Today was my second week of training to be a family support worker but the 3rd week for everyone else as I had to have a week off.

This weeks training was on stereotypes and prejudice behaviours.  The aim of the training was to help the co-ordinators learn if any of the volunteers did have any prejudice beliefs towards any type people or lifestyle choices and for the volunteers to learn about acceptable and unacceptable behaviours in the house.   We learnt in which scenarios it would be appropriate to take a parent aside and discuss our concerns and when it would not be appropriate to do so.  We engaged in several group activities aimed at increasing our understanding of acceptable behaviours in the family home and to help us understand our own limitations as volunteers caused by our own experiences and perspectives.

We engaged in about half a dozen activities overall but I will discuss just one of them today.

One of the activities required us to work in groups where we were given a stack of cards that had scenarios written on them.  We were instructed to place the card far away, out of the group circle if we thought it was an unacceptable opinion, or in the middle of the group circle if we thought it was acceptable.  Senarios included sayings such as; ‘It is not acceptable for a five year olf boy to play with girl toys because he may turn out to be gay and it is okay to hit your own child’.  These were the two that stood out most for me and I thought the first one was quite funny as when I was about seven years old all I ever wanted to do was dress as a boy and play with my baskateball hoop.  Between the two groups we discussed ‘The Gendre Issue’ but could not quite get our heads round why it had become such an issue. Our group agreed that it was prejudice to have such a belief and placed the card far out of the circle.  The senario about smacking your own child caused quite a stir in the discussion as I was adamant that you should never ever harm a child.  I used the example, ‘If your friend did not do something you wanted them too would you slap them in the face? Then why would you slap a defensless child who has less understanding than your adult friend?’  However, some of the women thought it was okay to smack your child in certian circumstances.  Infact to my suprise most of them did.

After this activity there seemed to be quite a comotion between the other psychology student and the co-orindators.  She did not come back after this and it had turned out she had left the course due do predjudice beliefs about child abuse.  In other countries it is still acceptable to physically abuse children and she was not in agreement of reporting any parents if she found out that they had physically harmed their children.  This was sad for me because I really got on with her and she was actually my favuorite person in the group as we both studied psychology so we had a common ground straight away.

Overall, I had a really good time and feel accepted into the group.  I feel I really fit in with the other volunteers and we have such a laugh together. I hope we all stay in contact after the training has finished.