Latest / The Post-Separation Abuse Podcast / 110. Working as intended - Part 3: The standard - How to tell who actually knows what your children need

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110. Working as intended - Part 3: The standard - How to tell who actually knows what your children need · The Post-Separation Abuse Podcast

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_00: Welcome back to the Post Separation Abuse Podcast.
• 0:04
  SPEAKER_00: I'm Danielle Black.
• 0:06
  SPEAKER_00: This is part three of our Working as Intended series.
• 0:11
  SPEAKER_00: The first two episodes covered the legal end of the system, what lawyers are taught, what an independent children's lawyer actually is.
• 0:20
  SPEAKER_00: Today we're going to widen the lens.
• 0:23
  SPEAKER_00: Before we get into that, I'd like to invite you to take a slow deep breath in, to hold it for a few moments, and then to release it slowly.
• 0:35
  SPEAKER_00: To unclench your hands, unclench your jaw.
• 0:40
  SPEAKER_00: Lift your shoulders up to your ears and then let them drop.
• 0:44
  SPEAKER_00: Let some of that tension dissipate, even if just a little bit.
• 0:49
  SPEAKER_00: This is part of your daily regulation practice.
• 0:53
  SPEAKER_00: And I do invite you to try and do these sorts of things, not just when you're listening to this podcast, but even at other points throughout your day.
• 1:02
  SPEAKER_00: It really does make a difference when we're needing to call on some of these regulation and grounding techniques in moments of dysregulation.
• 1:12
  SPEAKER_00: Back to the episode.
• 1:14
  SPEAKER_00: I'm going to start by sharing something that happened to a client of mine recently.
• 1:20
  SPEAKER_00: She's been doing the work, the documentation, the capacity building, so the regulation exercises on a regular basis, really navigating everything very carefully, building her knowledge, growing her capacity, learning how to advocate effectively.
• 1:38
  SPEAKER_00: She had very specific concerns that she was able to articulate well about her former partner's capacity to safely care for their two and a half-year-old.
• 1:49
  SPEAKER_00: She raised some of those concerns with her family doctor, a medical professional, someone whose entire framework is supposed to be evidence-based.
• 2:02
  SPEAKER_00: The advice that she received was to give her ex a chance.
• 2:08
  SPEAKER_00: Quote, how else is he going to learn?
• 2:12
  SPEAKER_00: Along with being told that, hey, it'll give you a really nice break.
• 2:17
  SPEAKER_00: Let's just sit with that for a minute.
• 2:19
  SPEAKER_00: A two and a half-year-old, genuine safety concerns about the other parent, about their capacity, about their ability to be attuned.
• 2:29
  SPEAKER_00: And the professional advice was to just be optimistic, to see it as getting a little bit of a break from parenting.
• 2:36
  SPEAKER_00: And for the protective parent to see their role as partly being about giving the other parent an opportunity to learn.
• 2:46
  SPEAKER_00: Something incidentally that they hadn't done in the two and a half years since that child was born.
• 2:53
  SPEAKER_00: But now apparently it should be perfectly okay for the protective parent, the primary caregiver, to just hand this child over so that the other parent, the non-primary caregiver, the father in this instance, so that dad can practice.
• 3:11
  SPEAKER_00: Now that GP is not the system that we've been describing in this series.
• 3:16
  SPEAKER_00: We were talking about family law.
• 3:18
  SPEAKER_00: But the same architecture, the same training gap, the same set of unexamined cultural assumptions and ideologies run much wider than family law.
• 3:29
  SPEAKER_00: The systems that make decisions about children's lives are not limited to lawyers and the court system.
• 3:36
  SPEAKER_00: They include the doctors, the coaches, the mediators, the family therapists, the parenting programme facilitators, an entire industry that has built itself around the language of being quote child focused without being required to know what that actually means.
• 3:54
  SPEAKER_00: This episode is about that industry.
• 3:57
  SPEAKER_00: Let's start with the two words at the centre of it.
• 4:02
  SPEAKER_00: Child focused.
• 4:04
  SPEAKER_00: Those two words appear on the website of virtually every practitioner program and service in the post-separation space.
• 4:12
  SPEAKER_00: Every family lawyer, mediator, family dispute resolution practitioner, divorce coach, parenting coordinator, every family therapist working in this area, every ICL, child focused, in the best interest of the children, child-centred practice, prioritizing children's needs, keeping children at the heart of the process.
• 4:36
  SPEAKER_00: The language is everywhere, and everyone using that language should really be asked the question What does the research say about children's attachment needs post-separation?
• 4:47
  SPEAKER_00: And how does that inform your practice?
• 4:50
  SPEAKER_00: That is the question that all of the people working in this space should be asked.
• 4:55
  SPEAKER_00: I'll say it again.
• 4:57
  SPEAKER_00: What does the research say about children's attachment needs post-separation?
• 5:03
  SPEAKER_00: And how does that specifically inform your practice?
• 5:08
  SPEAKER_00: Now there are various possible responses to that question, and they tell you everything that you need to know.
• 5:16
  SPEAKER_00: The first response is specific.
• 5:19
  SPEAKER_00: It references attachment theory, it can mention the hierarchy of attachment relationships and why that hierarchy matters for parenting arrangements.
• 5:29
  SPEAKER_00: It might reference the research on overnight care for babies and toddlers, or the work on children's stress response systems under sustained conflict, or what the developmental literature says about the difference between a parent being involved and a parent being a primary attachment figure.
• 5:46
  SPEAKER_00: It names researchers or frameworks or specific findings, and it's the response of someone who has actually read the research and integrated it into how they work, into how they think, into how they approach the families that they support, into how they think about children and children's needs.
• 6:07
  SPEAKER_00: Then there are the responses that use values-based language and ideological platitudes.
• 6:13
  SPEAKER_00: Things like children need both parents in their lives.
• 6:17
  SPEAKER_00: Children need to see their parents communicating respectfully.
• 6:22
  SPEAKER_00: Children need to be protected from conflict.
• 6:25
  SPEAKER_00: Children need to feel loved by both parents.
• 6:28
  SPEAKER_00: Now, all of that is true in the way that humans need food and water is true.
• 6:34
  SPEAKER_00: It's not wrong, but it's also not research.
• 6:37
  SPEAKER_00: It's also not evidence-based.
• 6:39
  SPEAKER_00: It's the cultural assumption that precedes the research, dressed up in professional language that sounds nice on the surface, and the professionals who reach for it, often genuinely well-intentioned, genuinely caring people, they're reaching for that language because they don't have the specific knowledge to reach for anything else, to reach for anything more precise, and that gap matters.
• 7:06
  SPEAKER_00: Because your children's nervous systems are not served by good intentions.
• 7:11
  SPEAKER_00: They are served by accurate research-grounded decisions made by people who actually understand what children need.
• 7:20
  SPEAKER_00: Any practitioner who cannot answer that question specifically, who responds with values language rather than an understanding of the developmental science, does not have the knowledge base to be making decisions about what's best for your children.
• 7:36
  SPEAKER_00: They do not have the knowledge base to be making decisions about your children's lives, regardless of their credentials, their title, or how many times they use the words child focused in their speech or on their website.
• 7:51
  SPEAKER_00: If you've been listening to parts one and two of this Working as Intended series, you already know that Australian lawyers complete their mandatory training without ever being required to study family law, child development, attachment science or family violence.
• 8:06
  SPEAKER_00: That training gap does not disappear if a lawyer later decides to change careers.
• 8:12
  SPEAKER_00: For example, when a family lawyer decides to become a divorce coach, they bring their legal knowledge to the coaching context.
• 8:21
  SPEAKER_00: When a family lawyer becomes a mediator, they bring their legal knowledge into a mediation context.
• 8:27
  SPEAKER_00: When a family lawyer becomes a family dispute resolution practitioner, they bring their legal knowledge into a dispute resolution context.
• 8:36
  SPEAKER_00: Now none of that is inherently a problem.
• 8:39
  SPEAKER_00: Legal knowledge can be genuinely valuable in all of those roles.
• 8:43
  SPEAKER_00: The problem is when the legal knowledge is the whole of it, when the practitioner has not done the additional work of building genuine competence in child development, attachment theory, trauma-informed practice, and the nuances of coercive control, and when they describe themselves as child focused without having that important foundation.
• 9:06
  SPEAKER_00: Mediation is a specific area worth naming here.
• 9:11
  SPEAKER_00: Family dispute resolution practitioners are accredited in Australia under the Family Dispute Resolution Practitioner Framework.
• 9:19
  SPEAKER_00: That accreditation has genuine requirements, training in dispute resolution process, communication skills, and screening for family violence.
• 9:29
  SPEAKER_00: It's certainly not nothing.
• 9:31
  SPEAKER_00: But it's focused on a process that occurs between adults, on facilitating communication, on reaching agreement.
• 9:39
  SPEAKER_00: A mediator can be fully accredited and have no more understanding of attachment science than the average person.
• 9:45
  SPEAKER_00: And yet mediators are sitting in rooms facilitating agreements about children's lives.
• 9:51
  SPEAKER_00: Agreements that will shape those children's developmental trajectories, often without any requirement to understand what children actually need from those arrangements and whether their needs are going to be served by the arrangements that are being discussed and agreed upon in that mediation setting.
• 10:10
  SPEAKER_00: The words, quote, child focused and quote, best interests of the children are used in mediation rooms constantly.
• 10:19
  SPEAKER_00: And we should be asking mediators what those words actually mean from a developmental science perspective and really pay attention to what comes back.
• 10:28
  SPEAKER_00: The broader point here is that a professional mediation credential tells you what someone is trained to do with adults in conflict, but it tells you almost nothing about what they know about children.
• 10:39
  SPEAKER_00: Those are different things and they require different knowledge.
• 10:43
  SPEAKER_00: Let's now walk through a little bit more of the post-separation industry landscape because honestly, there's a lot of it and not all of it is anything like what it claims to be.
• 10:56
  SPEAKER_00: Let's talk about coaching.
• 10:58
  SPEAKER_00: Coaching is an unregulated industry in Australia.
• 11:01
  SPEAKER_00: Anyone can call themselves a coach.
• 11:03
  SPEAKER_00: There's no mandatory qualification, no minimum training standard, no regulatory body with any meaningful teeth.
• 11:11
  SPEAKER_00: This creates enormous variation in quality, from the genuinely skilled research-informed practitioners to people who maybe complete a weekend certification at best and then set up a website.
• 11:24
  SPEAKER_00: The certification programs that produce divorce and separation coaches vary dramatically in content and rigour.
• 11:33
  SPEAKER_00: Many are built on general life coaching frameworks, positive psychology, goal setting methodology, communication skills, and apply those to a separation context.
• 11:45
  SPEAKER_00: Now these frameworks can have value in certain circumstances, but they are not adequate preparation for working with a protective parent who's navigating coercive control, a high conflict former partner with sophisticated image management, a family law system that's consistently misidentifying the dynamics, and children whose developmental needs are at stake.
• 12:07
  SPEAKER_00: A divorce and separation coaching certification program that does not include substantive child development attachment theory, trauma-informed practice, and coercive control content is primarily a commercial product.
• 12:20
  SPEAKER_00: It might produce competent generalist coaches.
• 12:24
  SPEAKER_00: It will not produce practitioners equipped to work safely and effectively in this specific post-separation space, especially when we're talking about supporting parents who are trying to understand what is best for their children after separation.
• 12:42
  SPEAKER_00: There's also growing pressures from some areas of the coaching space to formally regulate and accredit the coaching industry, specifically the separation and divorce coaching industry.
• 12:54
  SPEAKER_00: Now, in principle, I do think that quality standards are a good idea.
• 12:59
  SPEAKER_00: But in practice, the question of who's setting those standards is everything.
• 13:04
  SPEAKER_00: There are lawyers who want to be involved in that accreditation process.
• 13:09
  SPEAKER_00: So the profession whose mandatory training framework contains nothing about child development, attachment science, family violence, and has had over three decades, over 30 years to fix that and hasn't, wants to set the standards for who is qualified to coach families through separation.
• 13:29
  SPEAKER_00: Now, I don't know about you, but as far as I'm concerned, that is not any assurance of quality.
• 13:35
  SPEAKER_00: That is professional protectionism at its best.
• 13:38
  SPEAKER_00: And if it succeeds, we will have recreated the Priestly Eleven problem in an entirely new context.
• 13:44
  SPEAKER_00: A credential that signals perhaps a degree of competence without actually requiring the knowledge that actually matters for children.
• 13:54
  SPEAKER_00: The benchmark for any coaching credential in the post-separation space has to be developmental science if that person has any intention of supporting parents with post-separation parenting decisions.
• 14:09
  SPEAKER_00: Not a curriculum designed by course creators whose primary expertise is in marketing.
• 14:15
  SPEAKER_00: Certainly not a competency framework developed by legal professionals protecting professional territory.
• 14:22
  SPEAKER_00: But the developmental science, the attachment science, the coercive control research, the neuroscience of trauma, that should be the standard.
• 14:32
  SPEAKER_00: Everything built on that is potentially useful, but everything that skips it is not fucking fit for purpose.
• 14:40
  SPEAKER_00: Now let's talk about post-separation parenting programs.
• 14:44
  SPEAKER_00: Post-separation programs are widely recommended across the system by lawyers, mediators, family report writers, sometimes by the court itself.
• 14:54
  SPEAKER_00: The premise is very reasonable.
• 14:56
  SPEAKER_00: Helping separated parents understand dynamics of post-separation, helping them with skills to communicate and cooperate more effectively, all of those sorts of things are good for the adults and ultimately good for the children.
• 15:11
  SPEAKER_00: The problem is that so many of these programs are built on a set of assumptions that are not universally applicable.
• 15:18
  SPEAKER_00: They assume two parents who are in conflict but fundamentally capable of good faith cooperation.
• 15:26
  SPEAKER_00: They assume that the conflict is mutual and symmetrical, that both parties are contributing to the dysfunction in roughly equal measure.
• 15:34
  SPEAKER_00: They assume that better communication skills are going to produce better outcomes.
• 15:39
  SPEAKER_00: But none of those assumptions hold in a relationship where one parent has been coercively controlling.
• 15:46
  SPEAKER_00: In that context, post-separation parenting programs don't just fail to help, they can actively cause harm.
• 15:55
  SPEAKER_00: They place the protective parent in a position of false equivalence, as though the dysfunction in the relationship is a shared responsibility to be resolved through, quote, better communication, rather than a pattern of deliberate abuse that needs to be recognised and responded to.
• 16:12
  SPEAKER_00: But the reality is that very few post-separation parenting programs screen adequately for coercive control, most facilitators aren't trained to identify it, and the language of co-parenting, cooperation, communication, the needs of both parents, is the language of symmetrical conflict applied indiscriminately to situations that are anything but.
• 16:35
  SPEAKER_00: Then we have parenting orders programs.
• 16:38
  SPEAKER_00: Parenting orders programs are specifically designed for parents in family law proceedings.
• 16:44
  SPEAKER_00: They can be court-ordered, sometimes strongly recommended by report writers or lawyers.
• 16:50
  SPEAKER_00: They're designed to help parents understand their obligations under parenting orders to improve communication and focus on children's needs.
• 17:00
  SPEAKER_00: The quality does vary.
• 17:03
  SPEAKER_00: The better programs can be genuinely useful for parents in moderately high conflict separations, but where both parties are capable of engaging in good faith.
• 17:13
  SPEAKER_00: The problem again is the assumption of symmetry.
• 17:16
  SPEAKER_00: Parenting orders program that treats a protective parent and a coercively controlling former partner as two adults with equal responsibility for the conflict is not a neutral intervention.
• 17:30
  SPEAKER_00: It's one that, in practice, tends to pathologise the protective parent's attempts to maintain boundaries as equivalent to the controlling parents' attempts to maintain control.
• 17:42
  SPEAKER_00: It can be worth finding out whether or not the program has taken coercive control into account and how it can manifest in post-separation communication.
• 17:52
  SPEAKER_00: You may also like to find out whether facilitators are trained to identify asymmetric conflict dynamics.
• 18:00
  SPEAKER_00: If the answers are vague, you may like to keep looking.
• 18:04
  SPEAKER_00: Unfortunately, because of the problems with many parenting orders programs, they are often treated as just a box ticking exercise.
• 18:14
  SPEAKER_00: Let's just get it done because that's what we've been asked to do by the court.
• 18:19
  SPEAKER_00: And the fact that things like coercive control is often not taken into account, it can mean that the content of these programs are really not fit for purpose.
• 18:30
  SPEAKER_00: Now let's talk about family therapy in the post-separation space.
• 18:34
  SPEAKER_00: Family therapy, when done well by a practitioner who genuinely understands trauma, attachment, and coercive control can be profoundly valuable.
• 18:45
  SPEAKER_00: The issue is not with the modality in and of itself.
• 18:49
  SPEAKER_00: Rather, it's with the variation in practitioner quality and the assumptions that some practitioners bring to the post-separation context.
• 18:57
  SPEAKER_00: The most concerning version of family therapy is what is sometimes referred to as reunification therapy or reconciliation therapy.
• 19:07
  SPEAKER_00: Interventions that are designed to rebuild the relationship between a child and an estranged parent, sometimes court-ordered or strongly recommended in cases where a child has expressed resistance to spending time with one parent.
• 19:21
  SPEAKER_00: The research on reunification therapy in the context of family violence and coercive control is not supportive.
• 19:28
  SPEAKER_00: A child's resistance to a parent is information.
• 19:32
  SPEAKER_00: It may be information about the child's experience in that relationship, about their false sense of safety, about what they've witnessed or been subjected to.
• 19:42
  SPEAKER_00: Therapeutic interventions designed to override that resistance without first thoroughly assessing its source are at minimum ethically questionable.
• 19:53
  SPEAKER_00: In cases that are involving genuine abuse, they're genuinely harmful.
• 19:59
  SPEAKER_00: If reunification therapy or any equivalent intervention is recommended in your matter, ask what the practitioner's training in coercive control specifically looks like.
• 20:10
  SPEAKER_00: Ask how they assess whether a child's resistance is a response to genuine harm versus other factors.
• 20:17
  SPEAKER_00: Ask what their framework is for working with children who have been exposed to family violence.
• 20:23
  SPEAKER_00: And take their answers to a practitioner that you trust for a second opinion.
• 20:28
  SPEAKER_00: Any therapeutic intervention designed to reconcile a child with a parent they are resisting without a thorough, coercive control informed assessment of the child's experience in that relationship is ethically problematic and potentially harmful.
• 20:44
  SPEAKER_00: And unfortunately there are many bad actors in this space.
• 20:48
  SPEAKER_00: I have had clients come to me with all kinds of horror stories about therapists who practice quote unquote reunification.
• 20:56
  SPEAKER_00: Yes, even in Australia, including forcibly restraining children, irrespective of the level of distress of the child.
• 21:07
  SPEAKER_00: Yes, physically restraining and attempting to force a child into a situation with a parent that they are actively resisting.
• 21:17
  SPEAKER_00: In my view, that is not therapy, that is abuse.
• 21:21
  SPEAKER_00: Now on to the quote child focused professional development circuit.
• 21:27
  SPEAKER_00: There is a whole professional development ecosystem in Australia built around family law, conferences, seminars, CPD events, attended by lawyers, mediators, report writers, family consultants, all the important players.
• 21:41
  SPEAKER_00: These events can do important work in some areas.
• 21:45
  SPEAKER_00: They are also where professional culture is transmitted, where assumptions can be reinforced, and where the ideology of contact of a meaningful relationship with both parents and Unexamined presumption that children benefit from significant time with both parents is often rehearsed year after year.
• 22:08
  SPEAKER_00: The language at these events is consistently child focused.
• 22:12
  SPEAKER_00: The best interests of the children is the frame through which every discussion is conducted, and the practitioners who attend them can leave feeling very affirmed in their professional values, without necessarily having engaged with a single piece of current developmental research that might challenge the framework that they brought in with them.
• 22:32
  SPEAKER_00: This is how professional culture reproduces itself.
• 22:37
  SPEAKER_00: The confirmation bias.
• 22:39
  SPEAKER_00: Not through malice, but through the comfortable circulation of shared assumptions and ideologies among people who are never required to test those assumptions or ideologies against the evidence.
• 22:51
  SPEAKER_00: Now, report writers are likely going to be covered in other episodes, standalone episodes.
• 23:00
  SPEAKER_00: Because the reality is that I really don't think we can look at them as just one more practitioner in the post-separation ecosystem that we've been discussing here.
• 23:12
  SPEAKER_00: Rather, they really do serve quite a significant load-bearing role for the entire system's claim of being child focused.
• 23:23
  SPEAKER_00: Now, what I mean by that is that part of why lawyers don't have child development training and likely don't think that it's necessary is because that's what the report writer is supposed to be bringing.
• 23:36
  SPEAKER_00: The independent children's lawyer likely doesn't think that they need to know anything about attachment because the report writer should be providing that knowledge, insight, and expertise.
• 23:53
  SPEAKER_00: Every other role in this system that doesn't require developmental science as a mandatory foundation has in effect outsourced that requirement to the family report writer or single expert witness.
• 24:10
  SPEAKER_00: And with that being the architecture, then the question of what family report writers are actually trained to understand is really not just a simple knowledge audit.
• 24:23
  SPEAKER_00: Rather, this is a question, a load-bearing question for whether or not the family law system can credibly claim at any level to be making decisions genuinely based on children's needs, on their age and developmental needs, on their attachment needs.
• 24:41
  SPEAKER_00: Family report writers in Australia are typically social workers or psychologists with experience in family law contexts.
• 24:50
  SPEAKER_00: They're appointed by the court or in some matters engaged privately to interview the parents and the children, depending on the ages of the children, to observe interactions between parents and children, to review documents and then to produce a report containing insights and recommendations about parenting arrangements.
• 25:11
  SPEAKER_00: Their reports can carry significant evidentiary weight.
• 25:16
  SPEAKER_00: In many matters, the report writer's recommendations can effectively determine the interim arrangements that will stand for however long it takes to reach final trial, which in many cases unfortunately can be years.
• 25:32
  SPEAKER_00: And in many matters, those interim arrangements then become the final outcome or a significant stepping stone to the final outcome.
• 25:42
  SPEAKER_00: Because by the time the matter reaches trial, the arrangement has been in place long enough that the court is reluctant to disturb what really has become a settled status quo.
• 25:53
  SPEAKER_00: A disturbing fact is that there is no uniform training requirement for what a family report writer must demonstrate they understand about child development, attachment, trauma, family violence, coercive control, you name it.
• 26:08
  SPEAKER_00: The list goes on.
• 26:09
  SPEAKER_00: Some report writers are deeply skilled in these areas.
• 26:13
  SPEAKER_00: And some, I would go so far as to say, many, are not.
• 26:19
  SPEAKER_00: And there is no robust mechanism for distinguishing one from the other before the report has been written and acted upon.
• 26:26
  SPEAKER_00: So what can incompetence look like in practice when we're talking about family report writers?
• 26:32
  SPEAKER_00: I'll give you an example.
• 26:34
  SPEAKER_00: Now, this example has been generalized, and I'd love to say that this has only happened to one of my clients, but unfortunately that's not the case.
• 26:46
  SPEAKER_00: Various versions of what I'm about to share with you have happened to many of my clients.
• 26:54
  SPEAKER_00: It starts with children showing significant dysregulation after spending time with the non-primary caregiver.
• 27:01
  SPEAKER_00: Sleep disturbances, startal responses, hypervigilant behaviour.
• 27:07
  SPEAKER_00: Therapists, psychologists who engage with these children over a period of time, so separate to the report writer, often describe these behaviours in the children as trauma responses.
• 27:23
  SPEAKER_00: But when we come to the family report writer's interpretation, we're talking about someone who's had one conversation, one brief conversation with each parent, and one brief observation session of each parent with the children, and yet we can still end up with family report writers who think that they know far better than therapists, psychologists, social workers who have been engaged with families with children for months, sometimes years, and instead describe a situation where instead of it being a trauma response from children, oh no, rather it's that the children actually need more time with the non-primary parent.
• 28:07
  SPEAKER_00: They're actually grieving a lack of relationship with the non-primary parent, and that's what's behind the hypervigilance, the dysregulation, the sleep disturbances, and so on.
• 28:21
  SPEAKER_00: Now, a report writer coming to that conclusion, a vastly different conclusion than a practitioner who's been working with a family with children for a particular period of time, we're not just talking about a difference of clinical opinion here.
• 28:40
  SPEAKER_00: Hypervigilance is a documented trauma response with specific markers, somatic, behavioural, regulatory.
• 28:47
  SPEAKER_00: Grief in children is something else entirely with different markers, different timelines, different presentations across developmental stages, and any practitioner with foundational training in child development and trauma should be able to distinguish them.
• 29:05
  SPEAKER_00: Confusing the two is not nuance.
• 29:09
  SPEAKER_00: It does raise a significant concern that the foundational training is not there.
• 29:14
  SPEAKER_00: And again, for a report writer to completely dismiss the views of another trained practitioner who has been working with a particular family with particular children for an extended period of time, for a report writer to just dismiss that out of hand and think that they know better, that is a huge red flag.
• 29:35
  SPEAKER_00: But in this example, which again is a conglomeration bundling up generalization of what has come back to me from many clients.
• 29:45
  SPEAKER_00: So this is not just one specific example, but rather something that has occurred far too often.
• 29:52
  SPEAKER_00: What then happens in these situations with that report writer's interpretation, with the recommendations that then feature in the report for the children to be spending more time with the non primary parent, for there to be a complete discrediting of the views, opinions, therapeutic support that has been provided by other social workers, psychologists, playtherapists, whoever the other professional might be?
• 30:23
  SPEAKER_00: If that report writer's interpretation and recommendations are accepted by the court, what that's going to produce is more time with the parent whose presence is producing a trauma response.
• 30:36
  SPEAKER_00: Now we can only assume from there that the trauma response will deepen.
• 30:40
  SPEAKER_00: But then what happens to the ongoing dysregulation?
• 30:44
  SPEAKER_00: Well, what can occur is that that dysregulation is then reframed by professionals who, again, are fucking incompetent and don't know what they're looking at.
• 30:54
  SPEAKER_00: It's reframed as being the protective parent's fault.
• 30:58
  SPEAKER_00: Or maybe as evidence that the children need even more exposure to adapt to the relationship.
• 31:04
  SPEAKER_00: Perhaps framed as being the protective parent's fault in the sense that they're not doing enough to encourage the relationship, that their own anxiety is having a negative impact on the children.
• 31:18
  SPEAKER_00: The damage will compound, and by the time the matter reaches final trial, one or two years from now potentially, the children will be noticeably worse, and the system and the professionals in the system will have an array of explanations for that that don't include the fucking obvious one.
• 31:36
  SPEAKER_00: That is, that the report writer was incompetent, the report writer had an agenda, the report writer was prioritizing a relationship with the other parent over and above the safety of the children, and the report writer has provided recommendations that were adopted by the court and have caused harm.
• 31:56
  SPEAKER_00: Unfortunately, what many people don't realise about the system is that yes, family report writers can be cross-examined at final trial.
• 32:04
  SPEAKER_00: Yes, their recommendations can be challenged, but getting to final trial can take years.
• 32:10
  SPEAKER_00: The damage from interim arrangements based on bad recommendations is happening to the children now.
• 32:17
  SPEAKER_00: And the report writer meanwhile has cashed their check and moved on to the next matter, and the next and the next and the next.
• 32:25
  SPEAKER_00: There's no follow-up mechanism, no professional consequence for getting it wrong, and no requirement to get it right.
• 32:33
  SPEAKER_00: The report writer who has just produced a recommendation that will reshape years of these children's lives faces zero accountability for whether the recommendation turns out to have been correct or turns out to have been incredibly harmful.
• 32:50
  SPEAKER_00: That's the accountability gap.
• 32:53
  SPEAKER_00: And in my professional opinion, where the most serious harm in this system is being done right now, it's easier to blame the lawyers and the ICLs, and I'm not here saying that they shouldn't bear some of the blame.
• 33:08
  SPEAKER_00: But the practitioners whose recommendations carry the most weight, whose competence is the least audited before they get to make recommendations, and who face the least consequences when they get it wrong, that's the report writers.
• 33:25
  SPEAKER_00: We'll be coming back to family report writers in a dedicated episode later on, because this topic deserves far more than we can give it inside this episode.
• 33:36
  SPEAKER_00: But I wanted to name it here in our Working as Intended series, because if this series is really about the gap between what the system claims to do for children and what it actually has the professional capacity to do, then the report writer is the clearest example of the gap in the existing architecture.
• 33:55
  SPEAKER_00: What I want for you is that you can walk into any professional interaction in this space and know what sorts of questions to ask.
• 34:04
  SPEAKER_00: In fact, there's one question that you could ask.
• 34:08
  SPEAKER_00: You could ask it of every professional who describes themselves as being child focused.
• 34:14
  SPEAKER_00: Your lawyer, your mediator, a divorce coach that you're considering working with, a family therapist, the ICL, the report writer.
• 34:23
  SPEAKER_00: You can ask them what the research says about children's attachment needs post-separation, specifically in relation to primary attachment relationships, and how does that inform that particular professional's practice with families in this situation?
• 34:40
  SPEAKER_00: And then you listen very carefully to what comes back.
• 34:44
  SPEAKER_00: You're not looking for a perfect academic answer.
• 34:47
  SPEAKER_00: You're not testing whether they can cite specific papers.
• 34:52
  SPEAKER_00: Rather, you're listening for whether there's actual knowledge behind the language, whether they can tell you something specific, something that demonstrates that they've genuinely engaged with the developmental science rather than simply adopted the vocabulary of it.
• 35:07
  SPEAKER_00: A practitioner who knows the research will be able to tell you something concrete.
• 35:12
  SPEAKER_00: They might talk about the significance of the primary caregiver relationship in early childhood.
• 35:17
  SPEAKER_00: They might mention the research on overnight arrangements for children under four years of age.
• 35:24
  SPEAKER_00: They might reference what we know about children's stress response systems under sustained conflict.
• 35:30
  SPEAKER_00: They might talk about the difference between a parent being present and a parent being a primary attachment figure.
• 35:37
  SPEAKER_00: They will have something specific to say if the knowledge is there.
• 35:42
  SPEAKER_00: A practitioner who doesn't know the research, who doesn't know the science will give you values language, platitudes, both parents, stability, conflict, communication, meaningful relationships.
• 35:56
  SPEAKER_00: Again, as we've covered, all of that's true in the abstract, but none of it's specific enough and none of it's grounded in the developmental science that should be the foundation of the decisions made about and for your children.
• 36:09
  SPEAKER_00: A practitioner who responds to the question with specific research grounded content who can tell you something concrete about attachment science and how it informs their work is often worth your time and your trust.
• 36:22
  SPEAKER_00: That should be the standard.
• 36:24
  SPEAKER_00: And importantly, this question is not a trap, it's an invitation.
• 36:29
  SPEAKER_00: The practitioners who know the research will welcome it.
• 36:34
  SPEAKER_00: The practitioners who don't will reach for the values, language and the platitudes.
• 36:40
  SPEAKER_00: That distinction could be one of the most important pieces of information that you can gather about a professional before you trust them with the rest of your story and your children's story.
• 36:51
  SPEAKER_00: I want to be clear about what I'm advocating for here because sometimes I think it can maybe be misread.
• 36:59
  SPEAKER_00: I'm not saying that a lawyer could never become a good divorce coach.
• 37:05
  SPEAKER_00: I'm not saying that mediation is necessarily going to be harmful for you and your situation.
• 37:12
  SPEAKER_00: It can genuinely be helpful in the right circumstances.
• 37:16
  SPEAKER_00: I'm not saying that post separation programs are useless.
• 37:20
  SPEAKER_00: I'm not saying that the practitioners who don't know the research are bad people.
• 37:24
  SPEAKER_00: Most of them are not bad people.
• 37:27
  SPEAKER_00: Most of them are good people with good intentions.
• 37:31
  SPEAKER_00: Rather what I'm saying, what I'm advocating for here is recognition that the knowledge base matters, that the developmental science is not optional content, that it's the foundation without which nothing else in this space is safe.
• 37:48
  SPEAKER_00: That quote, child focused is not a value statement that stands alone.
• 37:53
  SPEAKER_00: It's a claim about knowledge and practice that can and should be tested, and the standard, the minimum, for any practitioner working with families navigating anything post-separation, but particularly post-separation abuse, coercive control, or other high conflict dynamic is substantive knowledge of child development and attachment theory, not a passing familiarity, but substantive knowledge, the kind that informs clinical decision making rather than decorating a website.
• 38:24
  SPEAKER_00: Specific training in coercive control, what it is, how it operates post-separation, how it manifests in co-parenting communication, and how it differs from mutual symmetrical conflict.
• 38:39
  SPEAKER_00: Not a module, not an awareness session, but training.
• 38:44
  SPEAKER_00: Understanding the neuroscience of trauma and its implications for children exposed to family violence and sustained conflict.
• 38:52
  SPEAKER_00: The capacity to identify asymmetric conflict and respond to it differently than symmetrical conflict, including the wisdom to recognise when a program, process, or intervention designed for the latter is being applied to the former.
• 39:08
  SPEAKER_00: That should be the standard, and I don't think it's an unreasonable ask.
• 39:12
  SPEAKER_00: I think it's the minimum that children deserve from the practitioners whose decisions shape their lives.
• 39:19
  SPEAKER_00: What I believe with complete conviction, after almost two decades of navigating the post-separation space, is that the parents who know this, the parents who understand what the standard is and can test whether the practitioners around them are aligned with it, they are the parents who get better outcomes for their children.
• 39:42
  SPEAKER_00: Not because the system suddenly works, but because they stop waiting for the system to work and they start bringing the knowledge themselves.
• 39:50
  SPEAKER_00: The next time a professional in this space tells you that they are, quote, child focused or trots out something else related to the quote best interests of the child, and they will.
• 40:26
  SPEAKER_00: And if you leave a professional interaction, having asked that question and received some kind of values, language, you know, platitudes in return, that's not a failure on your part, that's information.
• 40:39
  SPEAKER_00: Important, actionable information about where to direct your trust and where to protect your energy and what you need to be bringing to the spaces that you're in.
• 40:51
  SPEAKER_00: The system is not going to require its practitioners to know what children need.
• 40:55
  SPEAKER_00: Not quickly.
• 40:57
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe not ever, at the very least, not without significant external pressure.
• 41:01
  SPEAKER_00: In the meantime, you know.
• 41:04
  SPEAKER_00: And knowing changes everything about how you navigate this.
• 41:09
  SPEAKER_00: And this is exactly why I created the post-separation parenting blueprint.
• 41:14
  SPEAKER_00: It's the structured way through this.
• 41:17
  SPEAKER_00: And the blueprint is ready when you are.
• 41:20
  SPEAKER_00: AI Daniel, our digital coach, is also there for the questions that arise when no human is available 24 7.
• 41:29
  SPEAKER_00: You can learn more about both the blueprint and AI Danielle by heading to the website Danielle Blackcoaching.com.au.
• 41:36
  SPEAKER_00: There are also links in the show notes.
• 41:39
  SPEAKER_00: Next time in part four of our working as intended series, we wrap things up by diving into how you can best use a lawyer without letting that lawyer limit you.
• 41:52
  SPEAKER_00: We'll talk about what the parents who hold firm actually do and why every parent who gets serious about being the last line of defense for their children, who gets serious about understanding the knowledge, about growing their capacity, about learning to advocate more effectively, that those parents are contributing, whether they know it or not, to a system that has to change.
• 42:18
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you so much for being here with me for this conversation.
• 42:23
  SPEAKER_00: I value your time enormously.
• 42:26
  SPEAKER_00: And I know that some of what we talk about here can be really challenging and confronting.
• 42:32
  SPEAKER_00: Particularly if you are currently in the family law system, or you know that it's a possibility for you and your case.
• 42:43
  SPEAKER_00: I know that hearing some of these things can be confronting.
• 42:47
  SPEAKER_00: And that's one of the reasons why I think it's so important that we have these conversations.
• 42:52
  SPEAKER_00: Because when you know what you're dealing with, when you know what your lawyer knows and what they don't know, when you know what the mediator knows and what they don't know, when you know what the ICL knows and what they don't know, you can prepare better.
• 43:09
  SPEAKER_00: You can bring knowledge in the room, you can learn how to advocate more effectively, more credibly, more sustainably for your children.
• 43:20
  SPEAKER_00: And more parents being able to do that and optimize the outcome for themselves and their children.
• 43:27
  SPEAKER_00: That's why I'm here.
• 43:29
  SPEAKER_00: That's why I get up in the early hours of the morning to record podcasts so that I can fit them in with all of my other coaching work in any given day.
• 43:40
  SPEAKER_00: That's why I started this podcast in the first place.
• 43:43
  SPEAKER_00: That's why it keeps going.
• 43:46
  SPEAKER_00: Because I know that there are so many of you who are listening.
• 43:49
  SPEAKER_00: I know that there are so many of you who, whilst you don't like the fact that that you need to do this work or that it's necessary, you're willing to do it.
• 44:00
  SPEAKER_00: You're willing to do the work and I want you to know that you're not alone.
• 44:05
  SPEAKER_00: You're not alone.
• 44:06
  SPEAKER_00: I see you, I appreciate you, I value you.
• 44:11
  SPEAKER_00: Everything that you're doing matters.
• 44:16
  SPEAKER_00: It matters enormously.
• 44:18
  SPEAKER_00: And you matter.
• 44:19
  SPEAKER_00: Please know how much you matter.
• 44:22
  SPEAKER_00: I look forward to chatting with you again soon.