Celebrating National Children's Week
Every October, Australia sets aside a week to celebrate children and their rights: the things every child is entitled to simply because they are a child.
Many parents first hear about Children's Week through their childcare service. Here's a more detailed explanation of what it is and how you can take part with your child whether at home or at their childcare centre
What is Children's Week?
Children's Week is an annual national celebration of children's rights, talents and achievements, held across Australia in the last week of October. It's coordinated by the Children's Week Council of Australia, with state and territory bodies running local events, small grants and activities. The week exists to promote the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC), which Australia ratified in 1990 according to the Australian Human Rights Commission, and to recognise that children have a say in the decisions that affect them.
How is the Children's Week theme chosen each year?
Each year the Children's Week Council of Australia picks one article of the UNCRC and builds the theme around it. Past themes have covered the right to relax and play, the right to a clean and safe environment, and the right to choose your own friends. The theme gives childcare services, schools, councils and libraries a shared focus for the week, and it's usually announced early in the year so that services can plan around it. You'll find this year's theme and dates in the box at the top of this page.
Why does Children's Week matter for your child?
Children's Week matters because it treats children as people with rights of their own, and children who understand they have rights tend to speak up sooner when something isn't right. It also gives families and educators a reason to spend time on the things that are easy to lose in a busy week: play, listening, and letting children lead.
Australia's Early Years Learning Framework puts children's identity, belonging and agency at the centre of early learning, so most services are already working towards the same things Children's Week celebrates. The week makes that work visible.
How can you celebrate Children's Week at home?
The best Children's Week activities at home are simple ones that give your child some say: choosing the plan, telling the story, teaching you something. Here are five that work with any year's theme.
1. Let your child run the day
Pick one day during the week and let your child make the decisions, within reason. What's for breakfast, where you walk, which book you read, which song plays in the car. Children rarely get to be in charge of anything, and being trusted with real choices is a meaningful experience for them.
2. Ask what they think
Children's Week is built on the idea that children have a right to be heard. Ask your child what they think. What's the best thing about being a kid? What would you change about daycare? What feels unfair? Write the answers down. They are often more thoughtful than you expect, and they make a record worth keeping.
3. Share something from your family
A word from your home language, a recipe with a story, a game a grandparent played, a photo from a celebration your family keeps. Children build their sense of who they are from these small, specific things. Our guide to cultural diversity in childcare has more on why that matters so early.
4. Go to a local Children's Week event
Councils, libraries and community centres run free events across the week, from story time to mini festivals. Check your local council's website or the Children's Week Council's state pages to find what's on near you.
5. Read a book about rights
Picture books about fairness, feelings and being heard do a lot of the explaining for you. Ask your library for a Children's Week display, or ask your service which books they're using in the room.
What Children's Week activities work at a childcare service?
The Children's Week activities that work best at a childcare service are ones that give children a visible voice: a wall of their ideas, a day they help plan, a family visit they've asked for. Most services will already have something in the calendar, and this is a good week for families and educators to team up. A few ideas to suggest to your service, or to run if you are an educator.
- A children's voices wall. Ask every child a question tied to the theme and display their answers, in their words and their handwriting where they can.
- A child-planned day. Let the children vote on the activities, the songs and the snack for one day of the week.
- Family visits. Invite a parent or grandparent to come in and share a song, a story or a game. Ten minutes is plenty.
- A shared meal. A picnic where each family brings something, with allergy and food policies checked first. The Harmony Day activities we've written about before translate straight across.
- Acknowledging the Traditional Custodians. Find out whose Country the service is on and learn a few words of the local language. Our piece on embedding Indigenous culture in everyday learning has practical ways to make this part of the program all year.
- Books that look like the room. Pull together picture books that reflect the children's languages, cultures and families, and keep them on the shelf after the week ends.
Celebrating this year's theme: language, culture and faith
The 2026 Children's Week theme is about a child's right to use their own language, celebrate their culture and practise their religion. That covers a three-year-old who speaks Vietnamese at home and English at kindy, a child whose family observes Sabbath or fasts during Ramadan, and a child whose only tie to a grandparent's country is one dish at Christmas. Children's Week is a chance to make clear that all of it is welcome.
A few theme-specific ideas to add to the list above:
- Pick one word a day. Choose a word from your family's language (or one you'd like your child to learn) and use it all day. Stick it on the fridge. Our article on supporting bilingual children in child care has more on keeping a home language alive alongside English.
- Make a family celebrations calendar. Mark the dates your family celebrates across the year and draw a picture for each. It gives your child a way to explain those days to their friends.
- A greetings wall at the service. Every family writes "hello" and "goodbye" in their home language, near the door, so it gets used at drop-off and pick-up.
- A celebrations sharing circle. Children bring a photo or object from a family celebration and talk about it. Diwali lamps, Easter eggs, a Lunar New Year red envelope, a Christmas stocking.
Religion is the part of this theme that services often find hardest to approach. Respecting a child's right to practise their religion mostly comes down to asking families rather than guessing: knowing which children keep halal or kosher, making room for a child who sits out a particular craft, and checking how a family would like a festival handled. Our older article on celebrating diversity at Christmas is a good starting point for educators thinking this through.
Questions to ask your child's service before Children's Week
- “What's planned for Children's Week this year?”
- “How will the children have a say in it?”
- "Can I come in and share something from our family?"
- “How do you handle family celebrations and dietary requirements?”
Search childcare near you.
Children's Week might last just seven days, but the rights it celebrates apply all year. Choose one or two of these ideas, try them with your child, and keep the ones that work. The habits that start in Children's Week are often the ones that last.
You can learn more about National Children's Week through the Children's Week Council Of Australia.
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