Emerging Minds

In this episode, we’re joined by Natalie Papps, Alice Morgan and Sally Groom, creators of ‘One of a Kind’: a storybook for children who are in foster or kinship care due to their parent (or parents) experiencing mental illness. Natalie, Alice and Sally discuss the process of collaborating on the book with services as well as parents and young people with lived experience of parental mental illness and out-of-home care. They highlight some of the challenges children in care face, including being unaware of why they are in care, and how ‘One of a Kind’ supports practitioners and carers to open up these essential conversations.

One of the most effective ways to support children’s wellbeing during parental separation is to support their parents. In this episode, we talk with practitioners and parents about the importance of supporting parents’ wellbeing during relationship separation, and some ways to do this.

In this episode, cultural consultants Dana Shen and Shirley Young explore practices that support Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander infants and families’ wellbeing during the first 2,000 days.

In this episode, practitioners from various backgrounds discuss the impact of racism on culturally and linguistically diverse (CALD) children's mental health. They explore concepts such as white privilege, white fragility and decolonising practice, emphasising the need for cultural awareness, humility and active steps to address racism. The practitioners highlight the importance of recognising and challenging biases, promoting equity, and engaging in open conversations to create a more inclusive and supportive environment for children and families.

In this episode, we’re joined by Jackie Amos, Child and Adolescent Psychiatrist with Centacare Catholic Family Services. Jackie shares her wealth of experience in using parallel parent child narrative (PPCN) with children and parents. PPCN is an approach that can be used by practitioners in many different settings to support the parent-child relationship. In this conversation, Jackie explains what PPCN is, its key principles, and the benefits it has for children’s mental health and wellbeing.

In this second episode of our two-part series, our guests from The Bouverie Centre – Hanna Jewell, Banu Maloney, Julia Oxley, Nicholas Barrington and Angie Nyland – share supervision strategies that focus on the wellbeing of children. They discuss how supervision can help practitioners to find motivation, avoid judgement, and improve their contextual understandings of the families they’re work with.

In this episode, our guests from The Bouverie Centre – Hanna Jewell, Banu Maloney, Julia Oxley, Nicholas Barrington and Angie Nyland – share supervision strategies that focus on the wellbeing of children. They describe their reflective practice with practitioners and how supervision can improve practitioners’ skill and confidence in supporting children.

This episode comes from the Emerging Minds Families podcast. Host Alicia Ranford talks with Flick, a mother of four about how she learnt to parent when she wasn’t parented well herself.

In this episode, Dr Melinda Goodyear and Claire Marsh discuss the results of the Emerging Minds National Workforce Survey of Parent, Family and Child Mental Health 2020–21. They discuss the growing commitment among professionals to support child and family mental health, and the themes and challenges that stood out to them among survey responses. In particular, they explore the ways that organisations can help practitioners to support the mental health and wellbeing of infants in their work with parents and families.

In this episode, we’re joined by Kerryn Roberts, coordinator of infant massage at Relationships Australia South Australia (RASA). Kerryn shares her knowledge and experience in delivering cue-based infant massage to families in various settings. She explains the value of cue-based infant massage for infant mental health and the emphasis this program places on relationship development, encouraging parents to follow the infants’ lead. She also explores the importance of working alongside the parent-infant relationship and how this contrasts to intervening in the relationship.