FREE KIDS – Let your Children make mistakes

Nº do projeto:2020-1-PT01-KA204-078497
Coordenação: Agrupamento de Escolas nr 1 de Gondomar ( Portugal)

We are living in a millennium where most parents are overly protecting their children, keeping them away from learning and evolving into independent adults. Based on global research, excessive parenting is the main cause that is likely to lead to their future lives as individuals or parents failing, being unable to even deal with daily obstacles. It is good for parents to be involved in children’s lives. However, too much protection or control pushes children back from their own evolution as unique individuals. They are unable to experience life’s essential lessons, such as overcoming the fear of failure or acting independently, seeing and experiencing for themselves what is wrong or right, and engaging with responsibilities. Parents are present in children’s lives to provide emotional support and guidance, not to live their children’s lives or fulfill their daily obligations.

Project Objectives:

The main objective of the project is to improve the overall well-being of children and their physical and mental growth as individuals with less overprotective behaviors from parents. Children certainly need guidance from parents, as they look up to them and most of the time, children mimic their parents’ actions. Thus, it is crucial for parents to provide guidance in such a way that while children trust their parents, they will be able to make their own decisions and parents will be there to support and advise them rather than making decisions for them. We equip both teachers and parents with the tools and knowledge to assist in different aspects of parenting, to provide support in raising independent individuals while simultaneously reducing stress factors for parents.

Target Groups

We have two main target groups: (1) teachers and (2) parents.

Our project emphasizes both teachers and parents. Apart from the theoretical understanding of overparenting, the focus is on practical workshops covering different areas of parenting and child behavior, various methods and techniques, seminars, and training.

Our general activities will be:

  • conducting a pan-European research on the latest trends and methodologies in child rearing
  • data collection and creation of a best practices manual to prevent bad parenting and promote good parenting practices for raising independent children
  • based on the collected data, we will establish a training program for teachers, providing them with skills and a manual with lesson plans to later train parents in good parenting
  • with gathered best practices, we will develop a training manual for parents to improve overall parental well-being and how to raise mentally healthy and independent children
  • KIDS (Empowering parents portal) e-learning portal with guides for healthy education, a knowledge base for the education of independent children.

With the results of our project, we will provide:

  • Best practices manual for preventing overparenting and improving children’s well-being
  • Free training courses for teachers
  • Teacher’s manual with lesson plans
  • Best practices manual for parents
  • Creation of the FREE KIDS e-portal in collaboration with e-twinning for quick intervention in parental stress situations
  • Introducing our innovative FREE e-learning courses for children to improve well-being by providing bite-sized information (Topics divided into small blogs for quick review)