Intro And The Big Question

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Hello and welcome to another episode of the Post Separation Abuse Podcast. I'm Danielle Black. There's a question that comes up again and again in our coaching work here at Danielle Black Coaching. Why doesn't this child want to go? Why doesn't she want to sleep at Dad's house? Why does he cry before or during a changeover? Why has she started refusing school on the mornings when the other parent is collecting her? Why does he happily spend three hours with his other parent but becomes distressed at the mention of an overnight? Why does she say that she hates mum? Why does he hide when the other parent's car pulls into the driveway? Why after years of apparently spending time under the same roof with this other parent is this child suddenly distressed or suddenly saying no? Far

Why Refusal Does Not Explain

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too often we answer that question by starting at the wrong end. We see the behaviour and then we immediately jump to diagnosing the cause. The child doesn't want to go because mum is clearly anxious. The child doesn't want to go because dad is abusive. The child doesn't want to go because mum has alienated him. The child doesn't want to go because dad doesn't understand her autism. The child doesn't want to go because she is enmeshed with mum. The child doesn't want to go because this child is resisting boundaries. This child doesn't want to go because they have been traumatized. And sometimes one or more of those things will be substantially correct. However, we can have skipped a really important step. How do we know? And this is the principle that I want to be building this particular podcast series around. A child's resistance or refusal tells us that something is happening. But that resistance or refusal alone does not tell us what's causing it. If you've been around my work for a while, you'll know that this is an area that I care very deeply about, not just professionally, but also personally. I know what it feels like to be a parent of a child who has experienced harm from a parent, and for that child to finally have the courage to say no to spending time with that parent, and then to discover that one possible explanation for that child's refusal is apparently that their mother manipulated them into it. And obviously, in my lived experience, that parent who was accused of manipulation by my former partner was me. I know what it feels like to be painted as potentially abusive when the reality was very, very different. And ultimately, that was not the conclusion that was reached in my case. But I have never forgotten what it feels like to have someone look at my child's resistance and begin investigating me, the protective parent, as though my child's behaviour in and of itself was some kind of evidence against me. My personal experience matters to my work. But it's important that I say here that this doesn't mean that I believe that every mother is right. It certainly doesn't mean that children are never influenced by a primary caregiver or a protective parent, whether deliberately or inadvertently. It doesn't mean that influencing and coaching behaviors don't exist. It doesn't mean that a protective parent can never become so frightened, hyper-vigilant, angry, or convinced of their own interpretation that they inadvertently contribute to the difficulty that their child is experiencing. What I'm interested in is getting closer to the truth of children's experiences. Because

Five Children Five Different Reasons

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five children can be crying and refusing to leave their respective primary caregivers and be crying for five completely different reasons. One child might be three years old and desperately struggling to separate from the parent who has historically done almost all of their caregiving. One child might be autistic and completely overwhelmed by moving between two different sensory environments, two different sets of expectations and two different routines. One child might adore both parents, but absolutely hate spending five nights away from the primary caregiver. One might have had an enormous argument with mum the night before and be furious with her. And one might be desperately frightened of dad. Five children crying, different problems, different responses required. And this is why the binary that we so often end up with in family law, abuse or alienation, is so woefully inadequate. There are so many possibilities between and around those things ordinary preference, age and developmental appropriateness, attachment and historical caregiving, transition difficulties, neurodivergence, sensory overload, a parenting arrangement that is simply asking too much of this particular child, a parent who loves the child but isn't particularly attuned to them, a relationship that was never especially close, a relationship that was close but has since ruptured, a new partner, a new sibling, a new home, different parenting styles, different expectations, different consequences, a child who is becoming a teenager and quite reasonably wants more control over their own life, loyalty conflicts, alignment, inappropriate parental influence, family violence, coercive control, direct abuse, boundary violations, fear, trauma, and any combination of those things. All of those possibilities are not things that I've invented. The joint statement on parent child contact problems from the Association of Family and Conciliation Courts and the National Council of Juvenile and Family Court Judges specifically cautions against jumping immediately to a label, and it identifies numerous possible contributors to parent-child contact problems, including interparental conflict, litigation, poor co-parenting, maltreatment, responses to abusive behaviour, intimate partner violence, alienating behaviours, alignment, and combinations of factors. It also makes another point that I wish we could tattoo somewhere inside the family law system, and that is that research about groups cannot tell you what is happening in an individual family. We still have to deeply assess this family, these parents, this relationship, this child, because otherwise what can happen is that we stop being curious about what's happening with the child and we start defending the hypothesis about their behavior.

Rejecting A Schedule Not A Parent

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Sometimes the child isn't rejecting the parent. That's an important distinction. A child can resist or refuse a parenting arrangement without that being a rejection of a parent. Those two are not the same thing. A child might love dad, want to see dad, call dad, send dad memes, want dad at the school concert, spend a fantastic Saturday afternoon with dad, and not want to sleep at Dad's house for four consecutive nights a fortnight. That is actually logically possible. But we've developed this strange habit of treating caregiving time as though it's a measurement of a relationship. Five nights equals meaningful relationship. Two nights equals less meaningful relationship. Alternate weekends equals endangered relationship. Equal time means maximum relationship. But what exactly are we measuring there? Research on non-resident father involvement gives us a much more complicated picture than simply saying that more contact equals better outcomes. A meta-analysis by Kari Adamsons and Sarah Johnson looked at 52 studies of non-resident father involvement and child well-being. Positive forms of father involvement were associated with benefits for children. Positive father-child relationships mattered. Child-related activities mattered. Multiple forms of involvement mattered, but the amount of father-child contact itself was not associated with child well-being in that meta-analysis. And this is important. Time together can create opportunities. It can be very difficult to build upon a relationship with someone that you rarely interact with. And Adamson's herself has subsequently cautioned against taking this research and turning it into another stupid absolute of C, quantity doesn't matter at all. That's not what the research says, and it's certainly not what I'm saying. But the point that it makes is a lot more interesting and nuanced, and that is that caregiving time creates opportunities for relationship. It is not a measurement of a relationship. And that's another question that we need to think about and ask far more often, along with what was the relationship between this child and this parent actually like before separation?

The Real Pre-Separation Relationship

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Not is this adult legally the other parent? Not did she ever love her mother? Not did both parents live in the same house? Rather, who did this particular child go to when they were frightened? Who knew the names of their friends? Who facilitated the bedtime routine? Who knew that they preferred having their sandwich cut into triangles rather than squares? Who knew that they couldn't tolerate the seam in that particular pair of socks? Who attended the appointments? Who knew the teachers? Who noticed when something was wrong? Who could calm them, co regulate with them? Who played with them? Who listened to them? Who did they confide in? How much time did each parent actually spend parenting the child independent of another caregiver? Was the relationship close? Was it warm but a bit less involved? Was it playful but not particularly emotionally intimate? Was it inconsistent? Was it conflictual? Was it distant? Was it frightening? If a child and a parent were never particularly close before separation, and the child continues not to be particularly close to that parent afterwards, we can't simply begin with well, what has the other parent done to destroy this relationship? We can't diagnose the destruction or the sabotage or the negative impact on a relationship without first establishing what relationship existed to begin with, what was the quality of that relationship, what was the depth, what was the emotional intimacy of that relationship? Now that doesn't mean that the relationship can't grow. A previously less involved parent can become an extraordinarily involved parent after separation. Relationships are not frozen in amber. This isn't fucking Jurassic Park. But there is a very important difference between allowing a relationship to grow and using a parenting arrangement to manufacture in advance the equality that we think the relationship should eventually achieve because of some ideological benchmark.

Taking Fear Seriously With Care

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Sometimes there is a child telling us that they are frightened. Now this is where I want to be careful because quote, my child refuses to go. Therefore, abuse must have happened. That's not sound or logical reasoning. But neither is quote abuse hasn't been proven, therefore, legitimately, this child has nothing to fear. They are not the only two options. If a child says Dad hurt me, I'm scared of mum, I said no but they wouldn't stop, she screams at me, I don't want him to touch me. I told her no. We need to pay attention to those things. Now paying attention doesn't mean interrogating. It doesn't mean asking the same question seventeen different ways until we get a court ready chronology. It doesn't mean that we tell our child what happened. It doesn't mean promising an outcome that we can't control. It just means paying attention. The Australian Institute of Family Studies guidance about responding to children's disclosures emphasizes supportive listening as opposed to interrogation. And particularly with younger children, we also need to remember that fear is not always delivered to us in a beautifully articulated verbal statement. Children can communicate through behaviour, sleep, regression, clinginess, aggression, avoidance, physical symptoms, school refusal, dysregulation, and this is really only the tip of the iceberg. And none of those things individually proves abuse, but neither should we require a four-year-old to produce an affidavit before we take their distress seriously. There's also another distinction that gets lost. An adult may genuinely not have intended to harm a child, but that doesn't mean that the child wasn't harmed. A parent may think something was funny, affectionate, normal, appropriate discipline, play, a harmless family ritual, and a child may experience that same behavior as frightening, humiliating, painful, intrusive or violating. Saying quote he didn't intend to harm her is not the same statement as she wasn't harmed. Sometimes what matters is not whether we can immediately categorize the adult as dangerous. Sometimes what matters is that a child has learned when I say no to this person, to this adult, to this parent, me saying no doesn't make things stop. That matters.

Testing Hypotheses With Evidence

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Now I want to say something else that might land uncomfortably, and that is that sometimes the preferred parent is contributing to the dynamic. Yep, I know it's nobody wants to hear this, but we do have to talk about it. Because if I'm saying that court professionals should not be starting with a preferred hypothesis, then I don't get to do it either. Parents can badmouth the other parent, they can interrogate children, they can expose children to adult information, they can communicate their own fears, they can make children feel responsible for protecting them, they can reward rejection, they can make loving the other parent feel like betrayal, they can become so certain of their own interpretation that every piece of evidence just gets somehow bent around it. And those things can happen inadvertently. It doesn't have to be deliberate, there doesn't have to be intent. And any number of those things can contribute to a child's resistance or refusal. But the existence of that possibility doesn't justify using it as the default explanation whenever a child says no to communicating or spending time with the other parent. The question remains, what evidence supports that particular position when we're looking at this child's behavior? And what evidence contradicts it? What would we expect to see if it were true? What else could explain the behavior? Professionals should be able to answer those questions in a way that's sophisticated, in a way that actually aligns with their supposed expertise. And parents should be able to reflect on and answer those questions too. Being open-minded doesn't mean pretending that every imaginable explanation is equally probable. If there's independently documented violence, repeated disclosures, injuries, admissions, findings, and a deterioration in the child associated with spending time with one of the parents, we don't need to pretend that perhaps the child just doesn't like packing a bag. Clearly, we have to show some common sense when we're talking about evidentiary weight. Likewise, if a child is consistently relaxed with the resisted parent, initiates contact, settles relatively quickly, returns to the primary parent well, doesn't provide an explanation for their resistance that is linked with fear. And if the distress appears concentrated around separation from a preferred parent who is presenting in a way that's extremely anxious, then I think it's reasonable that the preferred parent's contribution to what's going on should be looked at more closely. The aim is not neutrality for neutrality's sake, the aim is accuracy. If our child is resisting time or refusing time with the other parent, we need to be genuinely reflecting on what we actually know. What has our child reported to us or to others? What have we actually observed? We also need to get accurate and honest about what are we inferring? Are we connecting dots that shouldn't be connected? What remains genuinely unknown? And if we actually look at the evidence, what explanation currently fits with that best? Again, taking out the inference, taking out what we think might be happening, what we're potentially jumping to conclusions about what might be happening, but rather what does the evidence actually explain at this point in time? Now, it could be that what you've actually got available as evidence isn't explaining a lot. That's still relevant. All of this is the work. If you're

The Blueprint And New Course

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already inside the post separation parenting blueprint, then You'll be able to dive into an expanded module 13, which is when children resist or refuse time with a parent. It has been significantly expanded, and that's not because the previous version wasn't good, it's just that this new version is better. We're now going deeper through some of the reasons why children can resist, how we can work out what might actually be happening, the difference between encouragement, facilitation, and coercion, what to do when transitions repeatedly fail, what relationship repair actually requires, how we should be thinking about reunification and professional intervention, and how we can document and advocate without turning our children's lives into an affidavit. There's also substantial new research being added to the blueprint's reference and resource directory. And this is important because the blueprint is research and evidence based. The content, and this is module 13, but also all of the other content, it's not just the opinion of the coaches at Danielle Black Coaching. It's also what the research and professional guidance actually supports, what it doesn't establish, and the questions that the evidence might help you to ask in your own case. And the reason why we expand and add in the questions that the evidence might help you to ask in your own case, talking points for professionals, including your legal team, is because we don't just want you parroting research. That's actually not at all helpful. It's not going to advance your case in any way. We want you thinking. We want you thinking about this. And, you know, I've said it before, but I'll say it again. The blueprint is not a resource to just mindlessly consume, copy and paste, you know, copy out chunks of it and forward onto your lawyer. That's not going to help you. But if you're willing to do the work, if you're willing to think and reflect on your own situation, if you're willing to work through the modules and also check in with the reference and resource directory, that's what's helpful. Not to parrot the research, but to be thinking, to be applying it to our own situations. There's another reason why I'm mentioning the blueprint now, and that is because on the 27th of September 2026, the post-separation parenting blueprint turns one. And that is honestly a bit surreal. Um I can't believe it's been 12 months. And we are going to celebrate, which of course is what we should be doing for any first birthday. Closer to the official birthday, I'm going to be announcing a significant limited time discount on the blueprint, but I'm not going to give you details today. More about that will be revealed over the next few weeks. But if you have been sitting on the fence about joining us inside the blueprint, or if you've been thinking that, you know, one day, the one day that sometimes never arrives, that you'd love to be joining us, well, this could be a great time. This is actually going to be the most significant discount that the blueprint has this year. As many of you probably are aware, Danielle Black Coaching is not a discount brand. We're not regularly doing promotions. I think last year our biggest promotion was at Black Friday. I haven't actually even decided whether we'll be having a Black Friday promotion this year, given that we've got the first birthday promotion. We might do something for Black Friday, but it's not going to be as big or as significant as what we're doing for our official first birthday of the blueprint. And there's also something else coming, which is a new course at Danielle Black Coaching. Claim Your Name, Burning the Good Girl Contract. The Blueprint is about helping you to develop the knowledge, the capacity, and the advocacy to navigate post-separation parenting without handing your authority over to every person that happens to have some letters after their name, a title, and maybe a fucking clipboard. Claim Your Name goes somewhere deeper. It asks what happens when you stop living according to the invisible rules that taught you to be pleasing, accommodating, self-doubting, responsible for everybody else's feelings, and extraordinarily good at overfunctioning for everybody else while simultaneously abandoning yourself. And sometimes there was also knee-jerk reactions in the opposite direction. The rebel, the bad girl. You know, that's not what we're talking about here either, in the sense that the solution that we're reaching for with our new course, with burning the good girl contract, it's not to become rebellious. It is not to become quote unquote bad. In many ways, that would just be another contract, another label as well. That's not what we're about. That's not what we're going to be aiming for. And as you're going to hear later in this podcast series, these two conversations, so developing knowledge, capacity, advocacy in navigating the post-separation parenting journey, and in stepping away from the invisible rules, the invisible contract that shaped us in childhood, those two things do intersect. And that's going to be revealed a little bit more in this particular series. So if you're interested in either the blueprint or our new course, and if you want to make sure that you don't miss the details of either launch, obviously keep tuning in here to the podcast each week. But also head to our website, Daniel Blackcoaching.com.au. On the home page, you'll find two separate newsletter type signups. One is our general sign-up, which includes any update or promotion that will be happening for the blueprint. And the other one is for the claim your namework. Sign up for whichever one interests you or both. I'm not your mum, I'm not telling you what to do. Although, statistically speaking, if you are listening to this podcast, there's every chance that you're already doing enough emotional labour without me assigning you another job. In saying that, I would not be inviting you to sign up to either or both of those mailing lists if I didn't think that it was beneficial. We certainly don't spam. In fact, I probably should be emailing the lists far more often than what I am. I just know that of the lists that I'm a part of, I really don't like receiving stuff all the time. If you want to be kept in the loop and the first to know about the promotion for the blueprint, please do join the general mailing list. Next

Next Episode And Final Thoughts

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episode we're going to take one of the most repeated phrases in separated parenting and family law and scrutinize it a bit. You've probably heard mention something along the lines of quote a meaningful relationship with both parents. What does that actually mean? Does a meaningful relationship require substantial time with both parents? Does more time necessarily produce a quote better relationship? Does less time damage a relationship? If both parents are deemed to be quote loving and capable, does that mean that children should have equal relationships and connections and attachments with them? And at what point did we start measuring relationships in nights, the number of nights overnight time? This is giving you a bit of an insight as to what I think about on a regular basis. I know you're probably thinking, Danielle, you poor lady. I know to some people this shit would be quite boring, but this is quite genuinely what I enjoy contemplating. And once you start pulling at this thread, you will find that there are a surprising number of assumptions hiding underneath it. Some of them have been repeated so often that they've started to sound like evidence when really they're not at all. And we're going to dive into that in our next episode. So I'll see you then. Thank you so much for being here with me. I'll look forward to chatting with you again soon.