‘Meaning making’ and narratives to support family reunification with infants

Cheree and Jonah* had faced significant challenges in their short lives, including homelessness and were both survivors of family and community violence. Both had previously used drugs and alcohol as a way of coping.

They were in their very early 20s when they became parents and while they hoped for a better life for their children, they really struggled. They had little family and social support and very little money. Both returned to using drugs.

The result was an unsafe home for their children. Two-year-old Jazz* and 6-month-old Rox*, were placed into out-of-home care by state government Child Protection workers.

Luckily there was a family friend who could care for Jazz and Rox while Cheree and Jon were supported to get off drugs. Soon after, the children returned to their parents’ care.

Everything went ok for a while, but unfortunately, Cheree and Jonah relapsed.

The parents went backwards fast, and it was no longer safe for the children to live with them.

The family had come to be seen and understood in a particularly negative way by the Child Protection professionals. Hope was lost and the narrative soon became one of hopelessness.

Thankfully some of the professionals held on to some hope that there would be change and had worked hard to support the young couple to stop taking drugs and provide a safe home for their children. A referral was made to Take Two for assistance and support so Jazz and Rox could return to live with their Mum and Dad.

The feeling of hopelessness from some professionals was so strong that it permeated their interactions with the family. The court had ordered that the children be reunified to parental care, but those working in the system believed it would almost certainly fail, like it did the first time they tried.

These professionals had removed the little children from awful circumstances and the memories of the way the children were when they were removed stuck with them and influenced the lens through which the family were viewed and their stories told.

The narrative about the family needed to change if the children were to be safely returned to their parents’ care.

Cheree and Jonah’s narratives about their parenting were similarly negative. They had made a lot of mistakes in their short lives, and both felt a lot of shame. Unsurprisingly this negative sense of self fueled their drug use as they sought to escape the ghosts of their past and fear about their family’s future.

Mum and Dad’s narrative about themselves also needed to change for them to successfully provide a safe home for their girls.

Take Two had our work cut out for us in trying to change or rewrite these hopeless and negative narratives. But we had three key things on our side:

• Mum was an avid journaller and had kept diaries since her children were born. She had a strong capacity to reflect and could describe her emotional experience.
• Throughout the assessment we could see the huge potential for the parents who showed that they could be emotionally attuned to their children’s needs.
• Mum and Dad were committed to having the children returned to their care and were willing to do whatever they could to make that happen.

Although the children would be returning to the care of both parents, our intervention focused primarily on Cheree, and our sessions were mostly with her and Jazz to support them rebuild their attachment.

Using a Child-Parent Psychotherapy framework we alternated sessions with just Cheree, and dyadic sessions with both Cheree and Jazz, as well as additional sessions with all four of them where possible.

The main goals of our work were to:

• help Mum reflect on her history and understand the impact of her own early experiences on her parenting
• assist the family to create a narrative of their experiences and make meaning of what they had all been through
• support Mum to provide a secure base for the children.

At the same time, we were working with professionals in the Child Protection system, meeting with them regularly to provide advice about planning, to help shift their understanding of the family and to feel more hopeful about a successful reunification.

Mum shared her journals and diaries with us, which provided a rich source of information about how she was feeling, how the children were developing and the shared family experiences during their regular contact sessions. We helped the parents reframe how some of the adversity they had experienced had impacted their choices and behaviours and then apply a different, less critical lens to their understanding of how they found themselves in the situation.

Over a period of around six months, we used the combination of parent-child and parent-only sessions to help Mum see her strengths and build on those to increase her confidence.

We supported her to be attuned to her children’s emotional needs as trauma narratives appeared in Jazz’s play and to provide a secure base so her children could feel safe and continue to return to her for help or nurture.

Over time, Mum’s negative and hopeless narrative became more hopeful.

We used the photographs and children's art works that Mum had kept, and in the family sessions we developed a visual narrative of the family’s time together. We didn't leave out or gloss over the difficult bits but instead spoke of them as part of the story openly.

Mum’s ability to be attuned and provide a secure base allowed her increased confidence in herself, and her parenting had a positive effect on Jonah also.

Together we made a book of these stories for the family to keep, read and remember. A binder was used for all the pages so that more could be added as the family’s story evolved.

As the parents became more confident and hopeful, they were able to make important changes in their lives. They used available drug rehabilitation programs and accessed counselling to address the impact of their childhood traumas.

The child protection system could see these changes and the people within the system started to feel more hope for the family also.

The professionals working with the family were invited to a family session to hear the family read their story. This moment of sharing the family narrative and the warmth through which it was told, allowed the hope that had been growing to flourish.

The children were successfully returned to their parents’ care and with some additional support for them, Child Protection and Take Two didn’t need to continue to be involved because the family were functioning well, and the young parents were confident in providing a safe and loving home for their girls.

*Not their real names. Some story details changed to protect the privacy of the family.

About Berry Street Take Two

Take Two is a trauma-informed mental health service with 20 years of experience working with infants, children, young people and families who have experienced complex trauma.