Parents have one of Australia’s most important jobs, so why don’t we have policy for them?
- Written by: Weekend Times
Australia has no shortage of policies relating to children.
In fact, these policies are often in the headlines. We invest billions of dollars each
year trying to improve outcomes for children and young people.
Yet we continue to see stubbornly high rates of child maltreatment and family violence, mental ill-health, school disengagement, youth offending and child protection system involvement.
The problem may not be that we are doing the wrong things. It may be that our policy architecture lacks the most important piece of the puzzle: parents.
From birth to death, we all need to be cared for, but as years of headlines have shown, Australia’s care economy faces big challenges. In this four-part series, experts examine how the country’s increasingly for-profit models of care and the government policy that spurred them on are failing those they’re supposed to protect – and what can be done about it.
Inconsistent support
For three decades, I have examined child maltreatment, child protection systems and family welfare.
Across these areas, one theme repeatedly emerges: we are remarkably willing to invest in systems that respond to problems, but much less willing to invest in parents – the people who have the greatest influence on children’s lives.
Parenting is one of the strongest determinants of child wellbeing. Warm, responsive, consistent parenting is associated with better mental health, stronger educational outcomes, healthier relationships, and lower risks of abuse, neglect, violence and offending.
But for all its importance, parenting remains largely invisible in policy.
Support for parents is fragmented, inconsistent, and often only available once families reach crisis point. We have pockets of excellent practice, but these don’t add up to a coherent national parenting support system.
Imagine if we approached health this way. We would never expect better health outcomes if we only invested in hospitals and ambulances, and not GPs and vaccination programs.
Yet when it comes to parenting, we often treat support as optional, episodic, or targeted only to “problem” families.
Missed opportunities
One of the most significant findings from the Australian Child Maltreatment Study was not simply that child maltreatment is common. It was that many Australians experience multiple forms of harm.
Abuse, neglect, family violence, bullying and adversity rarely occur in isolation. Harms accumulate across childhood and often have lifelong consequences for health, education, employment and relationships.
These findings reinforce the fact that we can’t rely solely on statutory child protection services to solve problems that often emerge long before a notification is made.
By the time a child comes to the attention of child protection authorities, opportunities for prevention may already have been missed. This is why many researchers and policy leaders have advocated for a public health approach to child wellbeing and safety.
Rather than focusing on responses after serious harm has occurred, public health approaches seek to reduce risk factors, strengthen protective factors and provide support across the whole population.
But to do this, we need to include parents.
Invisible parents
Parents go unmentioned across a broad range of policy areas.
In youth justice, debate often focuses on policing, detention, sentencing and community safety. Yet decades of research show many young people who enter youth justice systems have experienced significant adversity, including abuse, neglect, family violence and family disruption.
When governments discuss youth offending, parenting is often mentioned only in the language of responsibility for what has happened – not with a preventive lens.
If we genuinely want fewer young people entering justice systems, we must think ahead. That means supporting parents and carers long before problems emerge or become entrenched.
The same pattern appears in child sexual abuse prevention.
In the midst of last year’s safety crisis in early childhood centres, we interviewed parents about their role.
They want to keep children safe, but many lack confidence, resources, opportunities to learn skills in talking with their child about body safety and consent, or knowing what grooming or other signs of harm look like.
The same lesson emerges from contemporary debates about consent and respectful relationships education.
Across Australia, schools are being asked to deliver education on consent, respectful relationships, gender-based violence and online safety. Schools have a crucial role to play, but they can’t do it alone.
Research with school leaders, parents and communities consistently points to the importance of school–family partnerships. Children develop attitudes about consent and respect through everyday interactions with parents, siblings and the broader community, not just at school.
When parents are engaged and supported, school-based violence prevention education becomes more powerful. When parents feel excluded, uncertain or ill-equipped to continue conversations at home, opportunities for learning are diminished.
Read more: Australia’s childcare safety changes are turning one. Are they working?
What would better policy look like?
Social policies with a bigger role for parents would normalise parenting support as something for all families, not just those in crisis.
It would make evidence-based resources easy to access through trusted universal services such as maternity care, child health services and schools.
Effective policy should recognise that parenting challenges evolve over time. The support needed by a parent of a newborn differs from the support needed by parents navigating online harms or adolescent mental health difficulties, for example.
A modern parenting strategy would also promote diversity, seeking to support all manner of care arrangements and cultures.
Supporting parents isn’t about blaming them, or suggesting they alone determine children’s outcomes. Children’s wellbeing is also shaped by a range of things, from housing to poverty to education.
But because parenting is so important, it deserves more attention, not less.
If we are serious about doing better at protecting and raising children, parents are key. This means not treating parenting as an invisible private matter and recognising it as essential social infrastructure.
Daryl Higgins receives funding from the Australian Research Council, the National Health and Medical Research Council (as one of the Chief Investigators on the Australian Child Maltreatment Study), Australian government and state/territory government departments. He is also a director of the Parenting and Family Research Alliance.
