Welcoming Our Little Ones: A guide for families to raise strong and deadly Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children

Nunkuwarrin Yunti & Emerging Minds, Australia, September 2025

Cover of Welcoming Our Little OnesTo listen to this guide, use the ‘Read content’ button above.

Or, you can print a copy.

This guide was written by and for families with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children.

It shares some stories to support families to raise healthy and grounded Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children.

It is made up from shared stories from many Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander families.

No matter where you live or where you are at on your cultural journey, if an Aboriginal and/or Torres Strait Islander child is part of your family, you may find this guide helpful.

You don’t need to read the whole guide start to finish, just read the bits that suit you best right now.

Choose from:

Thank you

Nunkuwarrin Yunti and Emerging Minds would like to thank the families and staff from Wakwakurnaku Kumangka Pudnanthi family support group who co-created this guide based on the Replanting the Birthing Trees online course, which was co-created with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander knowledge holders preferencing Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander ways of knowing, being and doing.

Thanks also to Elory, Carrie-Lee Miller, Harley Ngrakani Hall, Jamie Goldsmith, David Edwards, Lou Turner and the Emerging Minds National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Consultancy Group for their contributions.

And thank you to the Paul Ramsey Foundation and Dana Shen who made this work possible.

Community artwork by Wakwakurnaku Kumangka Pudnanthi (WKP) families

Community artwork

What better way for our Wakwakurnaku Kumangka Pudnanthi (WKP) families to showcase their amazing achievement in co-creating a resource based on their own lived and living experiences than through their own artwork that represents an expression of themselves and what they had envisioned in the co-designing of the WKP group.

Each family that could contribute their time to this artwork used their handprints along with their minya (little) one’s hands or footprint filled with their own design. This is a representation of their initial vision for the group of using their hands, which to them meant: connection, family and learning in partnership with their minya one and with each other.

Families used traditional Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander art designs to help inspire them as well as adding their own personal touch, including the expression of their own minya one’s art with their own age-appropriate drawings. The lines joining the handprints of the mums and minya one’s are representing the connections that the families have all made with each other and the dotted circles represent the contribution of each of the families to the resource, as well as the WKP group. Some of the traditional Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander art used to inspire this piece include the yarning circle, family, bushtucker, animal tracks and ocean waves.

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