WELCOME
Global poverty is a huge problem for humanity today. Challenges and issues it brings, such as hunger, health problems, no education, unemployment and similar are more than serious to make us be more aware and get involved to help in any way possible.
SERVICES
With a wide range of services dedicated to all children in any need, we can provide many opportunities which lead to developing skills and knowledge which will make the foundation of ensuring children and people in their surroundings.
CONFERENCE, TRAINING AND PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT
With over 15 years experience of working with the most vulnerable and deprived children in inner-city areas of London, Kids Company is in a position to share the knowledge and expertise derived from intervening directly with this client group.
With the practical and emotional support we give to them we can help them build and thrive needed skills for adulthood. With our programs, young people with difficult start in life have an opportunity for proper education, training, and employment as any other.
OUR GOALS
Our mission is based on believing that every child with just a little help and support can bring the very best, no matter if the issue is sexual exploitation, child poverty, violence or malnutrition.
OUR BLOG
Children and family all around the world have the opportunity to read the posts we share which makes a great way of connection and makes a great aspect of help and support.
Safe proofing your home for your kids
Having kids at home can be a fun and exciting journey. There are so many moments of love and tenderness that you might even get lost in your kid or kids. However, as adults, it is our responsibility to ensure a safe and secure environment for our kids to grow up. Infants, toddlers, and young children are still in early stages where they might not remember or understand instructions to not touch or not do something.
From the time children start crawling and walking without support, till they turn five years old, they cannot be trusted to stay safe on their own.
You slowly need to teach them safe habits and dangers of not listening to you. Letting children know which practices are safe and which are not is very important. The best way to communicate with children is to show them pictures and diagrams in a logical way. A helpful drawing or an explainer video with animated characters can also help children understand safety concepts faster and better.
Let us look at ways that you can safe proof your home for your kids.
Electrical sockets:
Little children have a habit of crawling towards electric outlets and sticking their fingers into the cavities. Doing this can cause shocks. Use protective coverings and guards to cover all electrical sockets up to 3 feet from the floor to ensure your children stay safe.
Household disinfectants and cleaning equipment:
Store all liquids, soaps, and cleaning material in overhead compartments or shelves. Cleaning equipment contains chemicals that are incredibly harmful if consumed. Infants and toddlers do not understand the difference between washing liquid and juices. They might try to drink down the compounds. You can also put child locks on cabinets near the floors.
Kitchen equipment:
Equipment like hot ovens, water bottles, kitchen knives, cheese graters and so on should be kept out of reach of children. Ensure you have protective covers for all your knives and drawers that house pointed sharp objects. Even your kitchen scissors should have blade protectors on them.
Bathrooms:
Even safety razors, shaving creams and foams, hand washes, gels, body creams, and so on should be kept away in closed containers or shelves. Toddlers and small kids might harm or cut themselves by mistake. Keep an anti-slip mat in your bathroom and shower area to prevent children from slipping and hurting their heads.
Store medicines:
All medication, including children’s drugs, should be kept away from kids and children. Kids do not understand the importance of dosage instructions. They can easily overdose on cough syrup if not taken under the supervision of an adult. Ensure all syrup bottles have child-proof caps that are difficult to open.
Safety gates:
Install as many security gates as possible throughout your home. Safety gates help provide a secure environment for children to roam around. Install safety gates at entrances that lead to attics, staircases, basements, gardens, backyards, and kitchens. Installing a safety door or gate at the opening of your toolshed is a proper precaution against unwary toddlers.
Secure the furniture:
Secure lightweight furniture to the floors or walls to prevent it from toppling over. Once toddlers learn to walk and run, they invariably run into large objects that may fall over. Sometimes children also like to climb the furniture around the house. While the objects may break or fall over, protecting your child should be your utmost priority. Anchoring all the movable furniture down helps protect your child.
Gates and fences:
If you have a house with a small garden that leads on to the main road, install fencing and gates. Children start playing outside from an early age. Fences keep stray dogs and cats out while keeping your child inside. Additionally, there are cars and bikes on the roads. Keeping your children from wandering outside will help prevent accidents.
Store glassware and cutlery:
Store glassware and cutlery out of reach of your children. These objects can break and shatter easily. Children are known to be clumsy and will not understand the dangers of broken pieces of glass. To avoid the bleeding and crying, store all your cutlery, crockery, and glassware away from children and lock with child-proof locks. Compare the best crockery and cutlery at reviewslot.
Cover edges and pointy corners:
Children are at very awkward heights. They tend to get injured by corners of tables, chairs, and electronic appliances. Use child-friendly edge covers that are made of a hard, rubberized material to protect your children. If you are unsure of the rubber, use foam to cover sharp corners of tables and chairs and other furniture.
Simple housing for kids in the underdeveloped world
One of the greatest challenges of helping kids in developing countries is providing cheap and durable shelter. Providing children with a secure place to live is crucial to advancing development.
The problem is that building houses – using traditional methods – is a very expensive and time consuming task. It requires skilled labour, purpose built tools and a lot of expensive building materials.
Around the world, people are challenging the norms of housing development by pioneering cheap, recyclable buildings that can be built by unskilled labourers.
Here are a few of the methods used to provide housing in developing countries –
Recycling Plastic
Not only is this one of the most affordable and durable methods for building cheap housing, it is also environmentally friendly. The huge amount of plastic used and discarded by humans is having a massive, detrimental impact on the planet. Eight million tonnes of plastic is dumped in the ocean each year, which is equivalent to five small bags full of plastic on every foot of coastline in the world. When you consider this, and the fact that plastic can take up to 400 years to decompose, you start to realise the extent of the problem.
With that in mind, the benefits of recycling plastic and using it for housing are obvious. Instead of using plastic for ‘one-use’ items like water bottles, its amazing flexibility and longevity as a material can be used to provide excellent shelter in developing countries. Startups like EcoDom melt down plastics, mold it into large plastic panels and using those panels as walls and roofs.
Conceptos Plásticos is another company using recycled plastic to build houses in Columbia. The company built temporary shelters in Guapi for victims of armed conflict. The company completed the project in just 28 days, and they only employ 15 people. While the shelters aren’t permanent, they are created out of locally-sourced, environmentally-friendly materials.
Cut My Plastic recommends the use of plastics for windows, roofs and even floors. The material is easy to clean, water resistant, heat resistant and incredibly durable.
Earthbag Building
This isn’t a new, revolutionary method, but it is tried and tested. Earthbags have long been used by the military to form protective barriers and as flood protection. Now this old method is being used around the world as a cheap way of building houses and other shelters.
It’s also one of the simplest methods available. Essentially it works by filling up bags with gravel or soil and placing them on top of each other. Then you use something like barbed-wire in between bags to keep them in place, being careful not to snag the earthbags. You also have to dig appropriate foundations, depending on the size of the structure. This method also answers another one of the biggest issues in developing countries – the surplus on unskilled labourers without work.
Hyper Wattle
Another earthbag based building method, the hyper wattle design was the winner in a cheap house building competition. Contestants had to build a durable and sustainable house for less than $300. The hyper wattle method is extremely strong, which makes it excellent for countries with severe weather conditions. It’s made by stacking wattles (or tubes) filled with either dirt or foam and strengthened with chicken wire or cement mortar.
Bamboo
Bamboo has been used to build shelters for a very long time. It is one of the fastest growing plants on the planet and is extremely strong and lightweight. Because of this, it is an excellent building material. Bamboo houses don’t need deep foundations because they don’t weigh that much, and they are resistant to earthquakes because they can move back and forth. Like all building methods used for developing countries, they can be built using basic tools and by unskilled people.
Lego Style Brick Housing
In March this year, Elon Musk announced that his company – The Boring Company – is bringing out a new Lego style brick that can be used to build a house in a few days. Built using strong materials like tunneling rock, the bricks aren’t yet available. Elon Musk said on Twitter “the boring bricks are interlocking with a precise surface finish, so two people could build the outer walls of a small house in a day or so.”
Clay Brick Alternatives
A company called Durabric has created an earth-based, environmentally friendly alternative to clay bricks. They are used in much the same way as clay bricks, but have a significantly smaller carbon footprint and are cheaper to products. Made out of compressed earth, the Durabric is strong, durable and weatherproof. It is currently being used effectively in Malawi – where the Durabric is produced – and the company has plans to use the building method in other developing countries.
Tips on Keeping your Child Healthy
Raising children well is extremely important. With hectic schedules, work, schools, and allied classes to take care of, keeping your child healthy every day can be a challenge. There is a lot to do in too short a time, and there isn’t enough time or energy to concentrate on everything at once. Now you may have gone through the usually quite stressful experience of a natural birth. You might have used the latest in IVF treatment from Fertility Plus to conceive. Or you could have adopted your new member of the family. Either way, we all know,the most significant concern for parents today is providing a healthy lifestyle for their children.
Maintaining a healthy lifestyle and keeping your children fit has a host of benefits. Some of them are preventing severe health issues, keeping their immunity high, avoiding flu and colds on a regular basis, keeping asthma and breathing issues at bay, and so on. Children tend to mirror the adults around them. If you adopt a healthy living pattern, your children will also follow suit. Setting a good example is the best way to encourage health and fitness in your kids.
Put them to sleep
Yes, that right! Put your kids to sleep at a set time each night and wake them up every morning at the same time. This will help establish their metabolism, assist with any mood swings, irritation and tantrums, growing aches, and any stress issues they might face. Kids need minimum 8 hours of restful and undisturbed sleep daily. Many children avoid going to bed at a set time because they feel they are being pressured. The trick here would be to emphasise how sleep helps them grow bigger and better. Reasoning with children helps better than forcing them. This will promote their physical, mental, and cognitive development. Oli from thefablab.co.uk agreed “It’s essential for kids growth and overall health to get a good sleep, while they may have a lot of energy kids actually need more sleep than adults.”
Healthy eating
It isn’t always possible to plan your meals and lunch boxes. At such times, make an educated guess about which foods will cause the least amount of harm to the body. Take your children grocery shopping with you and let them help you pick out foods by reading the ingredients and labels. If you make a game of it and involve them, the excitement to eat certain foods will remain. Let them know the advantages of eating certain foods like oranges, grains, lean meats, carbohydrates, and so on with the help of useful examples. Eating a particular diet will help with stronger bones, or shinier hair, or strength to run faster, and so on.
Exercise daily
If you want your children to get some form of exercise daily, they must see you do it too. If you plan on starting yoga, teach it to your kids and make it a daily family event. Same is the case with soccer, sports, or running. If your kids need to improve their alertness and concentration, enroll them in music, dance, or defense classes to encourage motor coordination and better focus. Regular exercise helps create stronger muscle groups, denser bones, alleviates stress, and increases immunity. This helps your children grow up to be stronger and smarter adults.
Wash hands regularly
Kids hate doing this. We hated it too. Seasonal flu, germs, diseases, dirt, grime, and dust can all reside on the hands. Dirty and unclean hands spread illnesses amongst kids faster than we can blink. Like with eating healthy food, make washing hands a game. You can make a song for your kids to sing while washing hands that speaks about all the dirt and germs going away or you can tell them it is a germ hunt or something similar to make washing their hands enjoyable. Ensure your kids wash their hands for a minimum of 15 to 20 seconds with soap or antiseptic hand wash. Buy fruity smelling soaps or containers with animated characters on them so that your children will want to use these soaps to clean their hands daily.
Teach healthy habits
Many children miss school days due to some form of illness or the other. The best way to improve child health is to inculcate daily healthy habits. One of them, as discussed earlier would be hand washing. Teach them to cough and sneeze appropriately into a handkerchief or tissue paper and how to correctly throw the tissue away. Many times, viruses spread through unhealthy contact with other children in playgrounds or running and playing. Explain to your children why they must never rub their eyes without washing their hands first. Encourage your kids to avoid sharing water bottles, cups, and spoons with friends and other children since bacteria and viruses are easily transferred through saliva.
With the help from Dr Lauren Jones from www.doctor-4-u.co.uk, we’ve tried and tested these tips to keep your children healthy in the long term.
Print happiness as a form of valuable development
At first sight, anybody would say how children art activities are only “messy” part of children lives. Well, it is not that simple. Actually, it is a very valuable part of their childhood. Art gives children a lot more ways to express themselves and explore a variety of important experiences. A world full of markers, crayons, paint, and clay with many other materials opens many doors of new worlds for them. It is not just a way in which they could become professional artists. These worlds are new areas of development in many ways from an adult point of view. There are many ways art supports children’s development and here are some basic ones.
Social development
Learning to interact with others, to share and play in a team is very positive and important change for the social aspect of any human being. While creating with others, they share opinions, ideas, imagination and their little magic only they can understand.
Emotional development
Most of the children find it very hard to be able to represent their feelings and experiences in verbal form. A visual way of expressing is much easier for them, and when we value their creativity, they feel valued as persons. Self-esteem is boosting, and they feel more appreciated. Feeling more validity will make a child more confident in other more difficult areas that come after in their lives.
Physical development
Mostly motor control and eye-hand coordination are physical points which work together in the art area. This hand-eye coordination is of great importance after in athletic as well as in academic scenarios. This will make great importance later in adulthood for many aspects of their lives.
Cognitive development
Learning names of the colors and shapes through creative art activities makes a great foundation for visual and verbal development in children communication. Introducing kids to nature and letting them express it on paper helps in great observation skill development. This art time in their growing up also provides time to establish the conception of practice and concentration.
Using positive reinforcement while helping kids, especially those in need, the child felt very motivated and stimulated to learn and create.