much under scrutiny. I do not propose in this article to canvass the rights of the child under the Criminal Law but to examine the rights of the child in that area of the civil law which in these days of increasing marital breakdown, (at a rate from between 1 in 7 to 1 in 5 of every marriage in Australia) is most likely to affect him, namely under the Family Law Act.

I then want to postulate as to how those rights can be extended and improved both by statutory recognition as well as policy administration.

The increasing incidence of marriage breakdown in this country has resulted in greater numbers of children being involved in the social arrangement of access. Yet confusion and ambivalence are the usual responses to contact between the child and separated parent. Courts and the general community seem to hold the view that access is beneficial to children but such benefits are not clearly enunciated or understood.

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 First Principle of the United Nations Declaration of the Rights of the Child (1959) states that “The child shall enjoy all the rights set forth in this Declaration. All children, without any exception whatsoever, shall be entitled to these rights, without distinction or discrimination on account of … birth or other status, whether of himself or of his family”. Such a general expression of the desirability of equal rights for all children can be of little practical significance in the absence of positive laws to give substance to its spirit. The Declaration itself recognizes this in its Preamble, which calls upon “… national Governments to recognize these rights and strive for their observance by legislation and other measures”.

On March 20th of this year, it will be exactly five years since the Victorian Minister for Health released the Report of the Consultative Council on Pre-School Child Development, a document which was then adopted “in principle” as government policy for the State.

This report yielded, amongst many detailed recommendations, the concept of an Early Childhood Development Complex (ECDC) which has since been implemented in practice in a number of different places throughout Victoria.

As the research officer to the Consultative Council, I attended, from my appointment, all its deliberations and discussions, meetings, weekend workshops (some residential) and had the unique opportunity of witnessing the meshing of these experienced minds.

We are all concerned for the potentially damaging effects of long term residential care. I propose, in my first paper, to look at this change and its implications for residential work and residential workers, and in the second paper to concentrate more on those for whom I feel long term residential treatment is essential if they are not to become increasingly anti-social and eventually institutionally dependent.

In its Second Main Report, Law and Poverty in Australia, the Commission of Inquiry into Poverty expressed the view that “legal representation for children appearing before the children's court, whether in the criminal or protective jurisdiction, is necessary if justice is to be done.”

This view coincides with the opinion of the Supreme Court of the United States of America in In re Gault. It has been said that this decision “unleashed a frontal assault on the juvenile court system.” It confirmed that juveniles were entitled to “due process” and the same protection which the Fourteenth Amendment and the Bill of Rights afforded to adults.

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.