What is the Care for Kids Program? The Care for Kids Program is a comprehensive community-based approach to child sexual abuse prevention that provides early childhood educators, parents and other professionals with information, materials and resources to communicate positive messages about healthy sexuality to young children.  The programs was created by The Leeds, Grenville and Lanark District Health Unit in Ontario, Canada and was evaluated and proven effective in 1995.  Family Resource Center offers the workshop to local schools, pre-schools, and child care centers at no cost to the schools or centers due to the generous support of the funding grants through Prevent Child Abuse Iowa, Community Partnerships for the Protection of Children, and others.  Why do we need a Care for Kids Program?  Unfortunately, sexual abuse affects our youngest children.  In fact, 24% of all reported cases in Iowa involve children under five years old.  Care for Kids teaches new, developmentally appropriate ways to protect this specific age group.  Perpetrators of sexual abuse count on us to suppress children's curiosity about their own gender and sexuality.  Care for Kids seeks to end this cultural silence and secrecy. How is the Care for Kids curriculum unique among sexual abuse prevention programs?  In fact, Care for Kids has been developed to include healthy and developmentally appropriate messages about sexuality and to avoid a single-issue focus on abuse. The messages are very carefully worded in order to: 1) be simple; 2) avoid the major concern about how the touch may have felt to the child and avoid placing responsibility for protection of young children onto themselves; and 3) provide repeated reinforcement along with other childhood precautionary messages. Created by professionals who know children's needs and abilities, this sexual health curriculum can easily fit within existing early childhood programs and will support the prevention of child sexual abuse.   What have the trainers of Care for Kids workshops been taught?  They have learned to: ·  Implement the seven-session curriculum with children ages three to seven in the early childhood educational setting.  The program uses the following seven themes to communicate positive messages about sexuality to children:  Bodies, Babies, Feelings, Girls and Boys, Touching, Bedtime Secrets and Surprises. ·  Conduct an information session for parents and community members to introduce and gain support for the curriculum.  The program helps parents and childcare providers to better understand the relationship between sexual health education and abuse prevention. ·  Provide parents with practical skills in educating their children about healthy sexuality, guiding them toward becoming "askable" adults. Each theme of the curriculum includes a parent "home activity" that fosters healthy, open communication between children and the adults in his or her life. The session with parents is in advance of the ones with the children in order to prepare the parents to be active, open listeners and establish a dialogue about the delicate subject of sexuality. This allows parents to anticipate questions, practice through role play, and decide how to discuss their morality with their child. The trainer recognizes that a child's values and morals must and will come from the parents.   Who hosts Care for Kids workshops? Childcare and educational professionals from all settings, large and small, participate in Care for Kids workshops. Once a licensed or registered childcare facility decides to incorporate the curriculum into its program, we organize a parents information meeting, which a Family Resource Center Care for Kids trainer facilitates. Care for Kids establishes and fosters partnerships between childcare professionals and parents as together, they protect children.