The best thing we need to do for families in Australia.
I was delighted to be asked by wonderful friends at Families Australia to be a National Families Week champion for 2021. It is easy in these recognition weeks to gloss over what they truly are asking us to do as individuals and as a collective.
It is really an excuse to pause and consider, be reflective and play a role in changing your thinking, your understanding or lending you hand to an action.
In our capacity, Life Without Barriers deals with families every day, whether it is recognising our 8,000 staff and their families, or how we work with people supporting a loved one to make a decision about aged care, or disability services. We meet families who are escaping horrendous violence overseas, who then need to try to re-establish here in Australia as refugees or people seeking asylum. We meet families devastated by the impact of drugs and alcohol and family violence.
And we also work significantly with children, young people and families who are engaging in the child protection system.
As a society we largely celebrate that Australians are brilliant at rising up together at times of great crisis – by way of example we have seen tremendous comradery during COVID, bushfires and floods. Over the years, as farming families have done it tough, we have dug deep and thrown the weight of our support and care towards them.
At our best we are fantastic, at our worst we can be profoundly judgmental. We see this often in how families who are engaging in the child protection system are spoken about and treated. For families whose children are removed through the child protection system, shame and stigma is pervasive and is not in the interests of children. The long term impacts of this shame and stigma lasts for generations.
What I can promise you after working in this field of services for the past few decades, is there is no greater heartbreak you can bear witness to, than the grief and pain a parent experiences when they can’t be with their child or equally that of a child who can’t be with their parents. It is real.
We know there are simply some circumstances where it is not safe for a child to be with their family, but in the majority of cases families can be strengthened to thrive together. Life Without Barriers knows all families have strengths and over the past few years we have partnered with parents and families themselves in a range of ways. We recently partnered with Family Inclusion Strategies in the Hunter region (FISH for short) to pilot the Parent Peer Support Project in Newcastle. Peer support and advocacy has the potential to be a game changer in the child protection system.
In a nutshell it means people with a lived experience of the child protection system wrap their arms and support around families currently engaging in child protection - offering hope into processes that for families and children, can often feel so hopeless. The results are fantastic and as part of our Strategy 2025 commitments we plan to do even more in this space.
It is evident we can offer services and programs that can help provide the support and skills for families to overcome the barriers that have made them vulnerable. However, what we can do as individuals is make a decision to drop our propensity for judging families -something we often do with such force and righteousness and is never in children’s interests. In fact it is categorically harmful.
We need simply to draw on that compassion we have as a nation and bring it forward to strengthen families. All families. What I can absolutely promise, is that if we make that simple and easy step, we will experience communities that are happier, more connected and we will significantly impact future generations of children.