This case study shows how a brief specialist therapeutic consultation can strengthen everyday family work after family violence. Working alongside the key worker, the specialist helps bring the child’s experience into view and supports more confident, child-focused practice after the consultation ends.
It is part of a suite of resources on infant- and child-led therapeutic consultation. The Children Australia article provides the research and evaluation foundation, the OPEN webinar explores the model with researchers and practitioners, and this case study shows what the approach can look like in practice.
Family violence can have significant impacts on infants and young children, but their experiences are often difficult to identify and respond to in everyday practice. While children are frequently the reason services become involved, conversations can quickly become focused on adult conflict, trauma and crisis.
For many practitioners, the challenge is not a lack of commitment to child-focused practice, but knowing how to meaningfully bring the experiences of infants and young children into the work. Young children often communicate through behaviour, play, movement and relationships rather than words.
The infant- and child-led therapeutic consultation model was developed to address this gap. By bringing a specialist practitioner alongside a key worker, the model helps practitioners better understand children’s experiences, interpret their communications, and keep children’s safety and wellbeing at the centre of decision-making.
The infant- and child-led therapeutic consultation model was developed through practice with families at risk, including those affected by family violence, child protection concerns and complex early years needs. It involves targeted consultations delivered in the family’s home or another familiar place, with the key worker present.
The model rests on a simple but demanding shift: infants and children are not background concerns or passive dependents. They are people with agency, communication and relational experience.
The specialist practitioner models this way of seeing and responding. They help the worker and family actively include the child’s experience while exploring family history, trauma, hopes and safety.
The consultation is both therapeutic and practical. It offers the family a different conversation in the moment and gives the key worker skills to carry forward.
In this sense, the model is also a learning transfer approach: therapeutic practice is demonstrated through ordinary family services work, using noticing, wondering, naming, reflecting and returning attention to the child’s lived experience.
Following the event <link> where we heard from Wendy Buntson, Waleska X and Xadditional practitioner, we spoke with Melbourne City Mission’s Waleska X about their work with Wendy. The conversation explored how infant- and child-led therapeutic consultation is used within Integrated Family Services, where the key worker holds the ongoing relationship with the parents and child.
The following de-identified case study shows the model in practice with a family affected by family violence. It highlights transferable micro-practices, including keeping the child in mind, noticing and reflecting on children’s communications, exploring intergenerational patterns, and supporting caregivers to consider their child’s experience when making decisions about safety and relationships.
Emma and Ben were working with an Integrated Family Services key worker following ongoing conflict and episodes of family violence. They lived with their three-year-old daughter, Sophie, who had recently started kindergarten. Educators had noticed that Sophie became distressed at separation and had some emerging speech and language concerns.
The key worker had built trust with both parents and had started to understand that their current relationship was connected to earlier experiences of trauma. Emma had grown up with neglect, violence and parental substance use. Ben had experienced family violence and sexual abuse during childhood. Both parents wanted Sophie to have more safety and opportunity than they had known, but their relationship had become organised around arguments, separation, reconciliation and uncertainty.
The challenge for the key worker was not a lack of concern for Sophie. Sophie was central to everyone’s worries. The difficulty was that, in conversations about safety, parenting and the couple relationship, her lived experience could easily become background information rather than the organising focus of practice.
The key worker invited a specialist infant and child-focused practitioner to attend one home visit. The consultation was designed to strengthen the key worker’s ongoing practice by modelling a child-led way of seeing, asking and responding.
This helped the adults notice Sophie in the moment and use that observation to guide their response.
The specialist treated Sophie’s behaviour, play, movement and proximity-seeking as meaningful communication.
When Sophie stopped playing and moved close to Emma during discussion of a recent argument, the specialist slowed the conversation down.
They gently named what they noticed: “Sophie has come very close to Mum while we are talking about the hard stuff. I wonder what she might be telling us right now?”
The consultation did not resolve every issue for the family, and it was not intended to. It created a clearer shared understanding of what Sophie was experiencing and what she needed from the adults around her. Emma and Ben could both see that Sophie loved each parent and that she was also carrying stress from the conflict in the family system.
Over time, the key worker used the consultation to guide ongoing conversations with the parents. Instead of asking only whether the couple could repair the relationship, the worker kept returning to a practical, child-focused question: “What arrangement gives Sophie the safest and most emotionally secure day-to-day life?” Several months later, Emma and Ben decided to separate. This was not framed as the goal of the work or as a failure of the family. It was understood as a decision to reduce conflict and create more predictable, responsive caregiving for Sophie.
The key worker then supported both parents to develop a co-parenting arrangement focused on consistent routines, respectful communication and responsiveness to Sophie’s cues. The specialist’s contribution remained visible after the single session because the worker continued to use the questions, observations and child-led lens modelled during the visit.
At the heart of this work is a simple but powerful practice commitment: children must not disappear from view in the complexity of adult conflict, trauma, service systems or safety planning. Keeping Sophie front and centre changed the questions adults asked, the meaning they made of her behaviour, and the decisions they were able to consider.
The specialist consultation did not provide a neat solution. Its impact was more practical and enduring: it helped the key worker and parents see Sophie as an active participant in the family story, communicating through behaviour, seeking connection and needing adults to organise their decisions around her safety and emotional wellbeing.
The takeaway for practice is clear: child-centred work is most powerful when it is specific, observable and relational. When practitioners are supported to notice, name and respond to what children are communicating, children are no longer held in mind as an abstract priority. Their needs begin to shape what happens next.
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