Family and Child Consultants

January 26.   This is always a date of contention for Australians.   Is it a day to celebrate, a day to commiserate, a day to mourn, or a day to celebrate resilience and survival?    Why it's important for us to observe those things that make us proud to be Australians, it is also a good time to stop and reflect on what celebrating this day means for some Australians.   January 26 is meant to observe the day that captain Arthur Phillip founded the penal quality of NSW on already occupied aboriginal land in 1788, by raising an oversized Union Jack at Sydney Cove. Phillip was tasked with finding a suitable location to relocate convicts that had been exiled from Britain and in doing so disturbed, invaded, and occupied what we now know as Sydney.   It is important to remember that Australia was not the undiscovered, empty continent that we are sometimes led to believe.   On the 22nd of August 1770, Captain James Cook landed on Gweagal Country and called it...

When the workplace shares a Loss. For a number of years now I've worked with in the community sector, and sadly I had been part of workplaces which have experienced the death of colleagues and participants. It's important to recognise that when a workplace grieves the loss of a colleague or a participant, to do this type of grieving requires a level of sharing that is not common in the workplace. Most everyone will experience personal grief and loss during their career, but usually we mourn in private rather than at the office. We take leave to cope with the loss of a family member and though our Co-workers share their condolences with us, it's something we process on our own.  Why? Because we may worry that personal grief may be seen as unseemly at work and worrisome to our colleagues. We - or they - may be concerned that they can't share or even understand our feelings, that our tears or sadness may seem unprofessional, or that our minds are simply not in the right pl...

  When you have a co-dependent relationship with your work!   Does this sound like you?   You have spent your whole life caring for others, making sure everyone else is OK, trying to please and lookout for other people’s needs. This has served you well in your career in many ways, but as you try to perfect your roles of community services worker, you continue to feel unfulfilled, anxious or depressed. Or perhaps he you're not even sure how you feel!   If this sounds familiar, I understand the struggle of wanting to do it all while not letting a single person down. I first learned the term “co-dependency” when I was working as a social worker at an outpatient addiction clinic. It was framed as a “relationship addiction” that often surfaced I just since as my client’s entered substance use recovery. Basically, instead of numbing their feelings by using substances, my clients would distract themselves by focusing on other people’s problems.  Co-dependency invo...

                                Even in great families’ things go wrong.   Remember when you were convinced that life would be easier when your baby slept all night? When school would be easier when your child found some friends, or they stopped slamming the door and rolling their eyes. For some families it doesn't get easier. It gets harder, a lot harder. As those cute babies grow up to be teens, making their own choices and taking their own directions, most will succeed with some minor speed humps, heart breaks and infractions along the way. You know the ones - the teen in Year 10 who gets busted skipping school, the 17 year old who comes home drunk from a “sleepover”, or the 16 year old who's heart has been broken and is committed to spending the rest of their life in their room.   For some families this is what they dream of. I'm not talking about families where there's been tra...

We need to do better for our kids in care. In case you did not know - the research is clear: young people do not fare well when they leave care. Study after study, both in Australia and internationally, tells us that young people that leave the foster care system are more likely to be unemployed, homeless, experience poverty, mental health concerns, and are at far greater risk of entering early adulthood with a criminal record compared to young people who have not experienced out of home care (OOHC).   It gets worse for some young people as well. Young people in care are more likely to be socially isolated and lack informal social support from family and friends. There are particular groups of care leavers whose outcomes are at even higher risk such as Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander young people, young parents, and young people with a disability.  The pre-care experience of young people Pre-care experiences, which most commonly have included trauma associated with viole...