In this webinar, I will weave together personal experience with contemporary research, drawing on my own childhood experience, as well as professional expertise.

In the professional context, I have worked in many contexts where addiction and substance use are key factors in child protection risk. As a previous member of New Zealand’s Child Mortality Review Group, I know all too well that parental addiction has been a common theme in child maltreatment deaths for many years.

In the personal context, as a child I experienced the raw reality of parental heroin addiction. The effects of my own childhood experience are not unlike contemporary understandings and research; the impacts on children and young people are common year after year. When we respond with a developmental, empathetic and trauma-informed lens, we can effectively support healing, health and positive life outcomes.

The Queensland Family and Child Commission (QFCC) has just released the Child Death Review Board’s 2023-24 Annual Report. One of the key recommendations is ‘assessing the impact of parental substance use on the child’. The time to increase our understanding and respond effectively to parental addiction, and the impact on their children, has already passed. The best next time is NOW.