Page 7 - Meeting with Children Book

MEETING WITH CHILDREN APPROACH

PREFACE

Collaborating on any writing combines the personalities and
quirkiness of each author. It has been so much fun to work
together in this exercise of combining our beliefs, values
and experience in this written piece. Definitely challenging;
we sit at laptops on opposite sides of the planet, we bring
differing experience, differing cultures, and time zones that
create the meaning of jet lag, we have varying accents,
moodiness, and the endless Apple versus PC! Even our
spelling is not the same. So to have a book on your table, is
for us an achievement of cosmic proportion.

This book is not just a course manual, it is designed to be a
description of our thinking. It is a book about why, when
and how the voices of children and youth can be heard in
legal and non-legal processes that will impact them.

We are committed to a check-in with all children in family
law processes. Obviously this is affected by the age,
maturity and stage of development of young children.
However for children five years and over, giving them the
opportunity to describe their experience in both public and
private family law processes is, we argue, quite different to
the process of an adult describing what that particular child
needs.

And so to this book. We have each taken on chapters and
brought our own personalities to the writing. We have tried
to edit this into one readable piece, but we have also