Family adversity: here’s what we can do right now

What’s family adversity?

The term family adversity covers a range of negative issues that kids can experience:

• childhood maltreatment (e.g. physical, emotional or sexual abuse and neglect)
• household dysfunction (e.g. parental mental illness, witnessing domestic violence)
• community dysfunction (e.g. exposure to violence, bullying, discrimination)
• experiencing poverty during childhood

Some of these are also called adverse childhood experiences (ACEs). Family adversities don’t just affect children while they’re happening – they are also associated with poorer physical and mental health outcomes throughout a person’s life.

In Australia, family adversities have a huge effect on children’s health and wellbeing. The Australian Child Maltreatment Study highlighted just how pervasive childhood maltreatment is across the Australian population. They found that two out of every five kids experience more than one kind of maltreatment, and that people with these childhood experiences are almost three times as likely to develop a mental illness.

Even though we know how common these problems are and how significant the effect on our kids’ health is, there’s no consensus on what exactly we need to do about it. Kids and families who have these experiences might ask for help from education, health, justice or social care services – and often, the response they get is siloed in whichever sector they present to. We need effective and integrated responses to adversities, and that means stakeholders across sectors, including academics, practitioners, policymakers, and experts with lived experience, need to come together and decide what to do about adversities across various sectors, populations and contexts.

The authors of the Childhood Maltreatment Study call for a public health approach and say all levels of government must collaborate on financial resourcing and policy frameworks. The National Framework for Protecting Australia’s Children 2021–2031 and the recent Early Years Strategy also highlight the need for all government agencies to work together. That’s where we come in.

What’s this study about?

To help chart a holistic path forward, the team at the CRE into Childhood Adversity and Mental Health decided to gather views and opinions about how Australia addresses family adversity from expert intersectoral stakeholders, including policy makers, professionals, academics, and people with lived experience of adversity.  The team aimed to:

• Find out which service, research and policy areas diverse experts think are most important for preventing or mitigating the impacts of family adversity on child mental health and develop action priorities for each area.
• Find out if people with lived experience of family adversity have different priorities than those with no lived experience.

How did they do it?

The CRE invited a group of professional and lived-experience experts from health, education, justice and social care sectors to attend a two-day national symposium workshop. At the symposium, these experts worked together to identify a list of Research, Service and Policy priorities for family adversity and mental health. After that, the team sent out an online survey to find out how both participants and a wider expert group would allocate resources to the priorities identified in the national symposium.

What did they find out?

This study found a few interventions that everyone could agree on.

Preferred Service priorities included:

• providing integrated health, social, education and legal care hubs for children and families 
• providing nurse home-visiting programs in early childhood.

Preferred Research priorities included:

• scaling up existing evidence-based interventions
• evaluating cross-sector, flexible funding models for services addressing childhood adversity.

Preferred Policy priorities included:

• developing evidence-based policies with evaluation and implementation plans
• flexible funding models to support integrated care.

Participants with lived experience of adversities were most likely to prioritise:

• embedding lived experience in family adversity research with dedicated funding and key performance indicators
• schools shifting from a punitive approach to discipline to social–emotional and relational approaches
• evaluating the role of service navigators helping parents navigate complex health, education, social and justice systems. 

Now what?

These results provide detailed and actionable clarity on next steps to address family adversities. The priorities call for a focus on cross-sectoral approaches to preventing or mitigating the effects of family adversity.

Australia is ready for action – there’s no time to lose, with thousands of Australian babies born into adversity every year.