A Child’s Song provides consultation, education and therapy to families joined together through foster care, adoption and all forms of permanency. We believe that parents have the potential to provide the most effective support for their child most of the time. Given the right information, skills and strategies parents can provide the healing experiences their child requires to form strong family connections and to develop optimally.
A Child’s Song also offers individual counselling for adults, adolescents and children who are experiencing symptoms of trauma, anxiety or adjustment difficulties.
A Child’s Song was developed to meet the needs of fostering, adoptive and permanent families who are struggling with unique parenting challenges. Without a clear understanding of how trauma and caregiver losses impact a child, parents will implement strategies that, although well intentioned, may actually do more harm than good to the child and to the relationship. A Child’s Song is committed to supporting families to become the expert on their child and develop the tools to become therapeutic parents.
Our Name & Our Story………
‘Hearing, understanding and joining in to sing a child’s song is the ultimate form of connection between parent and child.’ ~Andrea Chatwin
A Child’s Song took its name from an ancient African Proverb. There is a tribe in Africa where the birth date of a child is counted not from when they are born, nor from when they are conceived but from the day that the child is a thought in its mother’s mind. And when a woman decides that she will have a child, she goes off and sits under a tree, by herself, and listens until she can hear the song of the child who wants to come. After she’s heard the song of this child, she comes back to the man who will be the child’s father and teaches it to him.
When the mother is pregnant, the mother teaches that child’s song to the midwives and the old women of the village, so that when the child is born, the old women and the people around her sing the child’s song to welcome it. As the child grows up, the other villagers are taught the child’s song. If the child falls, or hurts its knee, someone picks it up and sings the song. Or perhaps the child does something wonderful, or goes through the rites of puberty. As a way of honouring this person, the people of the village sing his or her song. It goes this way through their life. In marriage, the songs are sung, together. And finally, when this child is lying in bed, ready to die, all the villagers know his or her song, and they sing for the last time –the song to that person.