Stories are a powerful therapeutic tool that can create real change and give children and young people the skills and confidence to make their voices heard in future.

Relationships with family come with good times and challenges for everyone, but for children and young people in care, this birthright of family connection can often be deprioritised for the presumed “best interests” of a distressed child.

The brain is preoccupied with our safety. However, being safe doesn’t equal feeling safe. Have you ever said to yourself, “I know it’s true, but it doesn’t feel true”? The thinking brain (the upper part of the brain) can “know” it is safe, while the emotional brain (the lower part of the brain) doesn’t feel safe. Children need to experience felt safety to recover from traumatic events and adverse histories.

We all hear that we must prioritise our wellness and mental health, but what does this actually mean? How do you practice “self-care” when it feels like one more exhausting task on your to-do list? And when it’s so much easier to just put it off until later and start watching your favourite Netflix series instead… If you’re feeling stressed, overwhelmed, lacking in compassion, or burnt out, practicing mindfulness during your day, especially in the workplace, could be the answer.

If you’ve ever found a resolution hard to stick to and depressing to fail, remember that young people in out-of-home care have similar experiences with care goals. If you’re working with someone who’s struggling with a care goal, maybe this can help you find something outside the box that would fit their abilities better. A goal that is a trivially easy behavioural direction change rather than a behavioural destination puts less pressure on kids to be “better” and offers an avenue for slower and more permanent progress, with more opportunities to enjoy success.

Identifying sleep problems in children and young people can help prevent the onset and worsening of mental illness, substance misuse, and other health impairments. Thus, identifying a child or young person’s sleep pattern as a part of any assessment can be extremely important to enable appropriate forms of intervention to take place.

Christmas is a time of joy and celebration for many Australians, but it can also bring pressure and unrealistic expectations. The shops are decorated, Christmas songs are everywhere, and cheesy ads show happy families celebrating. However, for young people in residential care, these seemingly innocuous things can be a blunt reminder of their own challenging situations and experiences, triggering big emotions and behaviours.

In regular foster and kinship carers sessions I run, someone tells a story about a child or young person in their care who regularly lies.  In this blog we run through reasons why children lie and tips on how to address lying.

Support for young people in care has been extended past 18 to the age of 21. This historic change allows desperately needed time to develop independent and interdependent living skills that young people need for healthy adulthoods.

In this month’s Community of Practice workshop, we explored the additional challenges that LGBTQIA+ young people face in care, reflecting on how to provide a secure base in care and environment for exploring self-identity safely.

This month, we are thrilled to welcome Billy Black to our team at the CETC as a Care Experience Resource and Training Specialist. Billy has advocated for children and care since she was 15 years old. It was around this time that Billy realised she was a powerful advocate for change – not only in her own life and care experience but at a systems level.

What are care leaver’s experiences of having their own children during transitions from care? In this guest blog, multidisciplinary researcher and practitioner Jade Purtell highlights three core issues that impact how care leavers with children access and receive support.