Easy English fact sheets for parents dealing with the child protection system. Advice from parents with experience.

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Speed bumps

What I want to say to other parents:

Work with Community Services right from the start.
Work on the things you can change and don’t worry about the things you can’t.
You can’t change the past but you can change the future.
Do parenting courses and have a good support network.
Everyone makes mistakes, don’t be hard on yourself.
It might be a hard journey, don’t give up.

Someone we knew made a report to Community Services.
The police came and did welfare check on our children.
Community Services took our children away because they felt the house was not clean and safe.

Community Services said the children couldn’t stay with someone in our family.
The children were driven 2 hours away from us to live with foster carers.

Foster care was hard on the kids. They moved to lots of different homes.

Our 3rd child was removed from the hospital at 3 days old. Community Services took our baby because we had other children in care and there was an open court case.

Since the Final Orders, we have done lots of groups and parenting courses. We are meeting lots of different people from our community and going to lots of cultural events.

We have just had our 4th child and Community Services said the baby could stay in our care as long as we work with them and follow our care plan.
We will work with our support services.

We have just asked the court if we can have our other children live with us again.
This is called a Section 90 application.

Going through this journey has been tiring and emotional.
We feel it’s like going over lots of speed bumps. We decided to tackle one bump at a time.
The big picture of getting your kids back is overwhelming.
Break the steps down bit by bit…
When we have had family time with the kids, we try to keep it positive. Sometimes this is really hard especially the first couple of visits.

Update
Our baby’s case is now closed.
We followed the care plan.
We have no child protection services involved now with regard to our baby.

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