People use reflection and reflective practice for many different reasons, including for self-care and to make sense of their experiences. In this study, social workers spoke about how they learned to be reflective, with many participants describing activities in their childhood that developed their reflective capacity. The aim of this article is to apply these ideas and examine the factors that enhance reflective capacity in children and young people. This research was part of a PhD study that involved interviews with 35 social workers in USA, Canada, UK and Australia. This exploratory study found that activities like story reading and asking children to reflect on their behaviour are early steps in the process of becoming reflective, but this needs to be followed up with conversations that deconstruct assumptions to make sense of experiences and explore multiple perspectives. This research is important for health and human service workers and others who want to develop reflective capacity in children and young people, particularly for children subject to disadvantage who need to overcome trauma and adversities.

Let me introduce myself. My name is Jill Wain, I am and have been married to a wonderful and supportive husband, Greg, for 34 years and we have seven children. Three of my children are the result of our fostering experience and I have four birth children. The children range in age from 7 to 33 years. Up until recently five were still living at home but major house renovations have come up with some creative options that have actually moved two on, but with threats that they will be back when the house is finished. We will wait and see. That fridge with food in it seems to hold the key, or is it something else?

So let me pose the question, what did 1 think fostering was going to be about? On the positive side I guess it was having fun times with kids, playing at the beach, reading stories, games at the park, playing on the tractor and offering a child a few experiences they may not have had, and perhaps there would be the occasional vomit that I would certainly ask my husband to clean up (I am not very good at dealing with this), the odd tantrums and perhaps the poo smeared on the walls as a bit of a balance.

The tabloid print media has played a crucial role in recent Australian social policy debates, particularly those pertaining to drug use and child and adolescent welfare. Much of the media's contribution has been around promoting simplistic and often conservative solutions to complex social problems.

This article examines the recent media-inspired furore over so-called ‘safe-sniffing’ practices in a Victorian welfare agency. It is acknowledged that other forms of media such as talk back radio may have had influential roles, as might other factors also. Particular attention, however, is drawn here to the Herald Sun's role in this affair, and to similarities with its intervention in earlier policy debates. Some comparisons are also drawn with the coverage of the affair by the Age and the Australian.

It is argued that the Herald Sun's specific campaign on chroming reflects a broader conservative agenda to undermine progressive social policy interventions including harm minimisation. This agenda may have significant implications for the Victorian community welfare sector given the tendency of politicians – whether in government or opposition – to bow to the demands of the tabloid media.

Last year, the Australian Childhood Foundation celebrated an important milestone. We turned thirty years old. For more than half of this period, we have sought to translate the richness of ideas that the field of neuroscience has offered to those of us taking care of children, young people and adults who have suffered trauma resulting from violation.

I was born in NSW and was apart of the assimilation policies of the late 1960s onwards. My experiences with this have always been negative, but I have managed somehow to stay positive with life. This, I believe, is where my identity has given me strength, my dreamtime has supported me and life generally has been a rollercoaster ride.

The ‘best interests of the child’ is rhetoric often applied and to an obscure legal concept. Nevertheless, it remains one of the most important standards, if not the most important, to be applied when attempting to determine what might be the interests of children at law. But as might be the case with other supposedly fundamental principles, there is much ambiguity in the meaning and uncertainty in the application of this principle and the standard it presumes to impose. Not surprisingly, many questions remain unanswered. Firstly, what exactly is the paramount status of the best interests standard? Secondly, in deciding the best interests of the child, does the ultimate responsibility lie with the judge or does it require some judicial deference to community values, as presumably expressed in the legislation? Lastly, does the standard, as it stands today, run the risk of being so general that its application can easily be distorted? Indeed, given the inherent difficulties in articulation and application of the standard, it might be unrealistic to expect mere legal provisions to ease social and emotional tensions that exist in the realm of child welfare today. As children themselves generally do not make applications to the court, their interests inevitably will be dependent on those of other parties, such as parents and the various professionals who assist them. As long as these principles are sought to be upheld in a system which is philosophically and practically adversarial, our ability to promote, maintain and protect the best interests of children will be inhibited. Is near enough good enough … or is it just the best we can do?

Conflict is an integral part of human relationships. As defined by The University English Dictionary conflict denotes a struggle, a clashing of views or statements, a meeting in opposition or antagonism. The position taken in the present study is that a conflict consists of an opposition between two individuals “when one person does something to which a second person objects” (Hay, 1984, p.2). This particular outlook is consistent with that adopted by Kagan, Knight & Martinez-Romero (1982) in their study of children's conflict resolution styles.

Paradoxically, while conflict may be an important aspect of human relations, conflict as evidenced in children's relations has received scant attention. Research has identified possible sex differences in children's conflict with boys engaging in more direct conflict than girls (Miller, Danaher & Forbes, 1986; Shantz, 1986). Boys do appear to use different conflict resolution strategies (namely more threats and physical force as opposed to negotiation) than girls (Miller et al, 1981). Some evidence also exists that there are developmental changes in children's conflict resolution strategies such that from 5 to 9 years there is an increasing use of a reconciliation conflict resolution style (Aboud, 1981).

Risk assessments by expert witnesses appointed by the Family Court of Australia (FCA), and as informed by findings of any investigations by police and child protection agencies, play a critical role in the adjudication of custody disputes involving allegations of child sex abuse. This study focuses on the contribution made by these independent advisors as documented in the FCA trial transcripts of a sample of 62 such cases in the period 2012–2016. Analysis reveals that those responsible for assessing risk shared a concern for an emerging pattern of applicant responsibility for systems abuse, in conjunction with emotional abuse, as a significant child protection issue. It also raises issues for the Court when there are multiple risk assessments coming from experts who bring different disciplinary and organisational perspectives. As an exploratory study, the implications of these findings need to be viewed through the lens of protecting the best interests of the child.

This paper argues that Australia is lagging behind in recognising the important role social workers and other human services workers can play in schools to improve social and educational outcomes for students. It reports on a small, school-based, human services program, the Schools as Communities program, located in the Australian Capital Territory, and outlines key themes that emerged in interviews with principals and other school staff about the program's effectiveness. The program's outreach workers, who were mostly social workers, had a dual role working with individual families and facilitating community development initiatives of benefit to the school community. Case studies demonstrate how their presence contributed to earlier involvement and support of vulnerable families. They also illustrate that the school setting enabled social workers to work more effectively to build social inclusion in local communities. The paper argues the case for using a wider range of human services professionals from the school base and calls upon education and human services systems to create more effective governance arrangements to make this possible. An expansion of the traditional disciplinary base of education to incorporate social workers and other human services professionals who are skilled at working across multiple domains is essential if schools are to maximise the impact of early intervention and prevention in working towards a more socially inclusive society.

Traumatised children can be easily dysregulated by relational dynamics. These children often experience the sequential or simultaneous stimulation of attachment and defence characteristic of disorganised/disoriented attachment patterns. Expressing their relational needs for proximity and distance can be fraught with conflict, confusion, frustration and fear. Parents/care-givers are often baffled about how to balance boundaries and limit setting with closeness and proximity in a way that is effective for themselves and their children. Additionally, parents/care-givers themselves may have histories of trauma and attachment failure that impair their own ability to balance closeness and distance. Both proximity seeking or closeness and defense or boundary setting actions are organized by innate, psychobiological systems of attachment and defense, and for parents/caregivers, the caregiving system as well. Each action system has to meet particular goals to achieve proximity to and security with a trusted other (attachment system); to defend and protect when needed (defence systems) and to protect and care for offspring (care-giving system). The legacy of trauma and attachment failure, with their consequential neuropsychological deficits, can constrain and disrupt adaptive responses to the arousal of these three systems. This paper clarifies the inborn systems that drive actions of proximity and distance. A case study will explore the interactions of these systems in child/care-giver therapy. Sensorimotor Psychotherapy will be described and somatic relational techniques will be illustrated to address proximity and defence/boundaries in the context of child therapy and care-giver/child therapy.

Wings: Social and emotional wellbeing in the early years is a professional development programme designed to assist educators in early years services to improve outcomes for children. It uses a strengths-based approach and supports educators to understand the impact of their interactions with children and to use communication strategies, such as descriptive feedback, to develop children's capacities. These strategies are used to help children recognise their strengths and build their ability to self-regulate and manage their own social and emotional wellbeing. This paper reports on the outcomes of the Wings programme introduced into early childhood services in rural and remote south-west Queensland, Australia, through the Community Wellbeing Project run by the Pathways to Resilience Trust in partnership with Anglicare Southern Queensland. Preliminary findings indicate the Wings programme successfully enhanced the confidence and knowledge of early years educators engaged in promoting children's social and emotional wellbeing.

I wasn’t born a Commissioner for Equal Opportunity. I spent my formative years as a child, and my re-educative years as a lawyer, a teacher of law, and a law reformer.

As a child I swore that I would never be as insensitive to children’s needs and desires as adults were being to mine. As I became an adult I realised the seductive truth that it is much more reasonable, and pleasurable it was, to assert my assessment of children’s best interests over their own.

This paper presents the findings of a study into current induction practices in foster care agencies throughout Victoria. Eighty per cent of registered agencies responded to a mailed questionnaire exploring: the means of initial contact for prospective foster families, information and pre-service education sessions, assessment of families and the ongoing relationship between new foster families and the foster care agency.

Educational strategies are explored and the issue of worker continuity is discussed in relation to foster family retention and maintaining commitment through early placement difficulties.

Jennifer Lehmann, in her reflections on out-of-home care (OOHC) in the preceding paper, offers an important contribution to this special issue of Children Australia (Lehmann, 2015). We are honoured to be involved and to provide this response.

This paper explores the recent emphasis on family reunification as an intervention strategy with ‘high-risk’ families whose children have been placed in the care of the State for reasons of significant abuse and/or neglect. It considers some of the dominant ideas and ideologies around reunification as an intervention strategy and reflects on the many layers of complexity involved in seeking to reconnect children and families under circumstances of risk Finally, it considers the ‘systemic factors’ that compound the inherent difficulties involved in returning children to the care of their parents and offers some practice strategies aimed at recognising and minimising those risks and maximising the likelihood of a successful and safe outcome.

This paper reviews the Skills Enhancement Project for social welfare workers in child protection. It argues that both the description and conceptualisation of competencies is flawed. These enterprise competencies use a language that suggests expertise and control in human relationships that is antithetical to good practice. The push for incorporation of these competencies into the higher education curriculum is also problematic because of their messages about worker client relationships; the failure to consider the moral and ethical basis of practice and the assumption that professional expertise is developed solely through a technical approach.

This article describes an Australian project which was conducted over several years in which small groups of young people were engaged to participate in the selection of staff to work in youth programs. It builds upon a series of small projects of a similar nature which have been conducted in the UK over the years 1993 to 1996. The collaboration of staff and young people in staff selection was a rewarding one, and led to the conclusion that with appropriate preparation and resourcing, this process is a very worthwhile addition to conventional staff selection, and one which adds useful information to the selection decision.

This article traces the history of child welfare in Australia, showing the ways in which policies and practices, deriving primarily from Britain, were adopted and adapted in a nation in which jurisdiction was split between colonies/states and further divided, within states, on the basis of race. It argues that child welfare has always been part of the nation-building project, central to national objectives when children could be constructed as future citizens, marginal, and more punitive, when they were more easily understood as threats to social stability. In this first part it examines the history of welfare provision for non-indigenous children in Australia from 1788 to 1939. The second part, to be published in a subsequent issue, will discuss post-war developments in services for non-indigenous children, indigenous child welfare services and the historiography of child welfare in Australia.