As we turn our thoughts to Spring, we are thrilled to be launching ‘Doing Distance’ – a psychological toolkit for armed forces children, to help them navigate the challenges that come with ‘service’ life, particularly around separation and mobility.
Whether you are a military child’s parent, or a supporting adult from their school or local community, our new kit is for you. This toolkit has been compiled for our military families with the help from the team at ‘Bear Us In Mind’, a group with over 30 years’ experience working directly with families around separation and loss.
Here at the Naval Children’s Charity, we have adapted these resources to help our military children and their supporting adults to navigate the highs and lows of service life. It is our aim that these tools will help with the processing of the challenges experienced by children and young people and to help them hold on to special memories. All these resources will be available to download for free via our website early in March.
Before we put February to bed for the year though, it’s fair to say that it was an incredibly busy month for us, with the conclusion of two very special projects we had been working on since the summer.
The first ‘Life Chances’ programme in question was in partnership with Parallel Histories, teaching our young people the life skill of debating. After a series of online workshops, a group were invited to London to debate the Pros and Cons of being a military child.
Joshua Hillis, Deputy Editor of Parallel Histories commented:
‘They were brilliant. They were articulate and debating in a way that really, we’d hope adults would debate, they were engaging respectfully with each other but robustly, and relating their own experiences in an emotionally mature way. The confidence and speaking skills they brought to it was amazing and the ability to engage with questions coming from Ministers and senior figures and doing that in front of a camera with the lights on them. That was impressive.’
Many thanks to the team at Parallel Histories for all the fantastic work they put into giving our young people a wonderful experience and some fantastic life skills to take forward.
The other initiative was with our friends at ‘Never Such Innocence’. Together, we invited Naval children to take part in a series of virtual song writing workshops. The purpose was to write a song by Naval children, for Naval children. It soon became apparent during these workshops that a second song was forming, one specifically for the Submariner families.
After hours of writing, both songs were ready to be recorded, so we invited the young people to join us in London to record the songs at Hackney Studios, allowing a little extra time to see some of the sights along the way!The recordings were a fantastic success, and we are over the moon with the finished products that our young people created from scratch.
They are called ‘Navy Song’ and the ‘Submariners Sea Shanty’ and we hope that you enjoy listening to them as much as we enjoyed watching them being created!
The fun and adventure we offered our young people in February didn’t stop there, we also sent another group of intrepid adventurers on a Tall Ships Youth Trust voyage. As ever, our young people had an absolute blast with thanks to the fantastic Tall Ships crew. You can hear about their adventure here.
Remember, if you’d like to broaden the horizons of the young people in your life, there is a whole host of various opportunities available, you will find more details on the Life Chances page on our website.
