Prompts for Writers
Tell us your story.
If you’d like to submit a piece of writing or talk about an idea for a story, you can email our Assistant Editor, Sara Albert, at SafeKidsStories@gmail.com.
We welcome your submissions and story ideas for our site! The following blog entry takes a look at some of the types of stories we like to feature on SafeKidsStories, and can hopefully provide you with some inspiration. But as you can see from browsing the stories on our site, these categories are by no means the only prompts for story writers!
What do you mean by safe?
Poverty, race, immigration status, region — all these affect the likelihood that children will experience danger at an early age; but childhood itself is vulnerable. Describing safety and bringing young people’s voices into the conversation is not just about traumatized or urban kids. It’s about celebrating children’s wholeness, protecting childhood, mourning its violation, looking for individual and structural ways to do better, from sharing books that make children safer to anti-bullying programs, to individual stories and experiences that bring us into each others’ minds and hearts.
So much is being written about danger — violence, drug addiction, predatory adults, including cops. These are serious problems, but what we want to explore is where real, positive energy is being put into making kids safe. We are not being Pollyannas, but we know there are stories to tell, whether by teachers, parents, writers, or kids themselves, that do not make it into the media: stories that bear witness to the resiliency of individuals and society, stories that move toward an equilibrium of the heart.
Teachers, parents, mentors know that children are safer when the adults around them add vulnerability, respect, and care to the many virtues we must model. It’s why a Philadelphia School District psychologist, after a year of trauma training, said that she had unwittingly done violence to children by simply talking to children or punishing them. Now she uses sensory cues to help them learn to calm themselves, and to approach their underlying needs with curiosity rather than shame.
SafeKidsStories.com does not merely aspire to curate a creative anthology, but to do work in the world. We are crowd-sourcing stories and multimedia content for a wide audience: kids, parents, administrators, politicians, and for teachers, even professional development programs. We’ll organize stories according to monthly series that we’ll update here each year — including the September-October 2018 feature to accompany our event and social-media campaign #VoteThatJawn. We’d love to have you write about your own first vote, or invite your class to interview family members, or talk about what you fear or expect or didn’t expect in your entrance into the franchise.
Or, just surf the list below of areas of youth safety that matter most to us. Please think of them as prompts, and then tell us: What do you mean by Safe?
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Anti-Bullying: So many ideas and thoughts and handbooks…We’re collecting stories about how kids and adults stop bullying: in their schools and classrooms, in their neighborhoods, in their own behavior. Sometimes, especially with kids, we’ll also let them get off their chests how and why.
Body of Knowledge: Reminds our over-thinking selves to get back inside our own skins. Includes the brain science of trauma, safe touch, and the importance of the senses in children’s learning and comfort. One sub-heading is: Gut Feelings of Safety, because better food improves our guts in all kinds of ways. Just ask kids in an alternative, aka “bam-bam,” school, where the principal traded in her food service contracts to hire one woman who cooks real food, good food, everyday, fresh. A boy who’s had trouble adjusting said that the lunches gave him something to look forward to. When he asked whether she could ever cook a certain dish — and she did, he felt cared for in school as he never had before. Did his grades improve? You bet.
Change Agents: Take the walking school bus, done in several cities, to allow kids safe passage through neighborhoods in conflict. Take the Albanian counselor who translated while the third grade teacher taught Albanian-speaking parents their kids’ math homework each week, so that they could do the new math before they’d acquired their new language. Take Youth Courts, Donors Choose, Grandparent support groups, mentor programs, the Stoneleigh Foundation, making fellowship awards that support accomplished individuals working to improve systems that deal with children through research, policy change, or practice improvement. Micro and macro innovations create change that envelops kids in care and protection.
Choosing a Book: New ideas in reading let us enter a safe space where we can grow creative in that unknowing moment. And book reviews, too, from one teacher’s revelations reading Freire to kids at Tree House Books who’ve just begun reading.
Fiction: Stories for Children, and some by children. It’s a fresh, new library in your pocket. The mobile app will give children something new to read on the bus or outside on the picnic blanket. Everybody loves kids’ books. And the illustrations come from professionals, art students, and regular kids!
Funny thing about kids’ safety: A catch-all for humor. Lists, blogs, limericks, funny media reviews, cartoons — we all need a laugh. Could help us keep from swatting the kid and kicking the dog. See, don’t you feel safer already?
Kids Making America Safe for Democracy: Our inspiration for this is the excellent investigative work and reflection in pieces on NPR Youth Radio. We’ll start with adult journalists listening and pointing out the ways that young people can refresh the field. Then, we’ll work with Philadelphia partners to allow more youth reporters creating community and share their stories.
Letter to My Father: A collaboration with writer and curriculum creator Tina Smith-Brown. “You write the letter to the father,” she says “but you write it for you, to create safe space in your head.” This series begins at Crenshaw High in L.A. with Comedian Torrie Hart of Atlanta Exes, singer and actor Kyla Pratt, voice of Penny in Disney Channel’s The Proud Family, comedian Simone Shepherd, singer Apryl Jones of Love and Hip Hop Hollywood, and celebrity concierge Morgan Hardman and 50 high schools girls sharing letters.
Personal Blogs: Safe and unsafe, from animal relationships, to cherished loved ones, to remembered safe spaces, to songs, rituals, and prayers. Many of our series subjects revolve around personal stories. But not all powerful memoir fits neatly into one box. Like kids themselves.
SafeKids and Mo’ Money: We hear, over and over, about cuts to systems. Where has funding been increased? And with what results? The Superintendent of Lower Merion does a special summer session with all his principals. Philadelphians always call the name of Lower Merion to point at a fully-funded district. But when people think of what the extra Lower Merion money buys, they may not be thinking of these investments in leadership. What exactly does that summer mentoring and problem-solving together accomplish for the school year? Plus, what stories about funding and grants; who’s doing it and how?
Telling Tales Out of School: The data says that schools are the safest places for children to be, even accounting for recent tragedies. Within schools, educators are finding ways to help make children’s experience of learning, of social relationships, and of emotional life throughout the day safer so that children, even those who have experienced trauma, can grow into deeper experiences of safety. Here’s how.
You Can Do This!: One of the simplest ways to make kids feel safer is to encourage them through the vulnerable years and fears. How many successful people say that at a turning point, some adult had high hopes for them and said: “You can do this; you are good at this!” Let’s explore stories about discovering of students’ excellence. And peer encouragement, too. “Likes” could be added to any work, any story, any blog, any cartoon.
It’s a wide definition of safety here, almost spiritual, but effective.
What activities have been done to make you safe? What have you done, to keep others safe?
Originally published at www.safekidsstories.com.
