Self-reflection tool

What is this tool for?

This tool is designed to support you to reflect critically and work in a way that is more ethical, reduces the chances of negative impacts, and ultimately leads to better outcomes for children and families.

It might also contribute to you feeling increased meaningfulness and commitment to your work.

How and when should you use it?

To get the most out of it, you’re encouraged to try exploring these reflective questions in curious, inclusive and non-judgemental spaces with colleagues and others who have different worldviews and lived experiences from you. Your most valuable companions in this work will be curiosity and openness to hearing your ideas reflected back and being challenged.

This tool is most useful when completed with others, and regularly revisited. Reflection works best when it is undertaken across a whole organisation, not just in one team or role. When people at different levels – from executives and managers through to project staff – engage with these questions, it helps shift culture, surface assumptions, and build shared language and accountability for the work.

Reflecting on who you are and what you bring to this work

• What are the identities and values that fit for you in your life right now?
• How often and in what context do you spend time with people who do not fit those identities?
• How do you think about children and families with different identities to you?
• Are you familiar with the concept of intersectionality? If not, you might like to watch What is intersectionality? (YouTube)

Figure 2. Social identity wheel

The social identity wheel can help you reflect on what shapes you in life and work. The context always matters – in some contexts you will have power and in some contexts you will not.

Social identity wheel designed by Elizabeth Pearce and Michaela Willi Hooper, Open Oregon Educational Resources, CC BY 4.0.

What assumptions do you notice you hold about people who are:

• infants
• children
• young people
• in single parent families
• from different ethnic or cultural backgrounds than you
• Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander
• migrants or refugees
• LGBTQIA+
• in families that are different to yours, whether that be blended, foster/kinship, same-sex or multigenerational
• higher weight
• visibly disabled
• living in poverty
• living with mental illness or distress
• unemployed
• incarcerated?

Where do your assumptions come from?

How do these assumptions relate to your identities and values you reflected on earlier in this tool?

Assumptions about infants and children

Often, the mental health of youth is privileged over that of infants and children. Likewise, the mental health of individuals is often privileged over that of families.

The Five perspective shifts can help support reflections about assumptions we make about infants and children in their families and social environments.

Thinking about privilege and systems of inequality

It can also be complicated to understand how you can experience privilege and disadvantage simultaneously, and how they can shift across our lives and in different contexts. It’s possible to experience hardship and suffering in life and still have access to privilege.

Unpacking this requires courageously stepping away from defensiveness and towards vulnerability and curiosity. This is especially important for navigating the shame that may arise from beginning to comprehend your privilege and understanding more about what it means for children and families who don’t access to it.

To get started on thinking about and naming examples of privilege and disadvantage, take a look at out this privilege checklist and the following diagram demonstrating systems of inequality.

In the following adaption of Nixon’s (2019) coin model of privilege and critical allyship, the top of the coin represents the privilege of those who experience advantages that others don’t, because of who they happen to be, not because they earned it.

The coin represents the social structure that produces and maintains inequality (e.g. sexism, racism, ableism).

The bottom of the coin represents the oppression of those who experience disadvantage that others don’t, because of who they happen to be, not because they earned it.

These systems of inequality interact with one another and shape complex patterns of advantage and disadvantage. People may experience privilege in some ways and disadvantage in others depending on how these systems intersect in their lives.

Figure 3: System of inequality coin intersections

Note: The systems shown are examples and do not represent all forms of inequality.

Reflecting on possible intersections with you and your workplace

Think about how this might intersect with you and your workplace by considering the following questions.

The knowledge your organisation values

• What knowledge does your organisation privilege? What influences the way your service is delivered? Who benefits from this?
• What are the ways that systems of privilege and oppression shaped you – and your colleagues’ – education, training or the history of your field(s) of practice? Who benefits from this?
• What does it mean to treat lived experience as a legitimate form of evidence, equal to academic and clinical knowledge?

Assumptions about the people your organisation exists to support

• How do you think privilege influences what is considered ‘normal’, ‘acceptable’ or ‘healthy’ in your field of work? Who benefits from this?
• What are the systems of inequality your organisation might be embedded in (e.g. structures such as policies, practice guidelines, and/or hierarchies of knowledge or power)?
• What power does your organisation hold that might influence your interactions with children and families?
• In what ways do your organisational structures and systems perpetuate or challenge existing patterns of oppression for children and families?
• Do any of the way people in your organisation respond to distress experienced by children or families reenact power-over violence?
• How does your organisational culture promote diversity, inclusion, and equity for children and families? What are some ways this could be improved?

Reflecting on your responses to privilege and assumptions

Consider a time you noticed a privilege that others have that you do not.

• What is it like to notice that?
• How possible does it feel to make that visible to those with privilege?

Consider a time a person has made harmful, stigmatising or inaccurate assumptions about you.

• What kinds of effects did/does that have?
• How did/does it shape your relationship with that person?

Consider a time you realised you made harmful, stigmatising or inaccurate assumptions about children or families you encounter in your organisation.

• What made it possible for you to notice that?
• How did you respond?
• What might make it hard for them to let you know or to see the effects of your assumptions?
• What might it take for them to point this out – especially if it is an assumption they are up against regularly? What might be at stake for them?
• How could you make it more possible for people to give you feedback? (Remembering that people with lived experience should not be expected to educate you, you are responsible for doing the work.)
• How might your identity, privileges, beliefs and assumptions impact how you make sense of information or interpret or evaluate the experiences of the children or families you work with?
• We all interpret information through our own worldview by default. What could you do to navigate this?

Ideas for lifelong learning

Understanding, making visible and dismantling systems of privilege and oppression is a lifelong undertaking which requires that you continue to making space to hear the perspectives of others. Some ways to do the work might include the following:

• Reading books and articles, or attending workshops to learn about different perspectives and knowledges.
• Listening to and believing people when they tell you about their experiences of disadvantage and the effects it has on their life.
• Discussing these ideas and asking others you trust to hold you accountable for rigorous feedback.

You might also be interested to read How ready, willing and able are you to embark on an authentic co-design process?

More tools and resources to support you to dive deep into unpacking privilege include:

• families lived experience stories of getting through tough times especially those about:
  • managing money, housing and health challenges
  • responding to shame and stigma.
• An invitation to narrative practitioners to address privilege and dominance (relevant for any practitioners)
• The ABC’s You can’t ask that series
• Racism, children’s mental health and anti-racist practice, White fragility by Robyn DiAngelo, the Me and white supremacy workbook by Layla F. Saad
• Read:
  • Growing up Aboriginal in Australia
  • Growing up Asian in Australia
  • Growing up African in Australia
  • Growing up disabled in Australia
  • Growing up queer in Australia
• We’ve got this: Stories by disabled parents and a podcast episode with the editor, Eliza Hull, on Parenting with a disability and responding to stigma.

References

Nixon, S. A. (2019). The coin model of privilege and critical allyship: Implications for health. BMC Public Health, 19(1), 1637. DOI: 10.1186/s12889-019-7884-9

Pearce E. B. (2021). Contemporary families in the US: An equity lens (2nd ed.). Open Oregon Education Resources.