Transcript for
Overcoming adversity in work with mothers and children – part two
Narrator (00:02): Welcome to the Emerging Minds podcast.
Gill Munro (00:08): Welcome everyone. My name is Gill Munro from Emerging Minds. This episode is the second in our series, exploring the impacts of adversity on children and families. And we will be looking at practise that’s helpful in supporting parents to support their children’s social and emotional wellbeing and resilience. So, we’re joined today by Lisa Hofman and Gaby Munro from Jarrah House in New South Wales. Welcome Lisa and Gaby.
Lisa Hofman (00:35): Good morning, Gill. Good morning, everybody.
Gaby Munro (00:38): Hello, Gill.
Gill Munro (00:39): It’s always nice to start off by finding a little bit more about your roles. So, perhaps if you could start, Lisa, and just tell us a little bit more about what you do there at Jarrah House.
Lisa Hofman (00:50): I’ve been here more than a decade now, and my background is in social work and I’ve been specialising in child protection and working in the context of drug and alcohol for quite some time now. And that’s my role here at Jarrah House. So, we are a specialised service for women and children. So, it is emergence of drug and alcohol, mental health, and child protection. We have children under the age of eight living here and in residence with their mom while they go through drug and alcohol rehabilitation. So, my role here is to work closely with the mothers in a therapeutic sense. We use dialectical behavioural therapy here, and I also work with the mother-child relationship. And, in particular, working on building mom’s emotional availability to the child and reducing child protection risk.
Gill Munro (01:40): Thanks, Lisa. And Gaby, maybe you could tell us a little about your role at Jarrah House.
Gaby Munro (01:46): So, I’ve worked in childcare for about 35 years and I’ve been at Jarrah House for a bit over 12 years, and I’m employed here as a therapeutic childcare worker. So, I work very closely with Lisa because most children that come to Jarrah House have involvement with child protection and most of the children that come here also have developmental or behavioural issues regarding their often quite difficult and traumatic past and childhood. So, it takes a lot of therapeutic work with the child and the parent to help these children back to a better developmental level and slightly as I said, we work very closely with the mothers on emotional availability and on improving their relationship with children.
Gill Munro (02:37): So, these are families that you’re working with that specifically are experiencing issues with substance use, but I imagine that’s not the only type of adversity that’s going on in their lives. And perhaps just quickly, if you could give us a snapshot of the sorts of things these children and parents are trying to cope within their lives. Maybe, Lisa.
Lisa Hofman (02:58): So, the majority of the children who do come to reside at Jarrah House have been involved in the child protection system as Gaby has already said. The majority of the children we work with have some kind of developmental delay, commonly it presents in speech delay at the beginning, but as part of our programme, we do thorough developmental assessments. So, we do find that quite a number of issues in terms of gross and fine motor skill development can emerge. We have lots of children who come through on the spectrum with various challenges in terms of feeding as well, sleep and settling. And it does all tend to come back to trauma. So, it’s interesting that sometimes we see developmental delay in the beginning that can be overcome quite rapidly through the admission here at Jarrah House. And then in other cases, it needs more intervention.
Lisa Hofman (03:55): Most of the families who come through our programme have experienced domestic violence. All of them have experienced substance misuse, that’s why they’re here. And co-morbid mental health is a big part of the work that we do here as well. And all of that, of course, has a big impact on mom’s ability to safely parent the child and be able to be responsive to the child’s cues and also to make sense of, perhaps, their own early childhood trauma and the lack of emotional available parenting she may have received. And in the circle of security terms, we talk about that shark music. So, we encounter a lot of moms who have a lot of shark music here, which can get in the way of them being able to see their child and their child’s behaviour for what it is, and be able to respond appropriately and warmly to it.
Gill Munro (04:46): When you talk about shark music, can you unpack that a little bit for me?
Lisa Hofman (04:51): So, it’s not uncommon. I’m thinking of an example. And Gaby, you probably know who I’m referring to without needing to use names. We had a mom who came through our programme and she’d already had a daughter removed from her care. And, unfortunately, she had been involuntarily adopted. So, there was quite a significant trauma and loss for this mom already. And then she had a son. And when she arrived to us, she had her son with her. He was quite young still, and he was showing quite a lot of aggressive behaviour, lots of challenging behaviour, lots of biting and hitting, and really not showing mom a lot of delight or warmth. And in return, mom therefore had started to respond with lots of punitive kind of responses and not much delight and then certainly not much warmth. And, in fact, the way that she mentalized about her son was that he’s a monster and he really does hate me.
Lisa Hofman (05:46): He’d been quite recently restored to her at the age of two after his first two years being in care. So, mom was experiencing an awful lot of shark music rejection in terms of the loss of her older child. And now feeling that this little toddler was also rejecting her. And so, the work that we were able to do with her was really to transform her mentalising about her child. We used a tool called KIPS, which is the Keys to Interactive Parenting Scale. And we were able to capture on video while she was just playing and she normally would with her son moments of warmth and connection. Moments where he was looking at her with delight, and we were able to play that back for her, and from the strength-based perspective, start to build her warmth and her empathy for him to understand that what really was happening was this was a little toddler who was quite confused and quite traumatised by the sudden separation from the carers he’d known for the first two years and that it was going to take time and patience to build his connection with mom and his capacity to be able to share his cues and for her to understand them. And she started to see his aggressive behaviour more as a cry for help rather than a rejection.
Lisa Hofman (06:59): And so, slowly over time, we saw through the admission here, her being able to start to read his cues or rather his miscues. So, when he’d respond to her in an aggressive manner, she would show him warmth and love and care, and slowly he softened to her and she softened to him. And by the end of the admission, there was a day where he was unwell. He had quite a high fever. And for the first time, he turned to her and wanted to cuddle, wanted connection and warmth, and it was quite a moment where we could see that transforming.
Lisa Hofman (07:34): So, I guess, her shark music really was that she’d had her own experiences of domestic violence. She’d had her own experiences of being rejected in childhood, not shown warmth, not shown much nurturance, and then she’d lost an older child into care. So, she was experiencing all of that quite normal behaviour from her toddler who was really crying out for connection and attachment as rejection. So, being able to actually understand that as shark music and start to mentalize that differently, allowed their relationship to flourish.
Gill Munro (08:04): So, yeah. Gaby, I’m just really interested in how this plays out in the childcare centre. I mean, what you would witness between that mother and the little two year old, if you can talk us through that a bit. Just give us a visual of your work with the child and mom.
Gaby Munro (08:20): So, I’m really interested in seeing the arrival process of mothers and their children at Jarrah House because I can tell pretty quickly from the initial interaction with the mother and the child and observing the two of them together, what their relationship is like. So, we might have a child like the child Lisa was talking about coming into Jarrah House, looking around, seeing some toys, and immediately running towards the childcare centre. Not looking back, not waiting for his mother, having no anxiety about leaving her side and just wanting to come and play. Or we can have a child come in that chose the opposite. Very, very clingy, hanging off the mom, not wanting to make eye contact with someone, which is initially obviously normal because they’re in a very new environment with a lot of people they have met, but if this continues and sometimes it does for days, if not weeks, that’s again another relationship.
Gaby Munro (09:18): So, with the little boy that Lisa was describing, and he was having lots of very big feelings, lots of aggression. He’d obvious just been reunited with his mother and hadn’t had a chance to build up this emotional relationship with her. So, he felt very lost yet really no one he could rely on. So, he needed a lot of guidance and a lot of warmth and a lot of inclusion from both childcare and his mother to sort of find a place where he started feeling safe and could settle down a bit.
Gaby Munro (09:54): We also have children that are hypervigilant. So, we have a child, for example, who’s a little bit older who will not leave his mother’s side because in a way, even though he’s still very young, he feels he’s responsible to keep an eye on his mother and watch over her. So, this child has really high levels of anxiety, particularly, when he doesn’t know where his mother is, but the anxiety transfers then to other parts of his life as well. So, he lacks a lot of confidence and self-esteem, which makes social relationships at school, very difficult.
Gill Munro (10:30): Yeah.
Lisa Hofman (10:31): So, we treat the children here as clients as well. So, mom comes in and she’s a client of our service, but so is the child. So, I’m just thinking of the little boy that Gaby’s referring to and he’s six. So, he is of school age. And part of the work we’ve needed to do with him is to give him a voice so that he can start to express his feelings and make sense of the adverse experiences that he has had, which have included quite significant domestic violence, and also witnessing his mother’s suicide attempt. He needed to call for an ambulance and watch her be revived after an overdose. So, he’s experienced quite significant adversity and naturally is incredibly hypervigilant and concerned for his mother. He’s quite preoccupied with his anxiety around her wellbeing.
Lisa Hofman (11:22): And so, some of the work with him has been to give him a voice and he has started to open up to the childcare staff without his mother being present about some of his experiences and be able to be supported by another loving adult, caregiver figure who is not his mother. And I think that that’s a really important part of what childcare on-site offer here. And it’s why we refer to them as therapeutic childcare workers because it goes beyond providing them with social and educational and learning opportunities. And it really does become a holding environment for their emotional wellbeing, their psychological wellbeing, and they often start to open up and make sense of their experiences in a way that then allows to more ongoing therapeutic intervention.
Gill Munro (12:08): Yeah. And I guess it’s so important then for you to be able to support the child and mother so that the mother has an understanding and the child is able to communicate with the mother around those same stories. How does that start to come about?
Gaby Munro (12:22): Well, I use a lot of reflective parenting practise. So, when a child is having a temper tantrum, for example, and the mother is maybe inclined to tell the child to stop screaming, I will say, “I wonder what your child is going through right now. I wonder what your child is feeling. What sort of emotion do you think he’s showing us?” And let her think about it. She might initially just say, “Oh, he’s just having a tantrum,” and I’m saying, “And what emotion do you think he’s expressing with attention or, say, anger?” So, I will often try and say, “Well, if you’re angry, what helps you calm down? Do you like it when people send you away or do you like it when people stay close and offer you support?” And she said, “No, I need support in order to calm down.” And I said, “How about if we try that approach with your child? Maybe if you offered support instead of punitive action, see what happens.” And I let the mother do and practise, and often we get quite amazing results.
Gaby Munro (13:19): So, I use a lot of seeing and guessing. So, I say to the parent, “Well, what do you see? And what do you think your child is going through right now? What do you think this feels like for your child? What does it feel like for you?” So, that is one approach I take and I also do a lot of role modelling. So, we’ll walk up to a child like that and I will say, “Oh, I think you’re having very big feelings right now. I think you’re very angry because someone else took your toy away. I can see that you’re really upset about that.” So, I will actually role model how I validate feelings and how I validate emotions and encourage the mother to sort of try something similar and see what the result of it is.
Lisa Hofman (14:02): I’m thinking of another example and Gaby often refers to it in our parenting group of a mother who had rushed into the childcare, and she hadn’t seen the little one for the morning because she’d been in programme. And the little one was really enthusiastically colouring in and drawing and just very involved in an art activity and mom’s need in that moment was for some acknowledgement, some validation that she’d been missed, but the child was on the top of the circle. She wasn’t on the bottom of the circle ready to give mom a hug and warmth. She was really quite busy on the top of the circle exploring and making art. So, there was that mis-attunement between where the child was on the circle of exploration and where mom was on the bottom of the circle, wanting some more and validation and reconnection.
Lisa Hofman (14:44): And mom missed that cue and really interpreted that as a rejection, and it escalated quite quickly and ended with the child being dragged out of childcare tantruming and crying and feeling quite hard done by that. She hadn’t been able to finish her artwork. And it was when Gaby was actually able to give that feedback to mom about where the child was on the circle and how she might’ve been able to make a connection by joining her, enjoying with her in her play rather than trying to drag her to the bottom of the circle for a hug in that particular moment. And that was quite transforming because mom was then enable to start interpreting that behaviour as what it was, which was just that her child was on the top of the circle. And she learned to be able to try and make connection first and join her wherever she was, usually, on top of the circle of play in order to then actually have the child join her in the bottom of the circle for that reconnection and that warmth that mom was craving.
Gill Munro (15:39): Yeah. And Gaby, it’s really interesting to hear you talking as well from the child’s perspective. And I would just like to hear a little bit more around the communication of the child to the mother because children often take the blame, don’t they, for these sorts of things? They feel that it’s something that they’ve done, especially if they’re not allowed to communicate or nobody can help them communicate their feelings around that. How did that happen in your setting?
Gaby Munro (16:07): So, one thing that’s really important for us is to build a feeling of safety and security for the children. So, we have our routines of childcare and what we use is with circle of security approach, we use a lot of validating feelings. So, we don’t dismiss a child’s concerns or feelings. So, when the six year old had been with us for a few weeks, we started to feel very comfortable with the childcare workers. We had an interaction where we were sitting at the table and we were playing with Play-Doh and he brought up worries in a conversation. And I asked him, I said, “Oh, do you have worries?” And he said, “Yes, I have some bad thoughts.” And I said, “Oh, do you?” And he said, “Yeah, I’m really scared that my mom will die.” So, he was at that stage and disclosing to me what his big fear is.
Gaby Munro (17:01): I don’t jump in and try and fix things, but I actually validate how difficult that experience must be for him. He had counselling previously about this incident where his mother overdosed in front of him. And I asked him whether his previous experience with attending counselling was helpful to him. And he said, “Yes, that was really good to talk about it.” And I said, “Would you like to go and do that again?” And he said, “Yes, I would.” So, I was then able to approach the case manager and say, “The child has expressed to me that he would like to go back to counselling.” And she then had a conversation with the mother and we can then take steps to get that happening again for this child.
Gill Munro (17:45): You have taught so beautifully and well around your work. And I’m just trying to think of questions that will enable people that work in more generalist settings to pick up on some of these skills that you have, and maybe try stuff out in a setting where they don’t have the child and mother on-site, living with them. So, I’m just thinking, particularly around things like parents being triggered by child’s behaviour. And if you can talk a little bit more around that.
Lisa Hofman (18:12): Our perspective here at Jarrah House because we use dialectical behavioural therapy. It does actually assist us to work with what we refer to as shark music, or in more general terms, early trauma experiences that can shape how a parent interprets their child’s behaviour. So, in the sense of dialectical behavioural therapy, the connection between DBT and our parenting programme or our parenting intervention is that we are already working with the mothers in terms of their emotion regulation skills and their ability to use distress tolerance skills. So, in the sense of when they are then triggered because of their access to DBT, they’re already practising mindfulness, which hopefully will help them to catch when they’re being triggered. And to notice what it’s bringing up for them, both in terms of body sensations, but also in terms of thinking and also in terms of their behavioural responses.
Lisa Hofman (19:18): So, the hope is to build that level of mindful awareness so that rather than reacting to their child’s behaviour, they’re able to respond. So, rather than yelling and punitive responses, they start to be able to do what they need to do to take care of themselves in those moments. Give themselves a little bit of a time out, practise some distress tolerance skills, practise some emotion regulation, so that they can then parent from a place of a calmer space, not obviously completely calm. Parenting can be triggering and challenging for anybody. So, the mothers we’re working with who already have some additional vulnerabilities naturally, they’re going to find parenting stressful at times, but at least to be able to respond in a calmer and more regulated way starts to build their own sense of self worth. Their sense of self worth, not only as a mother, but as a woman.
Gaby Munro (20:11): I think it’s very important for a parent to see the child through a child lens because that is often lacking in our women. I mean, referring to your question, because obviously not everybody has the children and the mothers in a residential facility for several weeks. I think some psycho-education is really important around brain development of the child that a two year old is built to have temper tantrums between the age of two and three that this is developmental normal, that it’s not naughty or terrible or something awful that we need to stop. And to explain why it’s happening and then rephrase the behaviour for the parent and say, “What do you think your child’s expressing right now? Are you feeling really triggered by this? What is it that triggers you in this behaviour? What do you think is actually happening for the child? What is your feelings in this and what’s your child’s actual needs?” And this is quite possible in everyday situation. So, even in a walk to the playground, we can use this. We can use it when the women go to the shops and the children are starting to have a little tantrum in the supermarket. We can use this style of seeing and guessing and trying to see the child through the child’s lens and not the mother’s lens, which is sort of clouded by her own past trauma and childhood experiences, which is what we call the shark music.
Gill Munro (21:36): It’s just lovely to have the benefit of both of your wisdom and experience in working with these mothers and their children. And I think there’s a lot that people can get from the way that you’re describing this, that can be translated into a more generalist setting really. I’m just wondering… Something that I always think is a reasonably easy place to start, shall we say, is the establishment of routines between parents and child. We know that children feel… It really adds to their sense of stability and security if there’s a few routines and structures and so on. How do you go about that at Jarrah House?
Gaby Munro (22:11): So, a lot of mothers come in here and we sit down with them and we have a little questionnaire and we ask them about their routines at home. And, obviously, they come often from very adverse circumstances and there has been very little routine. So, mother will say, “There’s no firm bedtimes, there’s no firm meal times,” et cetera, et cetera. Jarrah itself, our programme, has quite firm routines for the women as well as for the children and the children then sort of have to slot into the system. So, by eight o’clock, all children have to be in bed, for example. And we help the mothers. We can sit down with them. We can actually make up a little schedule about, “What time does your child wake up? What do you do first?” “You get them dressed then you have to give them breakfast.”
Gaby Munro (22:55): So, we can help with that. We can visualise that into a visual chart or we can write it down. With older children, we could encourage that, “Oh, I’ve brushed my teeth. I’ve put a little star on it. I’ve done that. I do a little tick.” And a lot of mothers will say how suddenly having a routine has helped them enormously bringing some calm into their relationship with their children because they suddenly realise that they don’t have to constantly argue about what’s happening after dinner. “Are we having dinner at 8:00? Are we having dinner at 10:00? Are we going to bed straight after dinner?” Once the child gets used to having dinner, having a bath, brushing your teeth, then having a story read, and then it’s bedtime, the daily struggle stops. The child gets used to it. That is what we’re doing now. And suddenly they don’t need to constantly push limits and boundaries.
Gaby Munro (23:49): So, it is often a huge eye opener and many women walk out of here saying, “I will definitely keep to the routines that I’ve acquired at Jarrah House. It’s helped us so much having a calmer environment and less stressful situations where the child needs to constantly push limits and boundaries about bedtimes, meal times, et cetera.”
Lisa Hofman (24:09): Also, I find that it’s not uncommon when children have been in situations of domestic violence that moms have had to use routines that have potentially kept the child safe. So, things like using dummies or bottles for longer than necessarily ideal just as a means of keeping little ones quiet. Toileting, perhaps, with women who’ve come from homelessness. It’s been easier just to keep the little one in nappies beyond the usual developmental age just simply for lack of access to clean facilities and opportunities for regular hygiene. So, we also find that sometimes women rely on the support that they have available while they’re here at Jarrah House to be able to implement those big changes that they’ve been wanting to make, but perhaps just haven’t had the right circumstances and supports to implement. So, we often see moms when they arrive, little ones are still using dummies, still wearing nappies, perhaps clinging to bottles well beyond the age where perhaps it would be ideal. And we see those routines change as well with the right supports and in the right environment.
Gaby Munro (25:18): I have the experience often when I run the parenting group. When I talk about routines and rituals with children, I compare that to the women in our facility. We have a programme that is pretty structured. We have a group at 9:00, we have a group at 11:00, we have a group at 1:30. Of course, the topic changes, but that’s sort of the routine of when things happen. And if for some reason might be staffing issues, might be meetings that have to take place, this routine is thrown out. The women become incredibly unsettled. So, I make that connection. I say, “Imagine if we came in here in the morning and said, ‘Oh, look today. We’re not quite sure yet when we’re going to have a house meeting. And we might run a group, but we might not, and maybe today we’ll do the walk in the mornings instead of the afternoons.’ How would you feel about it?” And they said, “That would be terrible. That would be so unsettling. It feels so not safe.” And they can suddenly make the connection that their children would probably feel quite similarly to this if there’s no routines in the home. So, that works quite well as a comparison for them.
Gill Munro (26:26): Yeah. Lovely Gaby. Nice visual. Really is, isn’t it? It sort of makes it so clear. I mean, it’s funny because routines can seem to be something so restricting, but in actual fact, the way you’re describing it-
Lisa Hofman (26:38): Provide safety and predictability, which when you’ve been through a trauma, is really what you need, children and adults.
Gill Munro (26:44): Yeah. Another thing I was interested in is support. So, imagine that a lot of the women that come to you… Well, you’ve described that they come from backgrounds of family and domestic violence and intergenerational hardship and so on. So, can you talk to us a little around building those supports for women?
Lisa Hofman (27:02): So, we’ve been implementing the Parents Under Pressure programme, and that’s known as PuP around here, for quite a few years now. And we originally trained under Dr. Sharon Dawe at Griffith University and implemented that programme here back in about 2017. So, PuP uses a integrated framework that acknowledges the importance of community and family supports to build mom’s capacity to be able to be emotionally available to her child. So, that’s the lens through which we look when we’re discharge planning here and building support networks for mom and child to have available to them when they leave our programme. So, for some families, that’s going on to another longer term programme. For other families, that’s going home to the community. And either way, building those supports, whether that’s professional supports, community-based supports or kinship supports, is really important because we know that the antidote to addiction is connection. So, it’s often that isolation and that lack of support that’s actually led to an escalation in the substance use and the mental health issues that mom presents with when she enters our programmes.
Lisa Hofman (28:22): So, particularly, we would be looking at things like rekindling healthy kinship connections. So, often through the periods of addiction and the women report that they have fallen out with family members or family members have withdrawn support perhaps because they just felt they didn’t know what else to do. So, we quite commonly under our family inclusive practise policy here, incorporate family members wherever possible, where those connections are healthy and supportive. Obviously, sometimes there can be barriers to accessing kinship support in a generational patterns of addiction and mental health, for example, and trauma. But where possible, we try and invite family members in, we make referrals to family drug supports so that families have the right supports to be the right support for the women who are exiting treatment.
Lisa Hofman (29:12): We make referrals to professional support services where needed, and that’s part of our discharge planning. And it can be as simple as… We’ve got quite a few women who’ve gone through our programme and it’s about a referral to us supporting for them and their child to go and join a local soccer club or a local touch football club. So, it’s about rebuilding that sense of connection to their local community through a healthy activity or hobby. That’s going to be able to also be an opportunity to build relationship between parent and child through a common passion or interest.
Gill Munro (29:44): And Gaby, what about for the child? Because often the children will be completely unconnected. Is this something that you work within childcare with the mothers as well?
Gaby Munro (29:55): I would feed back a lot of information I get about the child, both the mother and the caseworker, who’s in charge of the discharge planning. So, we had a little boy here who was also quite isolated because he had to with… Together with his mother, flee his home environment because the perpetrator was at large. The perpetrator of the domestic violence. They had to move to a completely new area where they had no connections at that stage. And he was incredibly passionate about rugby. So, we actually managed while he was here to book him into a rugby club near his home. So, we supported his mother in doing that and he is still playing. And this is where he forms new connections now. So, he forms connections to same age children, but it gives his mother an opportunity when she goes with him to the training sessions and the games to also link up with other parents.
Gaby Munro (30:51): And another lens of that would be… We have a lot of Aboriginal children in our care. And some of them, obviously, due to the inter-general racial trauma the family has experienced, have often not had a lot of opportunity to be in touch with their own culture. So, we had one girl who was very passionate about dancing, and we facilitated that her mother booked her into Aboriginal dance classes in their local area. So, when they left here, the girl was then able to join this dance class. And it’s not just about going dancing and doing the cultural activity, but about liaising then and socialising with same age children and for the mother to meet other parents at the same time, which gets them out of the home and out into the community. So, I will work with the caseworker and the mother on this together.
Gill Munro (31:45): Great. Thank you so much. It’s just really fascinating to hear you both speaking. And we’ve really just about reached the end of our podcast, although I could just keep listening to you both, but if there’s anything we’ve missed, anything that you would like to add, perhaps you first, Lisa. Thoughts, dilemmas or strategies that we may have not managed to cover.
Lisa Hofman (32:04): No, look, I think we’ve covered a lot today. I guess, for us here at Jarrah House, it really is about being very lucky to have the opportunity to have the children on-site. And I’m very aware that some listening to this podcast may not have that same opportunity. So, it’s just to reemphasize again that even if the child is not present in the service where you’re having interactions with the mother or the parent, it is really possible to engage the parent in conversations about how they’re thinking and feeling about their child’s behaviour. And that can tell you awful lot in terms of what might need to be worked on and what might be going well and what might need some encouragement in terms of how the parent is responding to the child’s behaviour. So, it leads to some very interesting conversations and how two different parents can interpret the same sorts of behaviour from their child. And it really is influenced by their own history, how they were parented, and whether they’ve had exposure to adverse experiences. So, I think that would be something I’d really emphasise. It’s possible to get a lot of information by engaging parents in those conversations.
Gill Munro (33:14): Yeah. Great. Really useful. Thank you.
Gaby Munro (33:18): Exactly. I’m glad Lisa mentioned that because that is also… Not all the women at Jarrah House have their children here with them. Some might be staying with grandparents, some might be in foster care, and we can actually help a lot with improving the relationship with those children as well through the skills we described; the scene guessing. How do I talk to my child on the phone? Oh, I could write my child a letter to keep in touch. We had someone ask a question the other day. “My daughter doesn’t really want to talk when she’s on the phone.” She’s a five-year-old, she’s come home from school and it’s mom’s phone time and she says, “What did you do at the school?” And the child says, “Nothing.” And then we could suggest to the mother that she would just talk about her own day. The things that may be would interest the child that you went for a walk today, and you went down to the beach, and you found some beautiful shells.
Gaby Munro (34:06):
And again, this is sort of trying to explain to the mother why the child might not be wanting to talk at four o’clock after going to school, but also what can I do to still engage my child and not feel that we had a 30-second conversation and then we both hang up. So, we can do a lot of work for the women that don’t have their children with them here as well.
Lisa Hofman (34:28): And there’s some wonderful resources available on the Emerging Minds website in terms of the package that was released last year, just building relationships with children who aren’t in the parent’s care through various circumstances. So, we draw on those resources. We’ve got those posters up around our facility here at Jarrah House, and we quite often get parents, mothers coming and asking us for ideas of how they can connect with their child while they’re not in their care.
Gill Munro (34:57): Thanks for the plug there, Lisa. And I’ll just reiterate for people that was the Keeping in Touch resources. Many, many parents out there who don’t take their children into therapy with them, but there’s always some strategies that those counsellors can use to actually do something towards building that parent-child relationship in those circumstances.
Lisa Hofman (35:17): And the work of Arietta Slade around keeping the child in mind, that it is so important to value what practitioners are offering to children, even if they never actually meet the child just in supporting the mother or just in supporting the parent because the more that they can be supported to find their own wellbeing, the more that they’re going to be capable of being reflective and offering attunement to their child. So, there’s so much value to what practitioners are offering when they’re sitting in a room and a mother or a parent, even if they never meet the child.
Gill Munro (35:50): Great. Thank you so much, Lisa and Gaby. It was really interesting to hear from both of you and I’d love to get you back one day, actually, but we’ll have to leave it there just now. Thank you so much again, and we’ll talk to you again soon.
Lisa Hofman (36:04): Thank you, Gill.
Gaby Munro (36:05): You’re very welcome.
Narrator (36:08): Visit our website at www.emergingminds.com.au to access a range of resources to assist your practise. 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.