Transcript for
Breaking the cycle of intergenerational disadvantage

Narrator [00:00:02] Welcome to the Emerging Minds podcast.

Gill Munro [00:00:08] You’re with Gill Munro, and today I’m joined by Danielle Abbott from TACSI, The Australian Centre for Social Innovation. Dani joins us today to discuss the topic of intergenerational disadvantage and its impact on the families that she works with. Dani is the Quality Implementation Lead for Family by Family and the Virtual Village. These are programs that have been co-designed with families for families. They leverage the lived experiences of families and couple this with proven social theory and evidence-based practice to create confidence, self-agency and resilience for the families involved. Families that have been involved attest to the program’s helpfulness in shifting the negative effects of intergenerational disadvantage.

Gill Munro [00:00:55] So welcome, Dani, and perhaps we could start off by hearing a little about your role at TACSI and the type of work you’re involved in.

Danielle Abbott [00:01:03] I’ve worked on and off with TACSI for the last 10 years, currently working in the role of Quality Implementation Lead for Family by Family and the Virtual Village. And the kinds of projects that I work on at TACSI generally involve families or child protection or community. TACSI, The Australian Centre for Social Innovation, TACSI for short, ’cause that’s a long name, exist to find new and innovative ways of working with some very tough and complex problems. And all the problems that I’m involved in helping with or I’m picking or understanding are generally involving families who are having a tough time and often a tough, complex time with child protection.

Gill Munro [00:01:52] So from your experience of working with many families, can you talk to us a little more about disadvantage and the sort of issues that the families you’ve worked with faced?

Danielle Abbott [00:02:03] So I’ve worked with families both here in South Australia and in New South Wales in a place called Mount Druitt and what I’ve found is that families face multiple hardships and challenges and they can often pile up on top of each other. So it might be that you’re experiencing homelessness or a housing issue or a drug and alcohol issue or domestic violence or a number of those things all at once. It also could just be stress. The one thing that every family we’ve worked with has in common, despite their presenting problem, is social isolation. So what I’ve found across the years is that families often know how to find a particular service for a particular problem and how to reach out to that service. But one of the things that can be quite hard for a family is how do you find a friend and how can you find somebody who can walk alongside you that’s not a service. And I think that that’s quite a challenge for a lot of the families who we work alongside.

Gill Munro [00:03:15] That’s really interesting. And can you tell me a little about what you have noticed about the impacts of intergenerational disadvantage both on children’s social and emotional wellbeing and also on parents and parenting?

Danielle Abbott [00:03:29] One of the biggest things I’ve noticed about intergenerational cycles of poverty or disadvantage is that when families reach out for help for a particular problem, that the system is set up to respond in a bit of a cookie cutter kind of way to those problems. So if somebody is presenting with domestic violence, they can access the domestic violence service, homelessness, a homeless service, and those services are set up to respond to the problem rather than the person. And I think that that ongoing kind of interactions and often multiple interactions with multiple services their families can have, they can get lost in who they are and actually what would drive them to change something. And that gets repeated in the family. So, you know, for many parents, they have not been shown a particular way of parenting. So they might go to a parenting course or they might go and receive help for a particular problem, and they might be told that they need to work on the attachment with their child and those lessons can get lost because of they’ve never been shown that themselves. And so then how do you act? So I think one of the things that is really missing is we, we seem to disseminate information down to families and give them lots of information about great ways to improve on problems. But there is a lack of opportunities for them to learn in context of real life and from each other with Family by Family is a peer-to-peer solution, which takes a family who has been through a tough time themselves, but they’ve come out the other side and they doing really well now. And it links them to a family who is in the thick of a tough time to help make change. And there’s a couple of things that actually really help a family, especially a family who’s had intergenerational trauma in that context. One, is they meet somebody who can provide an enduring relationship. Often professionals can give so much, they might be holding heavy caseloads, we heard a lot about that when we were originally designing Family by Family, and that often meant that professionals might only give an hour a week to somebody and that hour is spent addressing the problem that they’ve presented with, that it lacked the ability to go past that problem into the person. But that person or that family might also then go and be alone in their experience after that hour session and not be able to take in or absorb that information. So in Family by Family, they’re introduced to another family in their own community who can help role model in context another way of doing family without a dissemination of information overload, because it’s live learning in context. And that’s really helpful because they can see when another family’s kid has a tantrum or when something goes devastatingly wrong, how that family is able to function or guide their way through that or find a solution and by learning from another family, that’s more helpful.

So I think that, you know, with trauma, we know that a child’s executive functioning can really be hindered. All that stuff that happens in the brain that helps you make a good decision about what to do next. But those children become parents and their executive functioning is still not operating or is hyper-aroused and reacting out of the trauma. And often clinical therapeutic models which are aimed to address some of that don’t always get through. And that cycle can be repeated. So by providing families ways to actually connect and learn out of that kind of clinical environment can actually really help that adult build those capabilities that are going to help them navigate their way through other challenges when they present. But we know that also that those challenges or toxic stress is often a pile up of different stresses that have happened across the course of a lifetime and continued to happen for our family. And unless we can help build that family’s capabilities to be able to remove those toxic stresses and guide their way forward, that we’re going to fail if we’re thinking about the next generation.

Gill Munro [00:07:53] You make a lot of really pertinent points there, Dani, and it sounds like such a great concept, having families supporting other families. So not only does the program deal with the social isolation aspect that families often experience when experiencing adversity, but it’s also a lovely way of helping families to learn skills that they may have missed coming from intergenerational disadvantage. So what would you like practitioners to consider when working with children and parents? What would you like them to think about?

Danielle Abbott [00:08:24] I would want people to think about a number of things. Often our services are aimed at either an adult or aimed at working with a child. But rarely do we have opportunities where family, whole families can work together to create change. And that’s something I’m quite passionate about, is what does it mean that that family is operating as a system and how can you help that system function better together, but also in the wider community. The other thing I would want other practitioners to really know about and what I’ve heard a lot from families is actually what does that mean to come from a very personal space when you’re working with a family rather than holding that professional wall, and I think that can be quite tricky. So it is actually one of the advantages of having families at the front line of service delivery is that they can hold a very different relationship and one that goes much deeper often than a professional can. But when that family comes into contact with a professional, I think being able to give of yourself and to actually know when to move into the private part of your life and give a little bit of that if it is what we’re also expecting families to give back to us, what it means to use your whole self in that. And I think there are different theories and different ways of looking at that, and I’m very much driven by humanistic theory and also like social pedagogies that would actually talk about like what is the professional hat that you’re wearing, which is really vital and important to be able to read a trauma or presenting behaviour or something. But also what is the personal and the private areas that you move in and out of and how do you hold that in order to actually have a good relationship that leads to change for a family? And, you know, it’s not that you’re giving everything or overloading a family with information, but you’re, you’re also acknowledging yourself as a human in that experience. Yes, you’re a professional, but yes, you’re also human and you may have experienced adversity as well. So one of the biggest things I hear from families is that they might get a social worker is fresh out of uni and doesn’t have kids and doesn’t know what they’re talking about because they’ve always lived in privilege. And for them to understand actually together we’re human and we’re holding something together can actually be a catalyst, a much bigger change. I think that’s really hard for professionals to enter into that space and to hold that space. But I also think it’s vital that we acknowledge that we’re all broken and that we’re all finding our own way through this world any way we know how together to make a relationship that can actually lead to long-term change.

Gill Munro [00:11:11] Okay, so what you’re describing there sounds like a kind of radical authenticity and genuineness.

Danielle Abbott [00:11:17] Yeah, it’s interesting that you named it as radical because I think it’s deeply human and we talk about trauma-informed practice but another way to think about that would be compassion-informed practice, and what does it mean to actually be sitting in compassion with the person sitting in front of you at any given time, and also acknowledging that that might be bringing up certain feelings or emotions for you and that you sometimes share that with the person that what it’s brought up for you and you humanise and normalise the experience. And now for professionals, we have to work really hard at that for families, and that’s what they do best, is they can just connect and they can cut through all that, all that overthinking that we do about it and be very natural as the change makers in that in establishing a relationship. So in Family by Family, we very much break down the relationship between the peers into three clear stages, the relationship building stage. That’s the stage where we have less of an agenda for families. We’re not really pushing them towards achieving goals. We’re actually just leaving space for the relationship to be established, a trusting relationship that will move a family into a space where they might actually think about an aspiration that they have for themselves or a goal that they might have for themselves. And then the families will move into what we call the ‘doing with’ stage. And that’s all about walking alongside the family, actually role modelling, going out and just having picnics and doing good things and things that are good for your family, but they’re very intentionally moving into this space. Sometimes doing for or going to the psychologist appointment with them, going to the DV service with them so that they are not alone. But the phase that’s really vital in that that with and moving to is what does it mean to do without and how can the family kind of intentionally withdraw and become more of a cheerleader for somebody who can achieve their own goals. And that experience of achieving goals and doing it on your own is vital for that kind of long term change of focus, because when you can learn that you can do it on your own without the support of professional services, you start to set more goals. And actually sometimes those goals translate into things that are really great for our economy, like employment or education outcomes.

And we start actually seeing this break in the poverty cycles that are happening for families. So for me, it was really exciting the other day to walk into a shop on Rundle Mall and actually bump into one of the children of the families I worked with 10 years ago who now grown up and got employed and is working and contributing back to society. And we’re actually starting to see those generational effects take place. I might just tell you the story of one of the ladies that we worked with in the prototype of Family by Family. And when we first met her, she was experiencing domestic and family violence. She was living in the housing house and everything she’d always been told was that her family would always be downer now. She felt stuck there and she had dropped out of high school in year 10, as had her siblings and her parents. She was a grandmother at 30, so she was a teen mum, then her children became teen mums and she came into Family by Family and she started becoming really interested in this kind of community work. And so she decided to enrol in uni and she actually got a degree in psychology. And through her doing that, her kids then all decided to go to uni. And so she has a child who is studying teaching and somebody who’s studying sports and now she’s bought her own house and she’s actually working in this sector as a professional in her own right. And she says, I have broken the intergenerational cycle. And so when we talk about breaking intergenerational cycles, I think we often think really long-term and we need to, but actually here, we’re seeing it happen within eight years. Somebody saying I can do all this within eight years as well, and I think that’s the power of helping somebody lift their sights and seeing more for this world and for us to actually look at a person instead of a woman who was in housing in domestic violence as a problem to be solved, as a person who could actually have much higher aspirations for their life. And how can we see that in them and help them get there.

Gill Munro [00:16:04] Can you talk a little more about that, how you work from a strength’s perspective?

Danielle Abbott [00:16:09] I think that there’s like a few kind of key magic ingredients in working in a strength-based way because, of course, identifying somebody’s strengths, who’s lived in trauma for a long time, can be quite confronting for a person as well, if they’ve never experienced somebody seeing good things in them that can actually hinder the relationship. So there’s a gentleness that comes to growing somebody’s strength. I think one of the keys to working in this way is not forcing somebody into a moment. So it’s key that services are voluntary, I think, or the, the way we’re working is voluntary and that people opt in to changing something. At first that change might be really small and we see it grow over time and we can grow with that person. So I think the voluntary nature of saying the fact that people can have self-agency and self-determination, they can choose the changes that they think are important for them, rather than coming to a service and having somebody say, this is what we think you need to work on at any given time, you know, to keep your kids, you have to follow a case plan. Will that case plan might have a real clear goal for that family? I don’t want to lose my kids, but it doesn’t get to the person then what the aspirations that that person might have for their family is. And so what we’re trying to do is open up a platform to say, hey, you know, families have their own aspirations. And what I’ve found over time is that those aspirations aren’t actually that different to the aspirations that the service sector might want for them, but we’re getting them there in a different way. So there was one lady that I worked with, this was where I learnt this lesson, the most in my own career, there’s one woman that I was working with and I know she wouldn’t mind me sharing the story because she tells it quite proudly. And I met her in a shopping mall out north. We had a pop-up store for Family by Family, and she walked up to me and she said, “can you help me get child protection off my back?” I was like, “oh I don’t know. But hey, how about we give it a go?” And I called her work and actually they were in court that week to have four children removed. She’d had 27 notifications in the past years from multiple services that were sitting around her and her family and the social worker has said, “actually, you know what? This is the first time she’s reached out actively. How about we do a supervision order and we see how she goes.” So we went out and we asked her if she’d like to set a goal with another family. And actually what she said to us is, yeah, we’d like to be more crafty as a family. Now that felt really at odds with the fact that she was really at risk of having children removed. But we said, OK, let’s do that. And the two families entered into the relationship building stage through doing craft, and they spent that real focused time working on building a relationship. Now, during that time, they decided to go camping and while they were out camping, her daughter was crying throughout the night and her family, her volunteer family could see she didn’t respond when her daughter was in need. So they started saying, “oh, I wonder if she’s scared. I wonder if she needs a hug. I wonder what her need is.” And so role modelling a response to that scenario. Now, when we came back just five weeks later and said, “OK, how’d you go at being crafty and what’s your goal?” She said, “I think that’s my real goal. I think my goal is I need to learn how to love my children.” And so she gets there herself without the pressure or fear of removal. If she doesn’t, we’re like, great. And then she leads the change in her own life to learn how to love her children in the context of another family. In that scenario, six months later, she had her case closed. So that doesn’t always happen that magically. But we’ve seen that happen repeatedly over time, that by allowing their family to lead their own change and their own aspirations, that they can actually get long-term benefits. That’s not to say that, you know, in a year’s time, that person isn’t going to come up into an encounter with another form of toxic stress and feel at a loss again, or their child’s going to hit another developmental age and they feel at a loss again. So service is always open to come back and reset goals, but you get better at achieving those goals each time and over time.

Gill Munro [00:20:47] Great. You really pick up on some of those key things with regard to intergenerational disadvantage in that story, the difference that relationships can make, and especially those relationships of support that families can call upon, how helpful modelling of parenting skills and interactions can be, and also how sometimes parents just really need help with executive function and co-regulation, particularly parents who have come from backgrounds of intergenerational disadvantage.

Danielle Abbott [00:21:13] Yeah, look, I mean I think self-regulation in general is a big part of that. And, you know, we all have ups and downs throughout a day and throughout our life. But for somebody who’s experienced toxic stress or trauma, they can, when they have something that throws them, they can really crash through that window of tolerance and have a very big up, where they have a massive adrenaline release and they’ve stopped thinking and they’ve lost that kind of cognition. And often that’s when we’re trying to work with families. But after that moment, they can actually have a big crash where they crash back down through that window of tolerance and their like, adrenal failure and they’re not functioning often. Sometimes when we meet families in crisis services and they’re the two worst moments to try and do any kind of therapeutic practice or work. But when somebody is in that kind of what we call the ‘window of tolerance’ in the ups and downs in that emotional regulation, then you can actually do some really concrete growth and learning, and it sticks in the brain. In Family by Family, the families get to choose when is that they’re ready to meet up and when they get to choose how they meet up and often happening in an environment which is very calming, which is actually the best place to learn and to learn from another if you want to change the way an adult or a child actually grows their brain.

Gill Munro [00:22:43] That’s fascinating. And I’m just wondering whether you would be able to provide any pointers for practitioners who work primarily with adults because, of course, most services, as you mentioned at the start, work just with adults or with children rather than with families as a whole. So I’m wondering if you had any tips on how practitioners could encourage those elements that you know are so important for children’s development and healthy family function, such as self-regulation?

Danielle Abbott [00:23:13] For me, I’m quite passionate about working with the whole family and seeing the whole family as a whole. Those things aren’t isolated from each other, but we have a tendency to want to isolate them from each other. So, you know, it’s about finding opportunities where you can be therapeutically working with the adult, therapeutically working with the child. But when do you actually give those two things an opportunity to come together and practice in the real world together in a unity. I really believe in this idea of systems theory and if you’re influencing one part of the system, you’re having an influence on the whole, whether you like it or not. So if you’re working with the family in a therapy, a parent in a therapeutic way, and you’re seeing growth there, well of course, that’s going to have impact on the child that’s unseen in that space and back in the home environment. Or if you’re working with the child and they have growth equally, they can influence their family. And if you affect one part of the system, you’re affecting the whole. We would truly believe though and we do this every week with our sharing families. We provide coaching spaces for the adults to enter into where they learn and grow together. At the same time, we provide coaching spaces for children where they can learn and grow together and so in children, we’re using kids coaches to really try and build out things like leadership, empathy, grit, role modelling and children are learning how to, how they are active participants in their communities, at their schools, in the context of their family. And parents are learning that, but equally, we will be providing at least once a term opportunities where we do that focus on the whole family, and that could be something really fun where they get to practise these things in the relationship to each other. And I think it’s that bringing together that’s really important. When working with some of that stuff about trauma and the brain and working with the individual, I think my favourite is the Dan Siegel. You’ve heard of the flip-lid, but that’s something that we would talk about quite a lot, he’s like, you know, you imagine your hand’s brain and this is your cognition and this is your emotional centre, or your amygdala, that sometimes when something triggers that, you might flip your lid and you’re just sitting in this very exposed place where there is no thinking happening. And personally, if I was working with an adult and that flip the lid moment happened, I would be like changing track, I wouldn’t be trying to achieve what I was hoping to achieve in that moment. I would be sitting and allowing time for that lid to come back down and for that calm window of tolerance space to be present again before we entered into anything. But that’s really important for families to understand that their kids also flip their lids. And so when you’re at home and your kid has flipped their lid, is often when you try to enter into that space of going, right, let’s have a teaching moment. Actually, there’s no thinking presence or helping families understand if that’s true for themselves, that’s true for their children. And so with the kids, often we just do a little hand action and have you flipped your lid and that’s enough. I would say that you’re learning as an adult what you need in order to be a present and capable parent is important, but it’s really hard if you’ve never experienced it for yourself as that child or in your own family. And so one of the evaluation results that came from Family by Family’s first evaluation was actually that the sharing adult, the volunteer family adult, was acting as a way of modelling attachment, the seeking family adult. And so the two parents were having moments where maybe it was a little hug, and at first that hug’s uncomfortable and then overtime they’re hugging. And then the mum starts feeling quite good about what that feels like. And then there’s a desire to want to then do that to your child. So the volunteer acts as a model of attachment that gets trickled down to the family.

Gill Munro [00:27:25] That’s lovely. And you’ve certainly given us some really great examples. Could we now turn to exploring the importance of supervision and reflective practice in this work?

Danielle Abbott [00:27:36] But I reckon I can talk a lot too what it means to work as a team and supervision and how we would view that.

Gill Munro [00:27:42] Yes, okay. That would be great.

Danielle Abbott [00:27:44] So in Family by Family, for us, one thing that’s quite a crucial element is the way a team of practitioners work together in order to get change for families. And we know that if we want to change the way a community and a family works, we also have to influence how the system supporting that, works. And so we believe in mirroring practice, and so in the same way that our volunteers get coached and they come to a team coaching session, our practitioners once a week enter into a team supervision session and a team coaching session where they’re able to actually talk about what’s been tough for them, whether that be personal or whether that’s in their work and where they can talk about some of the challenges of the families they’re facing. And there’s a couple of elements to that which are really key. One is the team is interdisciplinary, so you have practitioners who might come from a mental health background or from a social work background or a teaching background or a life coaching background, and they can all look at the problem in a different way. So it’s really interesting when you see this happen, you have the social worker saying, I’ve got a child and they have attachment issues. And then the mental health workers saying looks a bit like borderline personality to me, and, you know, the life coach is saying that that family is just having a tough time and needs to go forward. And together you can put a different lens onto the problem of the family, but also onto your own professional growth. And that’s really, really key. The other thing that’s key is actually accepting the professionals that support this kind of very hard work, a human, and also need to find a space where their own vulnerability can be held and shared and together can come up with solutions and their own goals and work towards their own change. And I think that that can be quite a confronting practise as well, because what it does is it actually shows that we’re all vulnerable here. And what does it mean to support each other in that vulnerability. So what we’ve seen, though, is that actually reduces vicarious trauma, it actually, instead of holding onto all these stories that you’ve heard as a practitioner, plus you’ve got what’s happening in your own life. And this fear of not wanting to open the floodgates is you give a place for that to be OK and to be held by the team so that they can then go back out and be present for families. So actually, one system affects the next system in the same way that the adult relationship affects the child, the practitioners sitting around there, if they are given the right supports and the right supervision, influence the trauma of the family. So the last thing we want is a traumatised system interfacing with the traumatised family. And I think for a lot of people here, very high caseloads and who are hearing very big and constant stories that vicarious trauma can be so present. So unless we find a way to address that at the same time so that we can actually all come together and be helpful help to the people who need it the most, we’re failing. So it’s an important part of the Family by Family practice to actually find a place for that vulnerability in order to be more helpful to families.

Gill Munro [00:31:11] Right, and that’s the type of support that’s behind that radical authenticity, as I like to call it. So you’ve got that support in your supervision practises where practitioners are encouraged to bring their whole selves in order to be able to bring their full presence to the families they work with.

Danielle Abbott [00:31:28] And, you know, there’s nothing worse than, you know, having been through your own experience with your own family. Maybe, maybe you have a child with a disability and you’ve been up all night, the whole week dealing with the crisis that that has brought into your own life and trying to negotiate your own services around your family and then rocking up to work and then having to negotiate the services around another family. And, but there’s no place to admit that I’ve been through this because you’re putting on this professional kind of mask of, I’m here for you, it’s all about you. When actual fact, what would help that family the most is for you to be honest with them and say, hey, I’ve had a tough week with my kid, this was what was going on then. The family’s like, oh, my God, I get it. And then now you’ve entered into a relationship and you know, OK. How are we going to get through this together? And it’s a much more equalising practise and it’s a human way of saying it’s OK, you’re just another family just like me.

Gill Munro [00:32:28] Yeah. Lovely example of collaborative practice, that’s for sure, isn’t it? It’s certainly thought-provoking and a really human way of working. So I’m just wondering if you do much work with pregnant women and if you could talk to us a little about that.

Danielle Abbott [00:32:44] A little bit.

Gill Munro [00:32:45] A little bit.

Danielle Abbott [00:32:45] Yeah, so we would still consider somebody a family if they were pregnant. Yeah. So we have had yes. Obviously the families we’re working with are always growing, but we’re not necessarily focused on that, although we have had families actually in the birthing suite with other families we’ve had. Yeah. So people are sharing their own experiences of everything from birth all the way through. Yeah.

Gill Munro [00:33:18] Right, and it’s okay if you don’t have much to add around that, but I was just interested in what you may have noticed with regard to pregnancy and intergenerational disadvantage.

Danielle Abbott [00:33:28] I mean, I think they’re, one thing that I was thinking about with the cycles of that I’ve seen that maybe I saw more present in Mount Druitt is the constant removal of children in that in that cycle of having more children and how that plays out. So often, we see families who’ve been interacting with a child protection system have very large families. And often that’s because children are removed and other children come along and then the cycle keeps going. I was working with one family in Mount Druitt and she had six kids at home and I would say she was living in what I’d call squalor and she hadn’t, you know, she was at risk of her children being removed and she had child protection. She had copper pipes stolen off her house. So she had child protection, asking her to get the water at very least back into the family property so that it was safe for the children to be there. And she had the school saying, you have to be here to pick up your kids on time, otherwise we’re going to be reporting you to child protection, right? So all these things are happening around her. She organised to get the guy to come around and fix the pipes, but he had, he could only fit her in for the time slot of three o’clock when she also had to be at the school, right? So you’ve got different expectations coming from different systems around the family. And unfortunately, those children were removed, all six of them. But then what I saw in that woman is those six children got spread out across New South Wales to different homes at the same time that that happened, she lost her parenting payment and went onto a Newstart allowance, which meant she also had to look for work and a certain number of works in order to get her payment. And now she had a different kind of request from child protection was, you need to start showing up to access if you want to get your kids back. With that loss of that parenting payment and not being able to get across New South Wales, you know, so you can just start seeing how all the different systems pile up her and her family. And they’re not all necessarily working with that family. Often women who are in that situation will have another child, because also when you have a child, you’re full of endorphins and love lives and for somebody to experience a lot of trauma, that could be the first time in your lifetime when you feel good about yourself. And so I just really feel like often, we’re geared to respond to that crisis-end when it’s almost like a little bit too late to try and help a family. And I have a strong passion about what does it mean to do early intervention, early prevention. And by that, I don’t just mean early in the child’s life or in pregnancy, I mean before the problems become a problem. And I think that families told us really strongly that they were often not meeting the criteria for the service that they thought that they needed. And what does it mean to, if a family saying they need help to be able to help them with what it is that they need at the time that they need it before it becomes toxic stress? And sometimes I think that perception is that you’re working with the “easier” families, but in actual fact, that’s crucial work. If we’re going to actually have a long-term view of stopping the crisis response altogether, is how do we actually zoom our services much earlier for families, even if it’s responding to a simple stress of I can’t sleep because my baby’s been crying all night, what does it look like to work with the family around that instead of working with the family around how do we stop these kids from being removed in the next few weeks where all the services suddenly zoom in, and of course, at the point of removal, all the services drop out around the family and they’re left alone, right at a very crucial point in that journey. So I’m really a big advocate for doing preventative measures and preventative work with families.

Gill Munro [00:37:36] That sort of speaks to the epigenetics argument as well, doesn’t it? You know, where you’ve got people even in preconception, women have experienced stress and adversity in their life, and so they’re already wired to pass trauma down. But with the right support early on for children and in that prenatal period, this can be turned around.

Danielle Abbott [00:37:56] Well, we we know from research that’s been done around survivors of the Holocaust and their children and grandchildren or even children, survivors of the Vietnam War, that actually the genetic make up of a person can change and that trauma can be genetically passed down. But the hope for me, the hope is if it can be passed down, it can be passed forward in a different way. And if we can create the right kinds of environments and places for families to interact, we can also change the genetic makeup that gets passed down to the next generation. A lot of that is about helping people find meaning in their experience. So with our volunteers, they all come from lived experience. So they’ve all had their own tough times and often they’ve been quite traumatic, tough times, whether that be domestic violence or own child removal, their own neglect or sexual abuse as a child, they all have lived experience. And from that they have a story that can help change something for others, but through the process of volunteering from your lived experience, what I’ve seen is families over and over again say I wouldn’t have wanted it, but I wouldn’t have changed it because I now I see value in what happened to me. So I have purpose in this world. And that purpose has actually given me confidence. And I’ve heard that story so many times that, you know, often what we want to do is push away the tough story and say, despite what you experienced, you doing really well, rather than actually, you can take what you experience and turn it into a value offer. And yeah, families always talk about that being a surprise in the volunteer role at Family by Family. So when we first started, we obviously had expectations of the kinds of outcomes that our seeking families would experience. But what took us by total surprise was the kind of outcomes we got for the volunteers who are using the lived experience. So we’ve seen huge employment and education outcomes, just people doing the most extraordinary things in their community, becoming really active capacity-building community people in their own right and doing their own innovations that have gone on to make change for the people that they live side by side with. And yeah, I think that epigenetics teaches us a lot about the kinds of practises that could help people do change for the next generation.

Gill Munro [00:40:37] It’s interesting how you frame meaning making as being a value offer, rather than it being about pushing that tough story away and saying despite that, you’ve done really well.

Danielle Abbott [00:40:47] And, you know, again, we say we noticed that in people’s lived experience, but I noticed that in myself. And I can say that I’ve been through my own tough times. And actually, if I look at my journey to being a professional in this space, it wasn’t because I was born into this world and had this really deep desire to go into the social sector. But in actual fact, in my own journey and I come from a very privileged background, but I hit hard times and I met a person who was abusive to me and emotionally abusive and an alcoholic and and I can talk about that safely. So when we talk about the bringing the personal, that’s a safe story for me to share and tell because it doesn’t define me. But it certainly threw me into a space of isolation for the first time in my life of loneliness, of not having the motivation to want to find employment, just wanting to hide away from the world. So all those things that we look at as problems in those with lived experience, actually the problems that also sit within ourselves as professionals. And that’s what I mean by the separation of we, we’re so good at othering, I think. And, you know, we see it so often, it’s like the people we work with, those people with lived experience, the professional, the service sector, the community, them, they. Who are they? They’re us, right? And actually, who is the face of child protection? I am. Who is the community? I am. Who is the person with lived experience? I am. We are, we’re in it together. And I think that that’s a radical shift that needs to happen in the sector, is that we’re so good at othering the professionals into a space of, you’re the one who helps guide the person with lived experience instead of actually having that real vulnerability and that courage to say, we are all people with lived experience of some sort or another, and at times we’ve all had a tough time.

Gill Munro [00:42:54] Well, that brings us to the end of the podcast. It’s been so interesting to hear about your work with the Family by Family program, Dani. It’s also been quite inspirational to hear the stories you’ve shared of the families who’ve been supported to achieve their own aspirations and goals to chip away at intergenerational disadvantage. So in conclusion, thank you so much for your generosity, Dani, and your demonstrations of radical authenticity.

Narrator [00:43:22] 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.