Transcript for
Homelessness and child mental health

Kirren O’Brien (00:00): We’ve got an opportunity to respond to these children whilst they’re young. And we understand the cycle of trauma, abuse and the impact that can have on their development and their life trajectories. And if we fail to respond to that at an opportune point in time, it’s likely that these children and young people will cycle back through services. So we’ve really missed a key point in their life to create some meaningful change.

 

Narrator (00:33): Welcome to the Emerging Minds Podcast.

 

Gill Munro (00:39): Hi, everybody, and welcome to the Emerging Minds Podcast. My name is Gill Munro. And in this episode, we will be talking with Susie Lukis and Kirren O’Brien. Both of whom are resource coordinators for Statewide Children’s Resource Program based in Victoria. The Statewide Children’s Resource Program advocates for and assists practitioners in homelessness support and other non-government services to respond more effectively to the needs of children who have experienced homelessness and, or family violence. Their website is well worth a visit as it has lots of free resources for supporting the mental health of children and families experiencing homelessness and these are freely available to practitioners nationwide. Susie and Kirren will be talking with us about the topic of homelessness and its impacts on families and, of course, in particular, the impacts on children and child mental health.

 

They are full of practical examples of strategies that services can adopt to better support children and families experiencing homelessness and they will also outline practical skills that practitioners can utilise in their work with children and their caregivers who are experiencing homelessness. I was also interested in finding out how families become homeless and what the impacts have been of issues such as COVID, cost of living rises, natural disasters and housing affordability. Anyway, I will let Susan and Kirren introduce themselves more fully, so let’s meet our guests. Susie, perhaps you could start by telling us a little about your role?

 

Susie Lukis (02:09): Certainly. So I’m Susie Lukis. I’m the Statewide Children’s Resource Program Coordinator for the inner and outer Eastern Metro area. So Kirren’s rural and I’m metro, and we have a divide in our program covering all the rural and metro areas. And as Kirren mentioned, our role is really supporting practitioners in primarily homelessness and family violence services, but actually cross-sectorally. So Allied Health, education, and also to advocate back up to the Department of Families, Fairness and Housing. And we love partnering with other organisations, such as Emerging Minds and the Centre for Excellence in Child and Family Welfare and our pique’s to really promote the understanding that it’s really vital that children receive support, because services are funded to support children.

 

Gill Munro (03:02): Thanks, Susie. It’s great to have you join us today. And we have really noticed how collaborative you are at Statewide Children’s Resource Program and how willing you all are to share your skills and knowledge. And it’s really appreciated. So let’s now welcome Kirren. Kirren, could you tell us about your role?

 

Kirren O’Brien (03:19): My name’s Kirren O’Brien. I’m the Statewide Children’s Resource Program Coordinator for the Goulburn and the Ovens Murray. My role supports the family violence and homelessness sector. I recognise the experiences of children and respond to that. So it’s really important that we recognise children as clients in their own right.

 

Gill Munro (03:43): And we are really excited to be able to talk to you both today, because I know that you’ve done a wealth of work in this area with resources for supporting the mental health of children and families in homelessness. So if we think about practitioners working in a more generic kind of service, what sort of things should those practitioners be aware of when working with children and families experiencing homelessness?

 

Kirren O’Brien (04:09): So I think it’s really important for practitioners to first be able to recognise homelessness and what it actually is. So homelessness can look quite different across families or individuals. From the 2016 census, we found out that about 18% of people who were homeless were living in supported accommodation. So this is like crisis and emergency accommodations, such as refuges. 15% were sleeping in temporary accommodation with other households, 15% are couch surfing and 7% are sleeping on the street. So intense and improvised dwellings. But the most common form of homelessness is living in severely overcrowded dwellings, which is about 44%. Severely overcrowded dwellings is where there’s a need for four more additional bedrooms to accommodate everyone adequately. And that’s not everyone having their own bedroom that may still be people sharing rooms. But in extremely overcrowded dwellings, the impact can be really debilitating on their privacy, their health, also their mental health to everyone in the household.

 

There’s a lack of ability to pursue social relationships or have personal living space or maintain privacy. It’s also really, really difficult to have exclusive access to kitchen and bathroom facilities. So it equates to, what, around 51,000 Australians across the country that are living in these conditions. And from the perspective of a child, particularly a child living in an overcrowded household, it might mean that there’s no quietness for regulation or for study. Their routines are really easily disrupted. They’re unlikely to have friends come over to play and it’s having limited possessions to make a safer space. It’s also really easy for diseases to spread amongst those household members and, obviously, sleep can be really disturbed. So children may be experiencing homelessness either in a family experience or they may be experiencing this on their own. So about 28% of clients accessing homelessness services are children. So poverty, overcrowding and family conflict are key pathways to homelessness.

 

I’m going to throw another stat out at you. So about 31% of clients seeking assistance from specialist homelessness services is largely due to domestic and family violence. So children who live in a home with family violence do have a similar experience to those who are living without a home due to the constant state of instability amongst a host of other things. So children don’t often have the language to express what’s happening or how they feel, and they look to others around them to make sense of their world. So if their caregiver’s experiencing crisis, it’s likely that they’re feeling that their world is out of control too. Each child has their own valid experience of homelessness.

 

And when we think of providing homelessness services, we think of providing caregivers the support they need to provide a roof over their family’s head. But also homelessness doesn’t usually occur in isolation of other challenges. It doesn’t just impact caregivers. So children have their own experiences and they might begin to have feelings of confusion, ashamed, embarrassed, guilty, anxious, and they can have a really big feeling of grief and loss if they’ve left a lot of their things behind, their friends, their family, their support systems. It’s a really big upheaval for children when they’re experiencing homelessness.

 

Gill Munro (08:05): Thanks for that, Kirren. I’m just wondering whether COVID and the latest rise in cost of living has made any difference. Have you noticed any new demographics into homelessness?

 

Susie Lukis (08:17): Certainly. Yeah. I think what we were starting to see before COVID was that house rental prices were rising and there was a little rise in costs of living and there’s been no real wage growth and certainly no increase in Centrelink payments for eligible people. But during COVID, there was actually a decrease in people presenting for material aid, because of those increased job seeker and job keeper payments. But there was an also an increase in people presenting with homelessness. And we know that there were programs across the country to keep people safe during COVID, who are experiencing a lack of a home. But now that those extra payments have come down, there’s been a significant increase in costs of living. There’s been an increase in rental costs and, in fact, in a lot of areas a significant decrease in affordable dwellings, because not just the increasing costs, but many properties that were available for rental have been turned into short-stay accommodation and that’s significantly impacted.

 

I think we also have to take into account the natural disasters that have been experienced across the country and certainly they have driven issues of a lack of a home for many, many people and made it significantly more difficult, particularly in rural areas, I think, to find accommodation for people. So certainly in the metro area, we’re seeing more families who are single income or perhaps low, dual income families who previously had a little financial buffer, were just able to keep their heads above water and now with the increased cost of living the increased utility costs and no wage growth or wages going backwards, that buffer is gone. So they may be able to just sustain their rental properties, but certainly they need assistance with food and utility bills and costs for children. And those numbers I think are rising.

 

Gill Munro (10:32): Tough times for families by the sounds of it then, isn’t it?

 

Susie Lukis (10:35): Yeah. It really is.

 

Gill Munro (10:38): So Kirren you talked a little about family and domestic violence. We know that’s the root cause for many women and children becoming homeless. I wonder if you can just say a little bit more about the particular impacts this has on children?

 

Kirren O’Brien (10:53): The impacts can really vary across different ages and stages. And I think it’s really important to acknowledge that every child is different. So we don’t want to paint them all with the same brush. We need to observe and be curious about their individual and unique experiences. If they’ve been through something traumatic, but have a nurturing and responsive support system in place, they’re going to respond differently than a child with fractured and despondent relationships. So I think when we talk generally that… I kind of want to break this up into infants, children and young people, because I think that those experience can be really quite varied across those ages and stages.

 

So for infants, they might be unable to access quality and consistent medical care due to the associated costs and availability or transiency. They may be less likely to receive immunizations or receive them on time. Their medical issues are less likely to be monitored or their history is lost. Financial hardship can restrict access to developmental activities, including daycare, or they may have limited supports to reduce their interactions with others for their social and emotional development. For children that are a little bit older, they might have a history of being disconnected or inconsistency in their education and recreational opportunities and connection to their community.

 

So continuing on with that theme of disconnection, they may start to have feelings of guilt and shame over their living situation. They can start to recognise that they’re different from their peers. They may have low self-esteem, language and speech delay, learning difficulties, difficulty concentrating. Can also start to really have a significant impact on their attachment styles with their caregivers and, potentially, lead to… we’re seeing that behavioural response to that trauma. So homelessness can be a real concern for children around that period of their development.

 

For young people, they’re beginning to exercise their independence, so this might negatively impact their perceptions of risk and navigating decisions. Being homeless can limit access to medical treatment, medications and access to basic hygiene, like laundry and bathrooms. It impacts the development of their value systems and goals. They may experience high levels of mental health problems, so we start seeing increases in anxiety, stress, depression, and behavioural problems as well. It’s at a time where they’re developing personal and intimate relationships as well. So reduced privacy may see them seek this from unsafe places that offer the illusion of safety and security and privacy, but it may actually lead to their sexual exploitation. We may find that young people are misusing drugs and alcohol to cope. And I think a big one as well is feeling alienated or self-conscious due to their presentation.

 

We often see children with lost uniforms or unwashed clothes. A key indicator for teachers that have reported a real chronic tiredness in class. They’re unable to keep up with homework and study. And other young people are really good at picking up points of difference in their peers. So it’s a lot of work and it’s really difficult to hide something as significant as homelessness. A fairly common experience for children across all of those ages is low emotional wellbeing, feelings of displacement and a decline in their mental health. So an increase in their anxiety and stress. Their attitudes and behaviours may change, their educational attainment, their social life, health, and hygiene, these can all change. Their presentation and loss of possession. So it’s really profoundly difficult for a child to thrive in those circumstances without a structured support system in place.

 

Susie Lukis (15:12): And we know that so much of how children move through an experience of homelessness is determined by the capacity of their caregivers to create emotional safety and a stable enough environment. And how do we model for parents or caregivers that the experience of children is really important to consider if services aren’t treating children’s experiences as really important to consider and providing children assessments and listening ears and responses that are appropriate for them.

 

Gill Munro (15:50): It’s actually a really good point, isn’t it? That? If services are ignoring children, then it says a lot, doesn’t it really?

 

Kirren O’Brien (15:59): And I think a big problem with that is that if we fail to respond to children at the earliest possible opportunity, we’re contributing to perpetuating a cycle. We’ve got an opportunity to respond to these children whilst they’re young and we understand the cycle of trauma, abuse and the impact that can have on their development and their life trajectories. And if we fail to respond to that at an opportune point in time, it’s likely that these children and young people will cycle back through services. So we’ve really missed a key point in their life to create some meaningful change.

 

Gill Munro (16:44): Really underpins that whole idea of early intervention, doesn’t it really, what you’re saying?

 

Kirren O’Brien (16:48): Absolutely.

 

Gill Munro (16:49): So how can practitioners set the scene to better support children? What sort of things can they do in their services to start making them more child-friendly I guess?

 

Susie Lukis (17:01): I think really the best scene is to have a service that, at its very foundation, is committed to hearing from children and to responding to children in a child-focused way. I think it’s very easy for there to be some posters put up and some child-safe standards written into policies and that’s the end of it, really. So I think that’s where it starts is the expectation that all practitioners will have curiosity about children, will be equipped within their role to understand what’s happening for a child and to respond. Again, we’re not asking people to step outside their role or to go beyond what their role can provide, but there are referral options, there are pathways to support for children and I think it’s really important that practitioners have a commitment to sourcing and providing those for children and really robust ways of assessing children.

 

I think there needs to be a foundational understanding of the rights of the child. Everybody talks about the rights of the child, but actually how does that play out in individual services? How does that play out in teams or individual practitioners? So I think that’s really important. We do need to have child-friendly spaces. Many services see a wide demographic of people, some of whom are perhaps not appropriate to be waiting in the same area as children and their caregivers. And so having a space where children can be. Providing new toys that work. Good quality toys, not the broken trucks with one wheel and the broken pencils and textas that are dry and don’t work. But giving children the message that we value them and we value their participation when they come into our services and that they’re worthy of having quality things around them is really important.

 

And I think understanding what it means for a child who perhaps outside of service has very little opportunity to have a voice. Children don’t have control over most things that happen to them. And, again, I think it’s really important that we don’t just talk about giving children a voice, but that we actually have ways meaningfully of engaging with children so they feel heard and modelling for parents that it’s important to hear the voice of the child. That we can have vulnerable conversations about difficult things with children present in a child-appropriate way and a safe way. And I think that’s really, really important. The Statewide Children’s Resource Program has a range of resources to support practitioners to do that, including our newest one, our hear my voice conversation cards, that are designed to be playful. They’re designed to engage children, give children a voice and some control over what happens and also to be really playful and to model that for parents. And I think that’s a really good place to start to build that.

 

Gill Munro (20:14): I love that what you were saying about the child-friendly spaces and what you were saying about, well, sometimes we want to try and protect children from the more difficult things in life, but children are actually aware often of what’s going on and they may take the blame themselves. It’s so important to have these conversations, but I think that practitioners can find that that is a bit tricky sometimes.

 

Susie Lukis (20:38): I think despite what we like to think about childhood being rainbows and butterflies and beautiful things, the reality is that it’s not that. For most children it’s a range of experiences. And I think, as you say, unless we understand that when things are happening in a family system, whatever that family looks like, children will always have an experience of it, whether that’s a fabulous thing or a devastating thing. The difference is in how we understand that children always will have an experience and how we give children a context for that. Because as you say, they will fill in the gaps themselves and children being children, developmentally, will blame themselves. “It must be my fault, because it’s difficult for adults when we walk into a room and the conversation stops.” Our fall back often is to think they must have been talking about me.

But most adults have enough life experience to say, “Actually they probably weren’t. And if they were, it probably doesn’t matter.” But children don’t have that understanding of the world yet. And I think that can build devastating stories in their heads to accompany the devastating things happening in the family often.

 

Kirren O’Brien (21:50): And I think sometimes very unintentionally, some people say, “Oh, children are resilient. They’ll bounce back.” I understand the intention of saying this, but I think that can also minimise the experience of the child. And actually we need to reflect on what they have been through and ways that we can help them overcome some of that trauma and transition into a place of healing and recovery. And I think if we say, “Oh, children are resilient,” it can potentially shift away from that and say, “Oh, they’ll be fine. They’ll be okay. They’ll be able to recover.” And I think that it’s really important that we put some systems in place. And it doesn’t need to be really complex and really burdening for children, but I think that those strong relationships and responsive adults and a safe space for children is creating that ability for their healing. So I really try and shift away from that sentiment as well.

 

Gill Munro (22:49): Really good point Kirren too. I think resilience can be a bit overused in many, many contexts, to be honest. The fact that people keep putting one foot in front of another. I don’t know. It would be nice if some people didn’t have to be quite so resilient some of the time, wouldn’t it? Especially our little ones.

 

Kirren O’Brien (23:07): It’s not their burden to shoulder at a certain time. We have to be responsive adults and shield them.

 

Gill Munro (23:14): So what sort of skills do you think practitioners need in order to engage children whose families are experiencing homelessness?

 

Kirren O’Brien (23:22): I think Susie mentioned it before in terms of not overthinking things. So I think if you’re going to engage with children, there’s three really important components that you can bring to the table. So the first one being bringing an awareness of age-appropriate information, being aware of where children are at developmentally. The second one, having a trauma-informed lens. So being aware that trauma can cause long-term effects on the brain and the body and the third being coming to the room as yourself. So you don’t have to be something that you’re not when you’re engaging with children. I think people over complicate it. They overthink it. They lose their confidence. If you’re playful and creative, use that to your advantage. Be fun and create games with kids. If you tend to be a little bit more reserved, you might connect with the child on a completely different level to that other practitioner.

 

So each child’s unique and connect to others in different ways. So we can each draw out something completely different from a child. For me, it was helpful to prepare to go into having contact with the child. So I consider a few different things. So what’s the child’s age and abilities? What activity do I think that they’ll enjoy and get the most out of? What’s my purpose? I really tried to make sure that my contacts and each engagement was purposeful. What did I want to achieve out of that? So when we talk about purpose, I thought about is it for observation purposes? Is it about assessing their safety? Is it building rapport or is it to gain a better understanding of their experiences? So I prepare for how I might be able to achieve that purpose. And I might choose an activity and pair this with some questions that I want to know more about and resources are a great tool that practitioners can use, because they’re a great conversational piece.

 

They shift the feelings of an intense focus from the child to an object, while still allowing them to be the subject matter. So it might be a colouring in book, a fidget spinner, a stress ball, but really any activity or a toy is a great engagement tool. From my experience, most children really do want to be part of the conversation. They want to make decisions about things that affect them. For children, who aren’t of an age where they can articulate their views and wishes, it’s still really, really important to engage and understand their interests and relationships and how they perceive the world. So that information that you gather will help build on how you’re going to support them as a practitioner and what’s important to them.

 

Gill Munro (26:11): I wonder if you mind me throwing you just an additional little curly one. I can imagine that when a family presents in homelessness that practitioners would often want to get stuck into the real busy work of trying to find accommodation or that we must fix all this for this family and that’s becomes the focus. What would you say about that?

 

Kirren O’Brien (26:33):

That’s a really good one, because I think that we can become elevated ourselves and sit in amongst that crisis with the caregivers. So I think it’s really important to be a calm space. I think it’s really important to use it as a reflective space. So if you’ve got caregivers and their family that are coming into and they’re desperately seeking a roof over their head, I think being a sounding board and listening to the things that they need and hearing about those experiences.

 

But really checking in with yourself and being aware that you need to be a safe space and sit with that for a little bit, because I think if you are also going to bring yourself up into a space of being in crisis, people in crisis can’t help other people in crisis. And so it’s really important to be that calm space, to be able to think things through, to be able to work through things systematically as well, and obviously to bring a human aspect to it.

 

I think that the sectors that we work amongst are really great at doing that there. Most people are happy to sit back and really listen to those experiences and they can be really heavy. They can be very emotionally draining and I think that practitioners are really great and respectful and really approachable at hearing those stories. But I think it’s also really important that we check in with ourselves and do a bit of self care around that, because it can lead to burnout. These are really heavy, complex, traumatic experiences for a lot of people.

 

Susie Lukis (28:11): I think that’s really good, Kirren. What if you’ve got a half hour appointment with somebody who has nowhere to sleep tonight and has children and they literally got the clothes they arrived in, I think it’s very tempting for us, as Kirren mentioned, to sort of leap into that crisis thinking and clearly finding safe accommodation for that night is a priority and we have to be doing that. But I think if we can also allow some space to focus on building that relationship and understanding that everybody that’s coming into that room and children may or may not be present. So whether it’s coming into that room physically or emotionally coming into that room, it needs to be acknowledged. And if we have half an hour and we can spend 5 or 10 minutes thinking about the children and the experience of children, my belief is that we’re actually going to do a much better assessment of the adult and how we can support the adult and the children than if we focus solely on the experience of the adult that’s sitting in front of us.

 

Gill Munro (29:17): I’m glad you mentioned that as well Susie because it is obviously so important, isn’t it? That the children may not be physically present, but they will be impacted by whatever is going on in that room. So I wonder if you could talk a little bit more about maybe how practitioners might role model to parents? I suppose I’m thinking about when you’ve got intergenerational issues and I know you’re not going to fix everything in a half-hour or one-hour session, but sometimes there are these key parenting skills. Can you say a little about that and how practitioners might role model parenting skills?

 

Susie Lukis (29:52): Sure. I think there’s a couple of things there. I always talk about that actually underlying anything that we do with clients, whether we are seeing them very briefly or whether we’re engaging in an ongoing term of support, it’s about building the relationship. So it’s about being authentic. It’s about being honest about what your limits are and what you can provide and transparent in the way that you work and really clear about the way that you envisage the work going, whether again, it’s really short term or long-term work. I think understanding that for parents who didn’t have a good parenting template, how do they understand to play? Much in all as we would all love it, there is no book that comes with here’s how to play with a child. So I think offering small moments of engagement. I think one of the overwhelming things for parents in crisis or caregivers in crisis is thinking about “I just can’t sit for four hours and make up voices and characters and scenarios,” and that’s too overwhelming.

 

So some of our resources can be used, for instance, to colour in a tiny little thing. Practitioners often have to go and make a phone call or quickly write some notes and being able to say to a caregiver and a child, “Maybe you might like to colour in this really small contained area and here’s three colours,” not the box of 72 Derwent, “… and I will be back in five minutes,” or, “I will be just writing for a couple of minutes here in the room with you.” And I think that can start to build those small moments of engagement and those small moments of successful play. Very often we see caregivers with toddlers, for instance, and toddlers have no sense of boundaries. They have no sense of anybody else’s needs, because they need to be self-absorbed, because that’s toddler development.

 

But often we see in their caregivers, who are exhausted, their heads are full of the crisis that’s happening, they spend all day being touched and grabbed and pulled on and “Mom, mom, mom, mom, mom. Dad, dad, dad, dad, dad,” that it’s so overwhelming. And the tendency is often to try and distract their toddlers from needing their support and their attention. And I think if we can model, again, for caregivers that sometimes giving those small moments repeatedly can actually help to soothe toddlers and can help toddlers to understand that actually this moment is okay, that their caregiver is available, because that’s the most distressing thing for toddlers is if their caregiver is unavailable, either not in the room often or emotionally unavailable if they’re experiencing distress. And so ways that we can model those small moments of connection repeatedly in very simple ways.

 

And whether that’s with us providing that opportunity first, “I’ll sit in colour with you for a moment. And now I’m going to go and make a phone call. Maybe dad can do some colouring.” That can help build the capacity of caregivers. And when we notice, I think clients, again, whether they’re adults or children, are very used to having their deficits noticed, very used to having people point out the children addressed inappropriately or that their children got dirty faces or their children have knocked things over. I think if we can notice the small strengths and the small positives, whether that’s a child who helps you pick up the pencils, those kinds of things can build a sense in caregivers that actually their child is a lovable human being, because sometimes caregivers forget that in the heat of crisis. So anything that we can do to build that capacity and to build that attachment and that relationship. There’s a beautiful Stephen Porges quote that says, “The removal of threat is not the same as the experience of safety,” and I think, for me, that really sums up so much in a few words.

 

Gill Munro (34:06): Some lovely practical advice. Kirren, were you going to add to that?

 

Kirren O’Brien (34:11): Yeah, I think following on from what Susie said, for children to thrive, they need to live in an environment of relationships that start with their family and extends out to their community. So their environment and relationships need to be invested in their development. And I think it’s every practitioner’s role to be invested in the child that’s presenting. So the biggest difference that they can make for that child is to strengthen the relationship between their caregiver and the community. I think we also need to be careful not to rely on a caregiver who’s experiencing crisis to be the one to flag support for their child. So they’re really in survival mode. If someone’s in crisis, they can’t be expected to accurately attune and identifying and seek the support that their child needs. And I’m not saying that their caregivers don’t know what their child needs, but

 

I think we really need to be curious and do our own engagement and assessments.

I don’t think practitioners should be afraid to ask or engage with the child directly. Like Susie had mentioned, it’s really important for us to have our own experiences with the child’s, because that can contribute to that assessment process as well. If it’s not possible, if the child’s not in the room, having purposeful conversations about their child and asking from the child’s perspective can be really helpful. So you can talk to the caregiver and say, “If your child was here in the room, how would they describe home?” Or, “How do you think they would describe you as a parent?” Other ways that we can support caregivers understand the child’s needs is to have them reflect on what their needs were as a child. So asking questions like, “When you were a child, what made you feel safe or what was important to you?” By actively building the skills and insights of the caregiver, we’re investing in children and their development.

 

We can do this by going back to basics. So talking to caregivers about the importance of play, role modelling, good engagement with the child, showing interest in the child and how they relate within the family unit, asking about their routines and identifying things that can help their family. So for further support, as practitioners we can refer to other parenting supports or we can source funding, so we can look at options to engage children in developmental opportunities. So working with children and families can have a really profound and lifelong impact. And I think we need to be curious, we need to be trauma informed, we need to be collaborative. And I think one of the most important things is we absolutely need to be quiet led.

 

Gill Munro (37:02): Lovely. And you mentioned some lovely strategies there, which I think are all supported by some of the resources on your website, which I’ll just mention again, the Statewide Children’s Resource Program. And I think we’ll be able to add a link to that and those resources after this podcast, because they are just amazing. So helpful.

 

Kirren O’Brien (37:23): Thank you.

 

Gill Munro (37:24): So I’m just wondering if there are any other practise skills practitioners need to support parents experiencing homelessness. I know you’ve already talked about a lot. Anything else that you’d like us to know?

 

Kirren O’Brien (37:36): Gill, I think we might need a new podcast for that.

 

Susie Lukis (37:41): I think it is important to have some theoretical underpinnings. I think the work that happens across homelessness and family violence straddles a number of framework. I think being gender informed, I think understanding attachment theory. We’ve talked about being trauma informed and understanding how experiences of families impact on the relationships within families, whatever that family looks like, is really important. I think not being too welded onto one particular theory is really helpful, but having a kit bag of strategies and of understandings. That there are different ways of looking at different relationships and being able to be flexible and fluid with that I think is really helpful.

 

But I do think the relationship underlies all that and the commitment to providing a service for children that supports connection with their caregivers and that supports building resilience. Resilience isn’t built by just ignoring what’s happening. Resilience is built by providing support, appropriate support, relevant support to all the members of the family and helping them move through the crisis as much as is possible in the time that we walk beside them.

 

Kirren O’Brien (39:02): And I don’t think be afraid to ask questions. Rather talk to your supervisor, talk to your colleagues that are Susie and my positions exist to do secondary consultations and support practitioners in how to respond, providing some more information on ways to support children.

 

So I think that there’s a real wealth of knowledge across our industries and we need to tap into that. We don’t know what we don’t know, but don’t be afraid to dive in, ask questions and let them tell their story. And we’ve really talked about focusing on relationships and engagement and doing that authentically. And I think that some things can happen organically. And where you feel like there’s a little bit of a blockage or you don’t feel that you have enough knowledge in a certain area, talk to those around you, because I think one thing that I’ve really noticed is there’s a lot of support in our sector and we all want to do the best that we can for our clients. And there’s others that are really willing to pitch in and support us to do that.

 

Gill Munro (40:07): Great. I think we’ve probably come to the end of our podcast, unless either of you had any more to say? No. Well, it’s been absolutely lovely talking with you both today. It really has. And I think you’re right, Kirren. I think we might need another podcast. But just such a wealth of information there. And, again, I’ll just reiterate the resources. Statewide Children’s Resource Program resources, which are free for practitioners to access and hopefully we’ll be able to share a link on our website. Thanks again.

 

Kirren O’Brien (40:39): Thank you, Gill.

 

Susie Lukis (40:40): Thanks so much, Gill.

 

Narrator (40:43): Visit our website at www.emergingminds.com.au to access a range of resources to assist your practice. Brought to you by the National Workforce Centre for Child Mental Health led by Emerging Minds. The National Workforce Centre for Child Mental Health is funded by the Australian Government Department of Health under the National Support for Child and Youth Mental Health Program.