Who cares? A study of diverse care arrangements in Australian society

For many participants, moving to Australia meant relinquishing the support of extended families until they were able to bring them here. In the interim, some families took on the more nuclear family structure widely practiced here while others retained the extended family networks with family members who already arrived.

None of the three ethnic groups perceived any difficulty in meeting the requirement to nominate a primary carer with ongoing care of a child for payment. In practice nonetheless, they often shared the caring and decision making of their children with those members of their extended family living in Australia. A typical example of this was that children were placed in the care of relatives when parents went overseas for long periods of up to a year.

Muslim women indicated that caring and financial decisions were shared with their partners and said that occasionally relatives from within the extended family made decisions for them. This included help with child raising and respite-care needs. The Muslim community influenced the placements of foster children within the cultural group because participants said children needed to learn customs and become familiar with cultural issues.

Families with other diverse care contexts

The third group studied included a mixed group of Family Allowance customers, including sole parents. Families were invited to participate in the project because of their possible experience with children going in and out of foster-care placements, institutions and respite care. They included foster carers, representatives of foster-care agencies and grandparents who cared for grandchildren whose parents were repeat drug offenders.

Single-income families were also represented, along with separated or divorced parents who shared the care of children under court orders or parenting plans. Some paid child support and many received it. In general, the group reflected the increasing incidence of divorced, separated and blended families with children, and atypical (or non-nuclear) caring and child raising arrangements. The group had a degree of child mobility with children moving between carers for a range of reasons.

Some sole-parent participants said they needed better access to respite care because they feared state child-protection authorities would remove their children. They said caring for children as a sole parent was stressful and without relief and put the children at risk of abuse.

Foster/substitute care is one element of contemporary family relationships impacting on the lives of around 16,000 children each year. Where children are removed for their own safety from their parents or carers by State and Territory child protection authorities, families lose entitlement to family assistance once it is established that a new carer (a foster carer) has ongoing care of the child. There may be a delay before a magistrate makes an order for the child to be removed temporarily or permanently or it may be ruled that the child may be returned as soon as possible to the family. In many cases the situation when a child leaves is unclear to the losing family and the foster carer. Parents said that because they did not know how permanent a placement would be, and hoped the child would return quickly, they were reluctant to tell Centrelink. The uncertainty of the situation meant they were sometimes overpaid Family Allowance.

A foster carer claiming Family Allowance for a foster child led to payment to the parent being cancelled, which reportedly had a negative impact on the relationship between the parent and the foster carer. Low-income parents faced the loss of a significant part of their resources when losing Family Allowance for a child. This sometimes meant losing access to accommodation deemed suitable for the child’s return.

All State and Territory child-protection authorities practice the gradual restoration/reunification of foster children to their natural or birth parents. Such processes take many weeks or months with varied success. Families said they needed Family Allowance to help them meet the costs of having the child back. They were not entitled to payment during these transitional phases but foster carers continued to receive payment despite not having the child constantly. Recognising the costs families face without Family Allowance supplementation, some States and Territories meet some of the costs arising from the restoration, but a number do not.

Key Issues: variety and continuity of care

Looking at the child-raising patterns in the three groups studied has shown that it is frequently difficult for carers within the groups to establish qualification for family assistance. Each group consulted in the project reported issues arising from two key areas of concern.