Free Playgroup in Bega
This is a place where children and families can play, connect and learn new skills. We offer inside and outside creative play stations, with different activities every week. We always love to hear your ideas and try to meet the group members’ interests.
Share our free morning tea and be part of a warm, welcoming, inclusive environment. Relax and meet other parents and carers, with free time for you while our qualified staff run fun activities that support your child’s development
- When: Every Tuesday 10am – 12 midday during school terms
- Where: Bega Uniting Church Hall, 125 Gipps Street, Bega
- Contact Valerie on 0438 037 459
- Visit our Facebook Page for updates
Tuning Into Kids
4 – 12 years
Tuning Into Teens 10 – 18 years
Emotionally Intelligent Parenting
What is Emotional Intelligence?
Emotional Intelligence is about using your emotions to guide you through the world. It is about being able to use your knowledge of emotions to make decisions, to calm yourself down, to manage anger and conflict, to help you in your relationships with people, to understand what is happening in social situations, and to assist you in any aspects of life that involves you and another person.
Why is Emotional Intelligence Important?
Children with higher emotional intelligence:
- Have greater success with making friendships and be more able to manage conflict with peers
- Have better concentration, which means they are more likely to be successful academically
- Be more able to self soothe when upset or angry
- Tend to have fewer childhood illnesses
- Have more stable and satisfying relationships as adults
- Have greater career success… research suggests emotional intelligence may be a better predictor of academic and career success than IQ!
Adolescents with higher emotional intelligence:
- Are more aware, assertive and strong in situations of peer pressure
- Have greater success with making friends and are more able to manage conflict with peers
- Are more able to cope when upset or angry
- Have fewer mental health and substance abuse difficulties
- Have more stable and satisfying relationships as adults
- Have greater career success… research suggests emotional intelligence may be a better predictor of academic and career success than IQ!
Tuning Into Kids Program
This is a free six week group program for parents and carers of children aged 4–12 years.
It can help you to teach your child the skills of emotional intelligence as well as helping YOU to:
- Be better at talking with your child
- Understand your child better
- Help your child learn to manage their emotions
- Help prevent or manage behavioural problems
- Teach your child to handle difficult situations
When parents focus on helping their child learn about emotions, the child is more likely to have higher emotional intelligence. In this parenting program we will teach parents what to do to help develop these skills.
Tuning Into Teens Program
This is a free six week group parenting program for parents and carers of adolescents aged 10 –18 years. It can help you to teach your adolescent the skills of emotional intelligence as well as helping YOU to:
- Be better at talking with your teen
- Understand your teen better
- Help your teen learn to manage their emotions
- Help prevent behaviour problems in your teen
- Teach your teen to deal with conflict
- When parents focus on helping their adolescent learn about emotions, the adolescent is more likely to have higher emotional intelligence.
In this parenting program we will teach parents what to do to help develop these skills.
Bringing Up Great Kids
Free Parenting Workshop
Through a Child’s Eyes – The more we understand our children the more we can help and support them. One of the ways we can do this is to think about our memories of our childhood and imagine the world from a child’s point of view. Remember what it was like to be a child …….
We all do and say things at times that are not consistent with the parent we want to be.
We offer some helpful strategies in responding to your child’s needs.
Being a parent is the most important job you can do. It also lasts a lifetime.
Some of the things we focus on include:
– Parenting under pressure!
Discussing some parenting myths like:
– “I should know all the answers.”
– “Raising my children is my job.”
– “Parenting comes naturally.”
The Bringing Up Great Kids Parenting Program can be offered in individual or group formats. We focus on different aspects of the parent – child relationship through discussions and fun activities.
We offer stimulating material and a range of strategies to equip parents in their vital roles.
Parents are invited to create their own parenting story through the ‘My Story as a Parent’ Journal. Please contact Sapphire Neighbourhood Services on 02 6492 3411, if you would like to get involved, or you have any further questions
Circle Of Security (CoS)
The Circle of Security is a free, relationship-based early intervention program designed to enhance attachment security between parents/caregivers and children. It can be offered in a group format or one-on-one.
Builds Skills & Relationships
Learn new ways to develop your child’s self esteem and build healthy relationships within and outside of the family.
Qualified Professionals
All staff who deliver this program are Registered Circle of Security Facilitators.
Privacy & Confidentiality
We will uphold your confidentiality and ask all of our participants to show the same respect to other group members. We can run personalised sessions if you need more privacy.
Caring Dads
Caring Dads is a group program for men who are committed to the safety and wellbeing of their children.
Facts about fathering
- Fathers can and want to be a positive influence in the lives of their children
- Positively-involved fathers enhance their children’s academic, personal and social development
However, in some cases fathers can have a negative impact on their children.
This can occurs if fathers:
- Do not understand the feelings and needs of their children
- Harshly discipline their children
- Argue frequently with their children’s mothers
- Use abusive or controlling behaviour
What is Caring Dads?
Through 17 sessions fathers will:
- Develop skills to cope in healthy ways with frustrating situations
- Understand how different fathering strategies and choices affect children
- Increase their awareness of controlling abusive and neglectful attitudes and behaviours
- Be provided with strategies to strengthen the father-child relationship
The Caring Dads group program runs one evening a week for 17 weeks.
This group offers:
- A unique opportunity for men to connect as fathers
- A combination of active group discussions exercises and homework.
Counselling
Our counselling service offers a range of support for your mental health and well-being, depending on your wants and needs. As your counsellor, I am committed to listening respectfully and providing a safe and supportive space no matter your gender, culture, ethnicity, religion, or sexual orientation. Together we can focus on current issues or work through past occurrences that may still be influencing you today. This may include trauma work, whether it be a recent traumatic event, ongoing, relational, or intergenerational. We focus on ways you have coped, your strengths and resources, and how you have remained resilient in times of difficulties. With collaboration, we will gain more understanding of your own life and through this, build compassion and resilience for yourself.
I offer the following modalities at SNS:
Sensorimotor Psychotherapy (SP). This modality focuses on the body as a resource for releasing and working through trauma. Survivors of trauma often find themselves struggling with the effects of overwhelming emotions, not realising how the body contributes to creating and sustaining these emotions. Our bodies hold in the here-and-now whatever wasn’t resolved, unwitnessed or unrealised when trauma occurred. Working with the body to explore sensory experience, SP teaches self-awareness, which leads to the valuable skills of self-regulation. Mindfulness is a key part of this, used to explore how our beliefs, memories and impulses show up in this present moment.
Internal Family Systems Therapy (IFS). This approach is based on the belief that as we develop, parts of us often take on roles that may be seen as negative or bad. This method assists with understanding how these negative patterns first developed, moving us towards healing and releasing old patterns and wounds that may hinder our well-being.
Solution Focused Brief Therapy (SFBT). This approach helps people change by constructing solutions rather than focusing on problems. We often get clouded by the problems in our lives and can’t see any way into the future. SFBT looks at what the person is already doing that can contribute to resolution and looks at what life without the problem would look like, developing hopefulness and direction. It also helps people realise the strengths, capabilities, traits, and values they are already relying on, often without recognising this.
I also love combining Sandtray Therapy with all of these modalities, to offer ways to communicate in a more non-verbal way while fostering the potential for a sense of play.
Support Starts Here
Office Hours: Monday to Friday, 9:00am to 4.00pm
Or call —02 6492 3411
