Children involved in family law rarely experience parental separation as one isolated event, their presentation may reflect the accumulation of repeated experiences over time: exposure to parental conflict, disrupted relationships, unpredictable transitions, loyalty pressures, adult distress, changes in caregiving arrangements and ongoing uncertainty about where and with whom they belong. Yet legal processes may reduce this to individual incidents, competing parental narratives or a single assessment of the child’s current behaviour.
The Cumulative Harm Informed Practice (CHIP) Framework (Bryce & Collier, 2026) offers a broader way of understanding the child’s experience. It recognises that: cumulative risk is the antecedent; developmental trauma may be a primary mechanism of harm; attachment and neurodevelopment influence how the child adapts; and emotional, behavioural and mental health difficulties may emerge as developmental outcomes. This changes the questions we ask.
Instead of focusing only on: What happened? We also need to ask: What has this child experienced repeatedly across time? How has this shaped the child’s sense of safety, relationships and behaviour? What protective experiences are now required to change the child’s developmental trajectory?
Children express cumulative distress through anxiety, aggression, withdrawal, school refusal, emotional dysregulation, somatic complaints or resistance to time. These behaviours should not be interpreted in isolation.
Resistance may have several possible meanings – reflecting fear, relational rupture, loyalty conflict, alignment, accumulated stress, disrupted attachment, developmental vulnerability or a combination of these factors.
A cumulative harm-informed approach does not presume the explanation. It requires careful developmental assessment and avoids forcing complex behaviour into a predetermined narrative.
For family therapy and therapeutic reunification, it means the goal cannot simply be contact compliance, for a child may enter a room with a parent while remaining emotionally unsafe, highly activated or shut down.
Meaningful reunification requires more than attendance. It requires: emotional and relational safety; developmentally appropriate pacing;
parental insight and accountability; support for regulation and co-regulation;
opportunities to repair relational ruptures; and repeated experiences through which trust can be rebuilt.
The CHIP Framework does not excuse harmful parental behaviour, minimise risk or assume that every relationship should be reunified. It provides a structured way to understand how experiences have accumulated and what conditions would be necessary for relational recovery to occur safely.
While Family Law decisions may establish arrangements, they cannot restore attachment, trust or safety. That occurs through consistent child centred and developmentally informed relational experiences over time.
Recent discussions across child protection, family law, and trauma research have increasingly focused on the importance of listening to children. This is a significant and overdue shift. Yet emerging evidence about trauma, memory, and repeated disclosure suggests that being heard is not always a neutral process.
Research consistently demonstrates that repeated recounting of traumatic experiences can generate emotional distress, particularly when children are required to revisit events without a clear sense of purpose, safety, or resolution. At the same time, family law and child protection systems often rely on multiple professionals gathering overlapping information to meet legal, procedural, and evidentiary requirements.
What this tells us is not that children should be interviewed less. Rather, it highlights a tension that the sector has not fully grappled with. The mechanisms designed to protect children frequently require them to repeatedly revisit the very experiences from which they need protection.
This becomes particularly significant in complex family law matters, where proceedings can extend over months or years. During this time, children may participate in multiple assessments, therapeutic interventions, investigations, and court-related processes. Each step may be justified in isolation. Collectively, however, they may contribute to a form of cumulative burden that remains largely invisible within existing assessment frameworks.
The implication for practice is significant. If cumulative harm can arise from repeated exposure to adversity, we should also be asking whether cumulative burden can arise from repeated exposure to systems.
Understanding that distinction requires more than procedural expertise. It requires a forensic understanding of how children experience systems over time, not simply how systems are designed to function.
We often speak about giving children a voice. Far less attention is paid to what it costs them to use it.
In family law and child protection matters, a child may tell their story to police, child protection workers, therapists, lawyers, family consultants, report writers, and courts. Every conversation is intended to help. Every interview has a purpose. Yet children do not experience these interactions as separate events. They experience them as part of a single childhood.
The sector rightly worries about children not being heard. But we rarely ask whether there is a cumulative cost to repeatedly being asked to explain fear, violence, neglect, loyalty conflicts, or trauma.
The issue is not that children should speak less. The issue is that systems often require children to carry the burden of proving their experiences over and over again before adults are prepared to act.
A child can become both the source of evidence and the person most affected by the process of gathering it.
Perhaps the question we are not asking often enough is this:
When does the process of hearing a child become another burden that the child must carry?
Should the Child Come Home? Or Has the Parent Changed Enough?
At what point has risk reduced enough that statutory intervention is no longer required, even though adversity remains?
Risk and adversity are not the same thing. Child protection exists to reduce the risk of significant harm. It does not exist to eliminate adversity.
If that were the threshold, very few families would ever leave the statutory system.
Trauma doesn’t disappear. Mental illness doesn’t vanish overnight. Disability remains. Housing insecurity may continue. Poverty is rarely resolved simply because a court order ends.
Yet somewhere within child protection, these concepts can become blurred.
The conversation shifts from “Is this child safe?” to “Has every adversity been resolved?”
The result? The goalposts move. Families are often left trying to demonstrate change without knowing where the finish line actually is.
But perhaps we are asking the wrong question.
Rather than asking whether adversity still exists, perhaps we should be asking: Has risk reduced sufficiently that statutory intervention is no longer the least intrusive response?
That doesn’t mean families no longer need support – Quite the opposite; it means the nature of the support changes.
This is where I believe Australia has a significant gap. When statutory intervention ends, support often ends too. Yet this is precisely when many families need it most.
The cumulative adversities that contributed to child protection involvement don’t disappear simply because reunification has occurred or an order has expired. They continue to influence parenting, attachment, relationships and child development. Perhaps cumulative adversity shouldn’t determine how long statutory intervention continues. Perhaps it should determine the intensity of therapeutic and community support that follows. That distinction matters. Because child protection is one system. Family recovery is another.
In my work on reunification, I have argued that we need to stop viewing reunification as the end of intervention and instead view it as the beginning of a different phase of support. Rather than a binary choice between “statutory involvement” and “case closure”, families require a continuum that transitions from statutory intervention to intensive reunification support, therapeutic intervention, and sustained post-reunification services.
The question isn’t simply: “Is this family ready?”
Perhaps the better question is: “What level of support does this family need now that statutory intervention is no longer required?”
Because protecting children and strengthening families are not opposing goals. The challenge for our profession is knowing when one system should step back, so another can step forward.
One lesson we have learned repeatedly is that children who are described as “not engaging” are often communicating more than anyone realises.
In multidisciplinary meetings, we frequently hear phrases such as “she won’t participate,” “he refuses contact,” or “they won’t answer questions.” The assumption is often that engagement is the problem.
Yet when we spend time exploring the context, a different picture often emerges.
The child who refuses to speak may be worried about the consequences of being heard. The child who avoids contact may be managing intense anxiety. The child who appears oppositional may be attempting to regain a sense of control in circumstances where they feel powerless.
A useful practice question is: “What purpose might this behaviour be serving for the child?”
That question changes everything.
Rather than viewing behaviour as an obstacle to overcome, practitioners begin exploring behaviour as information. Curiosity replaces correction. Assessment becomes more nuanced. Children often feel safer and more understood.
The practical takeaway is simple: when a child’s behaviour looks like resistance, pause before responding to the behaviour itself.
First, ask what the child might be trying to communicate.
Often, the behaviour makes far more sense once we understand the distress underneath it.
Across family law, child protection, and trauma-informed practice, there is growing recognition that children’s refusal and avoidance behaviours cannot be understood through a simple compliance lens.
Recent research examining child trauma, attachment disruption, and resist-refuse dynamics consistently demonstrates that behaviours such as withdrawal, avoidance, disengagement, and refusal to participate are often adaptive responses to perceived threat rather than deliberate acts of opposition. Studies of trauma-exposed children show that when stress responses are activated, avoidance frequently functions as a
protective mechanism designed to reduce emotional overwhelm rather than challenge authority.
What does this tell us?
It suggests that systems may be at risk of misinterpreting children’s distress signals. When refusal behaviours are viewed primarily as non-compliance, interventions often focus on increasing participation. When the same behaviours are understood as indicators of fear, uncertainty, loyalty conflicts, or unresolved trauma, the focus shifts toward understanding underlying drivers.
This distinction matters. Court decisions, therapeutic interventions, contact arrangements, and child protection assessments are often influenced by how practitioners interpret a child’s behaviour.
The emerging evidence points to a need for greater sophistication in assessment. Children’s behaviours cannot be understood separately from their developmental stage, relational history, attachment experiences, and broader context.
The challenge is not determining whether a child is resistant. The challenge is understanding what the resistance may represent.
This is where specialist assessment becomes critical. Effective assessment moves beyond observable behaviour to examine the meaning, function, and context of a child’s response, ensuring that distress is not mistaken for defiance.
