Transcript for
A new mental health podcast for Australian parents
Narrator (00:02): Welcome to the Emerging Minds Podcast.
Dan Moss (00:08): Hello, and welcome to this Emerging Minds podcast. I’m Dan Moss. For the past five years, Emerging Minds has been delivering podcasts about the mental health of Australia’s infants and children. These have generally featured practitioners, researchers, or parents with lived experience of adversity, and they’ve been generally about effective prevention and early intervention strategies with infants and children.
(00:31): But from November, our audience, you, will have the choice of two podcast series from Emerging Minds. One of these series will feature practitioners and families, and will be aimed primarily at helping families to support the environments which support good mental health for infants and children. And today, I’m really fortunate to be speaking with three of the staff from our families and education team who will be providing you with this extra podcast series. So, welcome Nadia Rossi, Alicia Ranford, and Ben Rogers to today’s podcast.
All three guests (01:07): Thanks for having us.
Dan Moss (01:09): It’s a privilege for me to be able to talk to you because I’ve seen all of the work that’s gone in over the last 12 months, really to get us to the stage where we’re able to launch this. So, it’s very exciting. And Ben, I might start with you. As the manager of this service, can you tell me a little bit about why it is that Emerging Minds decided to begin the Families’ program and what our listeners can expect?
Ben Rogers (01:32): Yeah. Thanks, Dan. We started about 12 months ago, but this thinking’s happened well before that. And I think, looking at the current, I guess, pressure on the service systems at the moment, and the increased rise in child mental health difficulties, as well as the general lower levels of child mental health literacy across the general population, we’ve realised quite quickly that it’s important to focus on building and strengthening parents’ capacities. So, we’ve been working as a team really closely with child and family partners across the country to map out ways in which we can understand what are those key areas that families want to know and can learn more about children’s mental health, and also to support their knowledge and confidence in accessing services around them.
Dan Moss (02:13): Yeah, great. And Alicia, welcome. I know that you’ve been doing a lot of work with child and family partners at Emerging Minds who have really been kind of instrumental in scoping the content. Can you tell us a little bit about what you’ve been hearing about from parents?
Alicia Ranford (02:29): Yeah, absolutely. Look, it’s been an amazing process and one that’s been a privilege to be a part of, as we have engaged with so many child and family partners across a variety of topics and things that they felt were really important to them. So, one of the main things was that they were really looking for resources that had that knowledgeable best friend tone, a voice that could talk to them in a way that they understood yet came with that evidenced informed practice, but something that they could relate to. And so, we’ve really tried to put that into all of our content and make sure that families can read it, and really feel supported, and learn from it so that moving forward, they’ve got a better understanding of what their family might be going through.
Dan Moss (03:12): So, in keeping with that knowledgeable best friend tone, I understand that you’ve got some practitioners within the first few of your podcasts who will be speaking directly to families, providing some kind of understandings and knowledge which might support their parenting?
Alicia Ranford (03:27): Yeah, that’s right. And that’s been a big part of it, too, is making sure that we’ve got that practitioner voice that talks to them about the experiences that they’re going through, such as anxiety, emotion regulation, really things that can help them, and provide them with some practical strategies on the home front so that they can activate something right now if they’re struggling.
Dan Moss (03:49): Yeah. Thanks, Alicia. And Nadia, I know that you’ve worked at Emerging Minds for quite a while now, but this is a new role for you. So, tell me a little bit about what you’ve been learning from families around the country as you start to join with them and start to plan some podcasts with them.
Nadia Rossi (04:07): My work with the Families team has really been, I think, learning from having different voices come through, listening to what our forum has to say. So, we work with what we call the Emerging Minds Family Forum, and that’s 10 child and family partners of varying lived experience, and they really help inform our work. We meet with them every few months and they have children themselves. They’re of varying ages, so we have younger people in the group as well. And they’ve really helped us, kind of guide us with our content.
(04:39): Some of them will review our content. Some of them are even on our podcast as well, so you’ll hear directly from them talking about tips on how to discuss your mental health and your mental illness with your children. And so, we have a varying group of people informing us that we really make the work with and for. I think that’s really important; giving a voice to our families as well and having them as part of the process because there’s no point in just putting work out there that we haven’t had reviewed, or haven’t had their voice involved in because we are making it for them. And, yeah, I think that’s really important for us as a team.
Dan Moss (05:16): Yeah. That’s wonderful. Very exciting. Thanks Nadia. And Ben, as well as podcasts as part of the Families’ suite of content, there’ll be other sources of material that will be produced on the Emerging Minds website for parents and families. Do you want to talk a little bit about that and how that came to be?
Ben Rogers (05:35): Yeah. I think hearing Nadia talk about the family forum, we’ve learned a lot about, I guess, some key components, some underpinnings of our work that will really support families to build their knowledge, confidence, and capacities. We’re developing content through ages zero through to 24, really, if we think about young people and young adults. So, with that in mind, we’ve had to really think through some, I guess, theoretical concepts that underpin our work to start with. One of those being a developmental perspective. So, we’ve got perinatal resources that will be focused online.
(06:09): One of the other key things to mention is thinking about how do we build self-determination in families, and there’s some key components that we’re looking at. And one of the inner thinking about that theory in itself is about autonomy. So, there’ll be information that we can share, whether it’s a podcast, an animation, an online resource.
(06:29): Also, thinking about that competence and skills that a family might learn. It might be a small practical strategy, or might be something quite big that they can reflect on. The other thing that was almost a light bulb in our family forum recently was looking at that third kind of tier of self-determination was relatedness, and it didn’t quite click home until I heard one of our family forum members talking about really wanting to see quotes. I want to see other people’s lived experiences because I connect and relate to that. And that’s really immersed and blended into all of our resources as well.
(06:59): Probably, the other thing to mention is… And we could talk about family resilience a little bit later maybe, but a key component is this idea of adult capabilities. So, thinking about and stepping into shoes of a family member, which we’ve been able to do through our forum and other consultation with lived experience and living experience of parents. It was a family that’s going through high levels of stress, managing the daily life to function, whether that’s with stable housing or stability around them. And they’re going to be accessing information at different points, so how do we create an online environment that allows them to access that information? So, the knowledgeable tone and best friend’s important, but also really clear key messages that we’ve been able to kind of blend through our resources, which we can unpack in this podcast today. But, yeah, there’s been lots of thinking that’s probably underpin this, but really our goal is about how do we strengthen the capacity of parents and families to support children’s mental health.
Dan Moss (07:54): Yeah. Thanks, Ben. And Alicia, so much of what you talked about today is really aimed at families and parents, particularly as they support their children’s positive mental health. But is there something in this for practitioners? I mean, I know that you’ve done a lot of work directly with practitioners, and we have obviously lots of listeners who are practitioners. Is there something in that for them to be listening to the podcast or other content that you produce, whether that be self-directed learning for families, or whether that be some of the key messages that you deliver?
Alicia Ranford (08:29): Yeah. Thanks, Dan. That’s a really great question, and one of the things that’s been really important for us is that we can help support practitioners to support families who are perhaps experiencing difficulties with a focus on infant and child mental health. And one of the things that we’ve done is we’ve got this suite of online content that practitioners can easily print off for families who are experiencing difficulties. They might be seeing perhaps a new mum that’s struggling to manage with their new baby, or perhaps a patient who’s experiencing some anxiety but they recognise that they have other children, and they may need some information on how to manage daily life and they’re functioning with their children as well. So, we’ve got content that they can print off and deliver to families, or can guide families to help support them support their families.
Dan Moss (09:21): Yeah. And it’s just empowering, the fact that this content is being delivered so collaboratively with that family forum. Is there something in that for all of us to be really conscious of?
Alicia Ranford (09:33): Yeah, that’s right. Look, it is, like Ben mentioned, there’s testimonials. All of our content has been reviewed by child and family partners with lived or living experience, so their voices are coming through with that. This is information that they, looking back, wish that they had been given, or wish that had been said to them at one point in another, one time or another. And so, it’s really great to be able to provide that to practitioners to give to families.
Dan Moss (10:00): Yeah. Great. Thanks. And Nadia, just thinking specifically about the podcasts for a minute, is there a benefit in both practitioners and families listening to these podcasts because they are being, I suppose, developed in conjunction with people with lived experience?
Nadia Rossi (10:17): Absolutely. And I think that’s it. They are developed in collaboration, in conjunction with people with lived experience, so they’re telling their story and they’re using their voice and their experience to help inform and I guess, help support other families and even practitioners hearing directly from someone with lived experience with a mental illness who has children, who’s going through difficulties explaining their mental illness to their children. I think, you hear that directly from someone who’s lived it and is living through it, I think, for a practitioner that’s just invaluable knowledge to actually have real world examples of someone. Even a parent that has a child with a neurodiversity, what challenges they go through, or what celebrations they can go through as well, and how a practitioner can learn from that. It’s not just textbook stuff. It’s not just people that come into your office. It’s real-world stories.
Dan Moss (11:12): Yeah. And Nadia and Alicia, have you got some examples of some podcasts coming up that we could really look forward to?
Alicia Ranford (11:19): Absolutely. We speak to an incredible mum who is a third generation trauma and neglect, and she reflects on how she learnt to parent and that even if you weren’t parented well yourself, you can still learn the skills to be a wonderful mother and caregiver. And she’s done exactly that, and it’s quite an inspiring story to hear from her.
Nadia Rossi (11:47): We also have a mental health nurse that we talk to about bonding with your child within the first 12 months. And so, that’s a really great podcast where you even get some practical tips that a parent can do with their child in that time period. We talk about the ‘shoulds’ of parenting and ‘comparisonitis’, as we refer to it; just comparing yourself as a parent to another parent, how social media can affect you, and coping strategies and ways to get through that period of time.
Alicia Ranford (12:16): Another great podcast is we talked to a dad who experienced fairly severe mental health difficulties, and he talks really eloquently on how he explained to his kids, and when he chose to explain to his kids what he was going through, and how he related to them and they could relate to him. He’s got some really fantastic strategies that he implemented with his family to make sure that they understood what he was going through and could be a part of his recovery.
Dan Moss (12:47): Great. Thanks Alicia. So, Ben, so much of what I’m hearing about in terms of what’s being aimed at families and practitioners for that matter is the ability for families to be able to be quite self-directed in the strategies that they use. So, this content can be adapted, I’m imagining, whether that parent is involved in the service system, or not?
Ben Rogers (13:14): Absolutely, Dan. We’ve been spending a lot of time over the last 12 months really breaking down, I guess, the key components of what it looks like for a parent to be supporting a child with their mental health and their family. And with that, there’s been a few key other initiatives that have come through. So, obviously, National Mental Health Child Mental Health Strategy was released late last year, which we’ve drawn on. A key part of that is looking at more of a functional lens of children’s mental health, and taking that continuum lens which is embedded into the way that we are thinking about families and parenting. You’ve heard Nadia and Alicia talk about the role of parenting and what that means when different adversities and stresses impact on their daily life.
(13:55): The other key component is just helping families understand what their role is in the prevention of children’s mental health. But obviously, a key component of our work being linked closely with the workforce is about as a family identifies with certain difficulties. And that’s a big challenge that we’ve heard a lot about; this idea of families not being quite sure whether it’s a developmental difficulty, or whether this is something they should be concerned about. We really want to help families with that early identification of difficulties, have a go at trying some things themselves. But if they needing support, then being able to access and navigate those services that are around them. That’s why we work really closely with your team, Dan, to develop resources that wrap around the practitioners, those that are listening in today.
Dan Moss (14:40): Yeah. And Ben, tell me a little bit about… Because these ideas haven’t just fallen from the sky, have they? They’ve been around at Emerging Minds for a while. But also, they’re very personal values for you, and I know that you’ve come with experience as a occupational therapist working with families. What did that experience teach you about the kinds of messages that you’re wanting to provide for families who are doing their best for their child’s mental health?
Ben Rogers (15:07): Yeah, as you mentioned, I’m a occupational therapist who’s worked in the child and family services, and one of the things I learned a lot in that clinical career was children, really, if you step into their shoes, they help you to identify what their needs are. They’ve got really great and important insights into what supports them. And particularly, the parents as well and the family that wrap around them and the knowledge that sits within the family context. It’s really important to bring that out.
(15:34): And probably, a huge shift for me was becoming a dad as well. I think, that was a key moment in time where I began to move away from my textbook understanding and to really this experiential understanding. And I still remember some key points in that journey where I was able to experience emotion, grief at times. I’d lost my dad, and I remember holding my son sitting on the bouncy ball trying to get him to sleep, and thinking about emotional regulation, which I talk about in the podcast series. But that was a moment in time where I noticed that emotion kind of bursting through me. And as a practitioner, I’d sat with parents who’d gone through grief, but when you experience that yourself, I think it really does shape you in a different way.
Dan Moss (16:15): Yeah, that’s a really insightful answer, and I think, tells us a lot about that the key messages have been delivered and developed over the past 12 months. And Alicia, you actually come to this work with quite significant experience yourself. And as part of that experience, I understand that you developed a website for families involved in mining to be able to care for the specific needs of their children within those communities. Can you tell us a little bit about that? I’m fascinated to hear.
Alicia Ranford (16:46): Yeah, of course. So, I’ve been in health promotion and advocacy for close to 15 years now. And I’m part of a mining family, so we had moved and relocated. We’d spent time overseas. I’ve lived in remote mining communities. And part of that is coming with all the ups and downs of being a new mum myself. I mean, my children are now 17 and 18 now, but when we first lived in an outback mining community, they… They were born in Cobar in Outback New South Wales.
(17:16): From there, we moved to my husband doing fly-in fly-out. And there were certainly challenges as a young family with having him go away for extended periods of time.The wheels fell off my own family, and when I went looking for resources, there was nothing available. So, I had the privilege of helping to create Mining Family Matters, which really has helped mining families all over Australia with fly in fly out and the ins and outs of being a member of a family with that. And I think, looking really at mental health and wellbeing for the resources sector, and what that taught me was that families really want to be spoken to at their level, and they want information that they can relate to and that is relevant to their needs at the time.
Dan Moss (18:00): Yeah. I imagine it’s been a real challenge finding that tone for your content and the podcast in terms of that knowledgeable best friend, but also being curious about what families already know, and what they already do for their children?
Alicia Ranford (18:15): That’s right, and recognising that families are the experts in them, and their children, and how they’re feeling. And so, how can we support them to understand, like Ben talked about, what is developmental, and then when do they actually need to think that they might need to go and access a practitioner. So, we really want to support families in feeling confident to access a practitioner when it’s required. And to do that, we’ve done a variety of things. All of our resources point towards accessing further support and who that might be. And obviously, for Australians, the general practitioner is such a pivotal part in a family’s life.
(18:56): We also look at other practitioners that people might not think about as needing to go and visit in terms of mental health and wellbeing. We have a great suite of practitioner videos where we highlight key practitioners. We’re launching with five and there’s more to come, but it really is looking at what is a speech pathologist? Why might you want to go and visit one? What can you expect when you go and see a child and adolescent psychiatrist? What might you want to think about before you go for your first visit, and how can you make the most out of it? And we also get our practitioners to dispel a few myths along the way. So, it’s something that can really support families to feel comfortable in accessing a practitioner.
Dan Moss (19:40): That’s such a great resource, Alicia. I have to say that, yeah, I’ve been in this sector for many years, but I still get confused about what the different practitioners do. So, yeah, I think that will be much appreciated.
Nadia Rossi (19:54): And also, they’re made in the tone that the practitioner’s talking to families so that a parent can sit with their child and watch. The resources that we’ve made and created aren’t just for parents. We say families, but we do mean a young adult, or a teenager, or a kid can sit with their parent and watch the videos that we make and listen to the practitioner. Their school counsellor may have suggested, or their GP may have suggested a speech pathologist. Well, the child may feel very nervous and apprehensive about what is that and what does that mean, and so we’ve got these amazing practitioners who are just so great at making everyone feel relaxed and understand, what Alicia said, what can they expect, debunk some myths.
Dan Moss (20:36): Yeah. Thanks, Nadia. I’m also interested in your background because I know that you’ve got a very creative background and that’s kind of come in handy, really, in this role as you’ve sought to find creative ways to get children to tell their stories, and really to tell us as families or practitioners what they want from us. Can you talk a little bit about that?
Nadia Rossi (20:59): Yeah, I guess, I’ve had an interesting journey to find myself at Emerging Minds, and in the Emerging Minds Families team. I have an arts background, so I was a performer and worked in the arts for many years. And a lot of my work, I was fortunate enough to work with quite prominent theatre companies in the country, tour around the world, and have some fantastic experiences creating work. A lot of my work was in children’s theatre, creating work with children and for children. So, it’s not that dissimilar to the work that we make. You’re always keeping your audience in mind. And so, I got to experience that with children and I can work with them, and performing for them, and seeing them in that total joy and fun, and they are the most honest audience you will ever have in your life, so it was good training.
(21:49): I had a bit of a light bulb moment again when I became a parent, and I think it was just this moment where I was in the kitchen with my mom and my first child was about 10 months old. I was really tired, and I had all this non- sleeping from the new baby, my mom and I had a disagreement, and I just burst into tears. And my daughter, for the first time ever, started cooing and just making this completely different reaction towards me. It just stopped us both dead in our tracks and was just like, “Wow.” She is just this tiny sponge absorbing and reacting more than just the joy and the fun and the crying. The usual crying, but she’s absorbing what’s going on around in her, in the world. I just started thinking about, “I’m not a practitioner. I don’t have that background, so what can I do?”
(22:44): And randomly, a few months later, I applied for a job here, and then I got in the projects side of work. It’s just been so great to then be able to be in a team where we have avenues to access that creative side where we’ve teamed up with SAYarts, which is South Australian Youth Arts, and we were able to observe their creative process. And from that, Allan Grace, who was a writer at SAYarts wrote three scripts, and we helped to develop those scripts and the performers developed the scripts. So, we have behaviour as communication, so how certain behaviours can communicate an emotion and try and communicate to someone else how you’re feeling.
(23:26): We worked with Self-care is Healthcare, how young people do self care, and it may be different ways than we think. And then, we went with superheroes, which is how people who support us through difficult times, and how we can support each other. So, these resources are amazing because they’ve come from young people within the classes of five years old to 18 years old. They were able to generate that material, and create that material, and then we were able to employ them as performers and give them their… They had their first experience in a film set and kind of fit into the creative process the whole time.
Dan Moss (24:06): Thanks, Nadia. Yeah, really interesting background. Yeah, really appreciating hearing about the diverse backgrounds of the team and how they’ve all helped develop these key messages. And speaking of the key messages, Ben, I know one of the things that you’ve been thinking about is that there’s a diverse group of audience out there when we’re thinking about families who might consume podcasts or other content. Some of them more middle class working families, whereas other families are those who are facing real adversity, whether that be through intergenerational disadvantage, or trauma, or cultural biases, or social isolation. So, I know that there’s been a lot of thinking going into how to capture all of those different families from different backgrounds. Can you talk a little bit about how you’ve planned to do that?
Ben Rogers (24:55): We’re fortunate to be able to sit behind four years and longer with Courtney before the National Workforce Centre of resources and key messages that help guide us, messages that really hold the child’s voice at the forefront of our work, and even just thinking about how we hold the family in mind as they connect together. I mentioned the National Child Mental Health Strategy and the mental health continuum before, and I think that’s a really important way of framing up some of our work.
(25:23): So, with this family lens that we’re holding in mind with our resources, it’s thinking about the family processes that happen, thinking of ways that we can create and support environments for families where they can talk to each other in open communication and make meaning together of certain situations that they might be going through. And I talked about adult capability before in terms of how a family could access our resources, whether that’s formatted of an animation, or a podcast. I guess, the other part of capability is helping families have confidence in how they can think about difficulties and challenges, and we have key components that sit within that.
(26:00): So, you’ve heard about the podcasts where you’ll hear in the first series a dad talking about having conversations about his mental health difficulties with his kids. That’s a really cool component that we want to support in families is, in order to build that family resilience, you need to be talking to each other and creating environments, context that are safe to do that as well. We spend a lot of time with the forum, but also there’s been other reference groups that have guided our work as well. And Alicia, it might be good to reflect on the diversity and inclusion workshops that we’ve just finished.
Alicia Ranford (26:32): Yeah. We had a fantastic scoping exercise where we met with members of the CALD community, the LGBTQIA+ community members, as well as people living in poverty and disadvantage, and we were able to spend a lot of time talking to them about how their experiences differ, and when they go to a resource, what makes them feel welcome and included and spoken to. And so, we’ve been able to integrate so many of what they fed back to us.
Dan Moss (27:03): Yeah. Great. Thank you, Alicia. This interview has been such a privilege today. Really, thank you for your professional, but also your personal answers have been really inspiring. So, I want to finish off with the same question for each of you, and that really is finishing this sentence. “We’ll know that the Families’ project at Emerging Minds has worked when…”
Ben Rogers (27:25): When a parent has the confidence and ability to be able to identify things that they can do to support children’s mental health, and to know when they can and how to access those services around them.
Alicia Ranford (27:38): And for me, it’s probably when families really feel confident in working with their practitioners to really get the best outcome for their family.
Nadia Rossi (27:48): I think, for me, it will be when a family sits down and looks at our content together.
Dan Moss (27:56): Great. So, Nadia Rossi, Alicia Ranford, and Ben Rogers from our Families and Education team here at Emerging Minds, thank you so much for spending a little bit of time with me today. I must admit, talking to you, I can’t wait till the podcast series lands. I’m sure many of you also will be tuning in. Thank you all for your time and we’ll speak to you next time. Thank you.
Narrator (28:20): Visit our website at www.emergingminds.com.au to access a range of resources to assist your practice. Brought to you by the National Workforce Centre for Child Mental Health, led by Emerging Minds. The National Workforce Centre for Child Mental Health is funded by the Australian Government Department of Health under the National Support for Child and Youth Mental Health Program.