The use of a metaphorical approach in a time limited group for children whose parents are separating/divorcing is explored. Drawing, “naming the group”, and structured exercises are used metaphorically to help the children tell their own “story”, not their parents version. The metaphorical processing of the media is what counts not the media itself. Every way of using media tells a story and moves children from story telling to story experiencing. When children are able to share feelings, they have taken a step forward.

Catholic Family Welfare Bureau Melbourne have for many years provided remedial family services, a core service being marriage and family counselling. Our range of service has expanded to also include educative programs.

One frequent request is for education for parents about adolescence and its' meaning in family life. Additionally, our Dandenong branch needed to respond to the many urgent requests they were receiving from parents for counselling, about “adolescence problems” encountered in their families.

As result a group of counsellors and social workers have produced a course in an endeavor to discover the most effective means to provide education for parents.

The idea of prevention in child welfare is not new. The prevention of substitute placement of children whether on a temporary or long-term basis has been a fundamental principle of child welfare we have held to for many years in Victoria.

However, it is only in the last decade that this principle is actually being carried out in practice by a number of voluntary agencies. For many children placement is still commonly used as a solution it is easier to place a child than to promote change within many multi-deficit families.

As adults, it is tempting to dismiss children's fears of such things as animals, the supernatural and physical events as vivid aspects of their imagination and to reassure ourselves that such fears are relatively minor or of limited concern. To this extent adults fail to realise children's fears reflect something of their understanding of the world and their place in it. To date, there has been very little research conducted in Australia on the nature and extent of children's fears. However, research conducted in the United States and Europe has identified a number of features of fears including sex differences and age trends.

It was the beleaguered Sydney Morning Herald that started my concern about child statistical abuse in Australia A small paragraph in “Column 8” pointed out that a program on the similarly beleaguered ABC had claimed that 38 percent of Australians die of heart disease each year. Then “Column 8” discovered something called the cholesterol check card, issued by the Better Health Screening Service, which claimed that 50 percent of us die from cardiovascular disease each year. What, asked “Column 8”, will the Better Health Screening Service do after two years when there is no-one left in Australia’?