Director’s Notes

Practitioners who work with children and their families are familiar with circumstances where a young person who is labelled as ‘anxious’ is subject to the excessive worry and overparenting by the adults which is clearly exacerbating the difficulties in a tight vicious cycle. This is concerning as research has demonstrated… Read more

With an increasing number of children presenting for therapy with a diagnosis of autism accompanied by funding from NDIS, it is easy for practitioners to become locked into an individual focus on the child and lose sight of the wider system in which they live and the problems expressed. The… Read more

Thirty years ago, John Dunbar, Professor of Evolutionary Psychology, proposed the social brain hypothesis which posited a relationship between brain size and group size with Dunbar’s Number setting this at 150 social connections for humans. The number has proved to be remarkably consistent across both ancient groupings, in the bronze… Read more

With the Olympic Games and coronavirus numbers escalating Japan has been in our attention. A lesser-known Japanese phenomenon is that of hikikomori, (derived from the verb hiki “to withdraw” and komori “to be inside”) a term to describe young people who become extremely withdrawn and socially isolated, devised by Japanese psychiatrist Professor Tamaki Saito… Read more

It was with relief that those of us who had been locked down in Adelaide returned to some form of ‘normal’ life, albeit with masks, on Wednesday. What was surprising was that on Friday, we all agreed it had been ‘a very long week’. Clearly, in an objective sense it… Read more

Standing outside the local coffee shop at the prescribed 1.5meters apart, the man next to me engaged in conversation with those around him. “I’m fully vaccinated”, he said and at once the wide spaced group began the conversation that has possessed the community, particularly since the lockdowns in Adelaide, Sydney… Read more

One of the features of a successful system, be it an individual, family, organization or society is its capacity to reorganize in the face of external change. For a family these may be predictable and inevitable as individuals move through the lifecycle and require different arrangements between themselves and others… Read more

When you matter to someone, and they matter to you there is a mutual influence such that each person’s actions will be symmetrically responsive to the other. So, what happens when a parent no longer believe they matter to their child? This question is addressed by authors Beckers, Jakob and Schreiter (2021)… Read more

If a parent were to tell us that they were depriving their child of food as a way of teaching them right from wrong, we would view this as a child protection matter and make the appropriate notification. But what do we say and do when a person tells us… Read more