Why No Contact Can Happen

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Welcome back to the Post Separation Abuse Podcast. I'm your host, Danielle Black. We've spent a lot of time in this series talking about what happens when children resist or refuse spending time with a parent. We've explored the reasons that children might resist, the responsibility that adults have for the relationships that they build with their children. And in our last episode, part six of this particular series, we explored the line between encouraging contact and coercing a child. We also talked about a possibility that frightens many preferred parents, and that is that a court might respond to a child's resistance by changing primary care, by changing the primary residence of where the child lives. That does happen and it matters that parents understand that that can be an option that is open to the court, but it isn't the only outcome available to a court. And I don't want this series to leave parents with the impression that the law's response to children resisting or refusing is always more pressure, more enforcement, or a transfer of primary care. Sometimes a court concludes that requiring a child to spend time with a parent is no longer in that child's best interests. Sometimes the orders provide for no contact. Sometimes they provide that contact will happen according to the child's wishes. Sometimes those arrangements aren't imposed by a judge after a contested trial at all. They can be agreed between the parents and made into consent orders, often after a family report or other professional evidence has contributed significantly to the conversation. That's what we're exploring today. Not how to engineer a no contact outcome and not how to avoid the parenting orders that you don't want, but rather what happens when a child's refusal becomes so significant and the realities of the child's relationship with the resisted parent so difficult that continuing to require contact may not be an appropriate response. There's a distinction that I want to make here right at the beginning, and that is that courts can also make no contact orders when a child actually wants to see the other parent. I've worked with families where children were either keen to have that relationship or were quite young and were not yet at a stage where they could be verbally expressing their views one way or the other. But that nevertheless serious concerns meant that professionals couldn't identify a viable pathway for transitioning beyond supervision and indefinite supervised contact is often not considered sustainable or beneficial for children. That's when the conversation of no contact can come into play as well. Those are important cases, and it just goes to show that a child's wishes can matter, but they are not the only consideration. This episode, though, is specifically about children who resist or refuse contact and what adults and courts can do with that reality.

Orders Are Not The Relationship

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To start with, we're going to return to something that we discussed in part five of this series when we asked whose job it is to fix a struggling parent-child relationship. We talked about the fact that parenting plans and court orders, care arrangements, can provide a certain type of scaffolding. They can tell the adults when a child needs to be moving between households. They can create regular opportunities for connection. They can provide structure and predictability, and in a lot of families that can be genuinely beneficial. But scaffolding is not the building. A parenting schedule can maintain particular arrangements without necessarily building trust, affection, or emotional safety. A child can spend five nights a fortnight with a parent for years because that's what the adults have arranged or agreed upon or has been ordered by a court, and still that child can feel unheard, dismissed, frightened, or profoundly disconnected from one of their caregivers. All this to say we need to stop treating attendance at any parent's home as a reliable measure of relationship quality. It tells us that the child was there, but it doesn't by itself tell us what the child experienced.

Adolescence And The Separate Mind

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Sometimes adolescence is when that distinction becomes impossible to ignore. The child who was seven and had very little choice and whose views were not given significant weight is now fourteen. They have a stronger sense of themselves, a clearer understanding of how they've been treated, and a growing capacity to act on their views. They might say I'm not going to the other house anymore. Or I'm not going five knots a fortnight. I'll go every second weekend, but that's it. The adults may experience that as a sudden breakdown, but from the child's perspective, this might just be the first time that they've actually been able to act on a problem that for them has actually existed for years. That's a very different story from a previously healthy relationship being mysteriously destroyed overnight. Now, this does not mean that every refusal is justified or that every account from an adolescent is complete, but it does mean that we need to get curious about the relationship and not just simply focus on the refusal. The reality is that some parents really are abusive, and some, whether abusive or not, struggle to tolerate their child's separate mind. Now, this is something that we don't dance around here on the post-separation abuse podcast partly because of the name of the podcast. Some parents are abusive, some are controlling, intimidating, or emotionally volatile. Some parents lack empathy or attunement. Some parents don't recognise their child's sensory needs, interests, preferences, or emotional experience unless those things happen to align with their own. Some parents experience a child's disagreement as disrespect and respond by simply demanding more compliance. A younger child can have very limited power in that relationship. They can learn to keep the peace. They can learn which opinions to not express, which questions not to ask, how to read the adult's mood. They might spend years accommodating behavior from a parent that makes them deeply uncomfortable simply because they've got no realistic available alternative. But then they get older. They begin to realize that they are a separate individual, that they have a separate mind. They might realize that being related to someone doesn't require them to accept being spoken to with contempt, having their boundaries ignored, or having their experiences and reality rewritten. They might have tried repeatedly to explain what's wrong, and they might eventually decide that they won't participate anymore. That doesn't automatically make a teenager write about absolutely everything, but nor does it make them defiant, manipulated, or incapable of appreciating the value of family. Sometimes a teenager is refusing to continue accommodating a relationship in which the adult has simply not been prepared to change. This is where we also need to think about the way we approach other relationships. If a friend tells us repeatedly that they feel dismissed or disrespected by us, we don't usually insist that the solution is to schedule more compulsory dinners together. We ask what's happening. If a friend came to us with that statement, with those feelings of being dismissed or disrespected, we would hopefully be willing to listen and take responsibility. So then if we look back at a parent-child relationship, well why should we disregard the feelings, the thoughts, the views, the concerns simply because one person in that relationship dynamic is a parent and the other is a child. A parent may have a court order providing for particular time with their child, but that doesn't establish that the child experiences the relationship as safe, responsive, or worthwhile. And it certainly doesn't absolve the parent of responsibility for how they behave during that time, for how they've actually contributed to the relationship or not, as the case may be.

Child Views And Enforcement Limits

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Now it's important that I say here that when I used the age fourteen in a previous example, that was just purely an example that I just plucked out of my mind in the moment. There's actually no age in the Australian Family Law Act when a child suddenly acquires the legal authority to dictate their parenting arrangements. No age is a magic number, not fourteen, twelve, fifteen, sixteen, none of it. The court considers the child's views as one part of the best interest assessment alongside safety, the child's developmental, psychological and emotional needs, the capacity of each adult to meet those needs, and the benefits of relationships where it's safe for those relationships to occur. In saying that, it would be totally absurd to pretend that age and maturity don't actually change the practical situation. A determined 14-year-old is not at all the same as a four-year-old. A teenager who refuses to leave the house will run away from a changeover, call the preferred parent asking to be picked up, refuse to answer messages or phone calls from the resisted parent, pack a bag and actually run away and stay with the mate for a few nights. This is a very different situation to what we can be experiencing with younger children who are resisting or refusing. And I understand this dynamic very personally and intimately. When I spoke with the family report writer in my own matter when it was in the court system, I raised a very practical concern about what would happen if orders were made requiring my child to spend time with their other parent in the context that my child was bigger than me at that point. He was absolutely firm in his views. He could articulate the abuse that he'd experienced and why he didn't want to go. There was no way I could physically make him do anything in saying that. With all other things he was what would be considered quote unquote well behaved. He attended school with no issue. No behaviour concerns in any other respect. So again, this contributed, I think, in the sense that he was not labelled as a quote unquote naughty child, and I was not labelled as you know an ineffective or enmeshed parent. There were genuine concerns about what might happen if orders were made when he was so firm in his views and he was not little in the sense that I couldn't just simply pick him up and strip him into a car seat. And even if I could have, I had serious concerns about the consequences of any sort of physical force. I was concerned about the potential toll on his emotional and psychological well being. He had already run away from the other parent's house once, so I was deeply concerned about that event happening again and potentially his safety and well being being compromised even more deeply. So what exactly would an order requiring his attendance with his other parent have achieved? Would we have gone back to court again and again and again because he continued to refuse? And my ex would have continued to take me back to court, saying that I was contravening the orders. Would I have been expected to somehow produce compliance from a physically mature adolescent who had clearly explained why he would not participate? And at what point would somebody ask whether the arrangement itself was appropriate? Now, these are not rhetorical questions to parents who are living through this. They are immediate, practical, important questions. And they're questions that the court has to confront as well in these situations. A parenting order places legal obligations on parents. Parents can't simply announce that their kids don't want to go and then treat the obligations as irrelevant. Courts can examine what efforts a parent has made, whether there was obstruction, and whether a failure to comply with an order had a reasonable excuse. But responsibility in alignment with a court order is not the same as having unlimited physical power over another person even when that other person is your child. If the child's adamant and the parent has made reasonable, genuine efforts, repeating the same order or bringing repeated contravention applications, in my view is highly unlikely to change a child's mind. Rather, it may instead deepen the conflict, intensify distress, and turn the relationship into an endless contest about enforcement. And even if a teenager can be forced to attend, that still leaves the more important question. What kind of relationship is actually being built by forcing them through that door?

Understanding The Reasons For Refusal

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The reasons for the refusal matter. And of course, adolescents can refuse contact for many different reasons. One teenager may want more time at a particular home for reasons related to sport, friends, and other social events. Another might feel responsible for the preferred parent's emotions. Another might be caught in years of loyalty conflict. Another might have experienced violence or controlling behaviour. Another might be reacting to a parent who's not abusive in a legal sense, but who has been persistently dismissive, rigid, or unwilling to recognize the child's individuality and separate mind. Now they're not interchangeable situations. A child's explanation should be heard and addressed in context. Their age and maturity do matter, but so does the consistency and specificity of what they're saying, their experiences over time, their functioning, the observations of any professionals that they might be connected with, and the behavior of both parents. We certainly shouldn't be confusing taking a child's views seriously with making the child responsible for the legal outcome. A child can be listened to without being asked to choose a parent. A family report writer can recommend that a teenager's wishes be given significant weight without suggesting that every single preference of the teenagers should automatically determine the entirety of the rest of their life. Sometimes the reasons provided by teenagers are incredibly straightforward. He doesn't listen to me or she keeps calling me a liar. Or every time I try to explain a different view, he says I'm just disrespectful. Those concerns can sound a lot less dramatic than an allegation of physical abuse, but they still tell us a lot about whether the resisted parent is actually capable of engaging with this young person as a separate human being. So our questions shouldn't be confined to what the preferred parent has done to encourage attendance. We also have to ask what the resisted parent has done to understand the refusal and repair the relationship. Have they listened? Have they changed their behaviour? Can they acknowledge their child's experience without immediately making excuses, arguing it away, or blaming the other parent? Do they expect the child ultimately to bend to their way of doing things? Or are they actually prepared to develop a relationship that's flexible with the actual child that's in front of them? As opposed to some kind of fantasy child that is an extension of themselves. Sometimes the concern goes well beyond reluctance. A child might repeatedly run away, experience serious psychological deterioration, or express thoughts of self-harm in connection with forced contact. These concerns require proper assessment and where needed, appropriate mental health and safety responses. They're not bargaining chips, and they should never be dismissed as mere manipulation. In saying all of that, the existence of significant distress does not automatically answer the parenting question. Sometimes children need help to manage anxiety or avoidance, and sometimes supported contact can be beneficial. Sometimes the distress is communicating exposure to harm. Sometimes an intervention intended to repair a relationship is itself creating significant psychological and even physical consequences without there actually being a realistic prospect of improving the relationship. When the court is involved, the court has to consider what will actually happen under the available arrangements. What would requiring contact achieve for this particular child? Is there any evidence that a graduated or supported approach could help? What have the adults already tried? What are the likely consequences if contact continues to be compelled or forced? And what might be lost if contact is no longer required? These are difficult judgments, but the difficulty is not a reason to pretend that more pressure is always the answer. Where the evidence supports it, stopping contact can be a protective and sensible response.

When Contact According To Wishes Fits

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There's also an aspect of this discussion that's too easily missed when we focus on published cases, and that is that parents can actually reach outcomes that are not compelling any particular contact or communication by consent. Imagine a fourteen year old who has consistently refused contact and clearly explained why. The parents and the child participate individually in a family report process. The report writer considers the broader circumstances and recommends that the child's views be given significant weight. That doesn't make the report writer the decision maker. It doesn't mean the report automatically calls for no contact. But it can fundamentally change the conversation between the parents and their respective lawyers. A parent who was seeking a fixed schedule of parenting time and for the child to be compelled into those arrangements might recognize that continuing to pursue compulsory contact is unlikely to improve the relationship. The parents might agree that the teenager's time with the resisted parent should occur according to the teen's wishes, or that at the very least there should be no specific prescribed scheduled time. In some circumstances, the parents might agree to there being no contact. If proceedings are before the court, they can seek consent orders reflecting that agreement, obviously with the guidance and advice of their respective lawyers and subject to the court's approval. This matters because families sometimes imagine that the only pathway in these kinds of situations is a dramatic final hearing in which one parent wins and the other loses. But in reality, professional assessment can lead to an agreement that better reflects the child's needs. Understandably, this requires both parents being able to take on board the views and the guidance of the professional who has prepared the report, and to take on board the views, the thoughts, the emotions, the wishes of their child that were expressed to the report writer. This can still be a difficult and painful agreement, particularly for the resisted parent. But agreeing that compulsory contact should stop doesn't mean that the resisted parent is agreeing with every allegation or giving up forever on the possibility or the hope of a relationship with their child. I know from my own experience that the recommendation to give a child's wishes significant weight can be an important factor in reaching an outcome. And it's worth saying clearly and plainly that an agreement reached in those circumstances can be a careful reflection and consideration of the needs of the child rather than one parent simply surrendering a position. We also need to distinguish between a report writer recommending that a child's views be given significant weight and a report writer recommending a particular no contact arrangement. They're not the same recommendation. The reasoning matters and the precise terms of any proposed orders matter. And the court can still have an important role. When people say that a court has ordered, quote, no contact, they might be talking about very different arrangements. An order expressly prohibiting contact is not the same as an order that allows time or communication according to the child's wishes. An order for no prescribed time is not necessarily the same as an order for no communication at all. In one case, the court might determine that a child is not to spend time or communicate with a parent. In another, it might leave the door open for the child to initiate contact. In another, it might provide for letters or indirect communication or some other form of supported interaction. These distinctions have legal and practical consequences and again the wording of the actual parenting orders does matter.

What Different No Contact Orders Mean

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One recent illustration is Ad and Adad, decided by the Federal Circuit and Family Court's appellate jurisdiction in august twenty twenty six. The case involved two children aged fifteen and thirteen. The primary judge had made final orders under which their time in communication with their father would occur according to their wishes. The judge anticipated that the practical effect, at least for the foreseeable future, would be no time or communication. The father appealed. The appeal raised, amongst other things, objections concerning the report writer's opinions, subpoenas, and also injunctions. The appellate court found no error in the primary judge's reliance on the report writer's opinion, and the appeal did not overturn the wishes based contact arrangement, although an injunction was varied. There's an important point in the reasoning. The report writer was entitled to express an expert opinion about arrangements that would meet the child's needs. That did not make the report writer the person responsible for deciding disputed facts. The judge remained responsible for making the findings and the orders. The appellate discussion also recognised that concerns about psychological harm can be relevant even where the conduct being addressed is not physical violence. Now, I don't want to oversell that case. It does not establish that every 13 or 15-year-old should control their own contact or care arrangements. And an appeal is not a fresh trial in which the appellate judge simply substitutes their preferred parenting arrangements. But it is a concrete example of Australian final orders leaving contact to adolescents' wishes, even when the foreseeable practical result could be no contact. And notice how different that is from the assumption that the only appropriate response to a teenager's refusal is simply to order more time or to change their primary residence. The available outcomes are far more varied than that. So when we're talking about a child's views being given significant weight, what do we actually mean by that? That phrase can carry enormous importance for both children and families. A report writer might say that a young person's views should be given significant weight because of their apparent maturity, the clarity and consistency of their reasons, the history of the relationship, or the likely consequences of imposing arrangements that the child strongly opposes. But significant weight does not mean total and absolute control. The child's views sit within the wider assessment of best interests. A court might give substantial weight to a teenager's opposition while still considering safety, emotional development, the benefit of relationships where safe, and the capacity of each parent to meet the child's needs. That distinction is particularly important when the child is articulating experiences of abuse or long-standing emotional mistreatment. In saying that, we shouldn't assume that because a teenager can explain their refusal, that every allegation has therefore been legally established. But neither should we require the child to prove a criminal offence before their experience of the relationship is taken seriously. A court making parenting orders is assessing what arrangements are best for this particular child going forward. And sometimes that assessment leads to a conclusion that is uncomfortable for at least one of the adults. Even if a relationship might be beneficial in principle, compelling this particular teenager to spend time with a parent is not an appropriate way to achieve it.

The Contravention Cycle And Its Cost

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Let's come back to the practical question. Suppose a 14-year-old refuses to get in the car, the preferred parent has talked with them, provided reassurance, made the arrangements, taken reasonable steps to support the child's attendance, and the teenager is still refusing. The resisted parent alleges noncompliance. Court proceedings follow, another order is made, the teenager still refuses. What then? Another contravention application, another court hearing, another argument about whether the preferred parent has done enough? Encouraged enough, encouraged harder? How many times do we repeat the same process before examining whether the underlying arrangement is actually workable or beneficial for this particular child? Now this is not me suggesting that contravention proceedings are always inappropriate. They can be really important where a parent is genuinely obstructing contact or disregarding orders. Courts absolutely need mechanisms to respond to that kind of behaviour or situation. But where a mature teenager is adamant, has clearly articulated their reasons, and cannot reasonably be compelled by the parent caring for them, we have to acknowledge the limits of enforcement. And the cost of returning to court again and again and again is not just financial. The child might experience every attempted changeover as a confrontation. The preferred parent may feel that they're being asked to choose between protecting their child's well being and their child's relationship and trust with them, and avoiding allegations of noncompliance. The resisted parent may become more invested in proving their entitlement to a relationship with the child than in understanding why their child does not want to spend time with them. The relationship then becomes a legal contest rather than a human relationship. At some point, somebody has to ask whether continuing that cycle is serving the child, is serving anyone. Seeing reason does not mean abandoning the importance of parent-child relationships, but it does mean recognizing that repeated compulsory attendance is not the same thing as relationship repair.

Repair Work For Both Parents

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So what responsibility remains with the resisted parent? I want to spend some time on this because the resisted parent does not disappear from the picture simply because the court stops requiring contact. If anything, the absence of compulsory time may expose the importance of their relational work even more clearly. Imagine being a parent whose teenager no longer has to see you. You might be feeling devastated. You might believe that the other parent has contributed to your child's resistance. You might feel profoundly misunderstood by any professionals that have been involved. Those feelings can be very real. And your child's experience of you is real too. And it deserves curiosity rather than automatic rebuttal. For example, if your child has told you that you don't listen, can you listen without immediately telling them why they're wrong? If they've told you that something that you've said or done has frightened them or worried them, can you take responsibility for the effect of your behavior without turning the conversation into a defense of your intentions? If they want a different kind of relationship from the one that you imagined having with them, can you tolerate that they have a separate mind? That they have a right to their own views, their own feelings? Repair can involve acknowledging harm, regardless of whether the harm was intended. It can involve changing behavior, respecting boundaries, participating in appropriate professional support, and demonstrating over time that contact is not simply going to recreate the old dynamic. Repair can involve allowing the child to set the pace. It can also involve accepting that an apology from you does not entitle you to forgiveness or immediate reconciliation. Of course, where contact is prohibited, the parents must comply with the orders. A wish to repair the relationship is not permission to bypass parenting orders, but where communication remains possible, the opportunity presented is not to pressure the teenager into some kind of relationship that's preferred by the resisted parent. Rather, it's for the resisted parent to become someone with whom the teenager might eventually want a relationship with. Sometimes that can require an adult to face a very difficult possibility. That the child has reasons for refusing that cannot be fixed by court orders. And what about the preferred parent? The preferred parent also has responsibilities, although we have to acknowledge that those responsibilities are not limitless. And again, this is something that I have a lot of lived experience with. Respecting a teenager's position is not the same as recruiting them into a campaign against the other parent. And a wishes-based order doesn't necessarily mean that the preferred parent should communicate that any reconciliation is undesirable. But let's be equally clear. Supporting the possibility of a relationship doesn't require minimizing abuse, pressuring a child to override their own safety concerns, or pretending that the resisted parent's behavior is irrelevant. The preferred parent's task is not to manufacture affection or to produce a teenager by force. Where it's safe and consistent with parenting orders, a parent can make space for children to change their minds. They can avoid making the child responsible for the parent's own emotions and emotional reactions. They can calmly respond if the child expresses curiosity about the other parent or a desire to reconnect. They can refrain from turning every shift in the child's position into a test of loyalty. But again, if the child is describing harm, that needs to be taken seriously. A preferred parent can be open to future possibilities while also recognizing that their child's present boundaries may very well be appropriately protective. I also want to say here that no contact outcomes is not automatically proof that the resisted parent is or was abusive. In the same way that a wishes-based order, so parenting orders in which the contact and communication with one parent is according to the child's wishes, that isn't automatically proof that the preferred parent has done everything right. And a court's refusal to make any such orders doesn't prove that relationships are healthy either. These outcomes are decisions about care arrangements for children, not neat and tidy verdicts on the moral worth of adults. Sometimes there are clear findings of abuse. Sometimes there are concerns about psychological harm or entrenched resistance. Sometimes the court is choosing between options that all carry disadvantages. Sometimes the parents reach agreement because the evidence makes the practical reality impossible to ignore. That doesn't mean that we have to be vague about abuse or tiptoe around failures of empathy and attunement. We can name them and we should name them where the evidence supports them. But we also need to acknowledge that not every refusal has the same origin. And on that note, it's not helpful to think about parenting orders that don't require a particular parenting schedule as either a celebration or a punishment. No contact orders or orders that provide for contact or communication according to the child's wishes can be a protective outcome. And they can also involve grief and lost opportunities. Both of those things can be true at the same time. And this circles us back to some of the things that we mentioned in episode five and to the central idea running through this series that care arrangements after separation can create opportunities for relationships between parents and children, but they can't by themselves make those relationships meaningful or beneficial. For years, the schedule, the parenting plan, the court orders may have told a child where to sleep on what particular nights across a fortnight, but eventually that scaffolding comes away. And sometimes with adolescents, we see the beginning of that process well before that particular child turns 18. They're no longer small enough to be moved through an arrangement simply because adults insist. They can articulate what they've experienced, they can resist, they can make their own assessment of whether relationships feel worthwhile and beneficial to them. Now that assessment might be incomplete, it might be influenced by conflict, influencing from a parent, or any number of other things. That assessment can also change over time, but it's still part of the child's developing personhood. And where a teenager has spent years feeling unsafe, dismissed or unheard, their refusal may reveal the true condition of a relationship that compulsory attendance had kept looking functional from the outside. So if a parent-child relationship can only continue because the child is legally required to attend, then what is holding that relationship together is a court order. We then have to be wondering where's the trust, connection, safety, mutual respect. This is when parents need to be considering how they can be supporting their child's relationship with them differently. This can include addressing the behavior that's damaged the relationship. Sometimes it might be to actually stop requiring any degree of contact or communication, at least for the time being, because the cost of compulsion of enforcement can be far too high and the prospects of meaningful relationship repair via enforcement can frankly be simply too low. And none of these decisions should be made automatically or made lightly. But all of them should be available for serious consideration when we're genuinely focused on the child. Because a teenager's refusal often is not the beginning of a relationship problem. Oftentimes, it's simply the moment that the adults can no longer avoid seeing the relationship problem.

Next Week On Influence And Loyalty

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In our next episode, we're going to be talking about situations when children are caught in the middle, when there's been influence from a parent, manipulation from a parent, loyalty conflicts between parents. Because sometimes some children really have been manipulated into rejecting a parent. Sometimes they've been lied to. Sometimes they've been told things about money, extramarital affairs, morality, religion, and other aspects regarding the breakdown of their family unit that they should never have been exposed to. Sometimes they've been made responsible for a parent's emotional survival or given the impression that loving one parent means betraying the other. That's what we're going to be talking about next week, and I hope you'll join me for that conversation. Again, thank you so much for being here for this conversation, for these many conversations that we've been having about when children resist or refuse contact. When children say no. I value your time. I really appreciate the fact that you're making space for these conversations, that you're making space for perspectives that perhaps you haven't considered before, perspectives that might challenge some of your current values, attitudes, or beliefs about this particular topic. Simply being willing to sit with different thoughts, different ideas, different perspectives is so incredibly valuable. I'll look forward to chatting with you again soon.