Understanding children’s mental health in culturally diverse (or ‘CALD’) communities

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Culturally and linguistically diverse families have disproportionately poorer health outcomes and face numerous hurdles to accessing the support they need. As a practitioner, you have a real opportunity to improve the experience of children and families from diverse communities, by developing strong cross-cultural communication, diverse community connections, and understanding the barriers families face while helping them to overcome them.

This course explores practice considerations that support culturally responsive and inclusive work with families. It introduces four key domains to think about when working with families from a culture different to your own:

• Migration and acculturation journeys: An exploration of a family’s migration and acculturation journeys, including the challenges they face and the strengths and resources that help them to build strong lives in Australia, can help you to identify the best practice approach for their context.
• Cultural identities: Culturally humble and curious conversations can help you to understand a family’s cultural connections and therefore the most effective ways to support their health and wellbeing.
• Cultural family practices: Cultural family practices (daily traditions and routines) play a crucial role in strengthening children’s wellbeing and sense of belonging. Encouraging families to share their cultural practices and incorporating them into your assessments and treatment plans can improve sustained therapeutic outcomes.
• Racism and unconscious bias: Racism impacts a child’s physical and mental health, development, relationships, academic outcomes, and social and emotional wellbeing. Part of effectively addressing racism as a practitioner involves cultural reflection and humility: recognising your own culture and how it may privilege or inform unintentional cultural biases; acknowledging and talking about racism; advocating for and acting on behalf of families to address structural racism; and adopting a lifelong learning approach with cultural curiosity in your practice.

Considering these domains in your practice can help you to better support children’s mental health in your work with culturally and linguistically diverse families.

This foundation course is for any practitioner who wants to develop their practice of working with culturally diverse children, parents and families. Some practice skills will be mentioned; however, the aim of this course is to provide the foundational knowledge that underpins culturally responsive practice.

It is estimated that this course will take you approximately two hours to complete, including reading material, watching videos and completing the reflection activities.

You can undertake the course across multiple sessions at your own pace. The last screen you visit before logging off will be bookmarked and you will have the option of returning to that screen when you next log in.