Confronting whiteness in developmental psychology : impacts on ethnic minority families in the Australian child welfare system

This chapter explores the dominance of Western theories of child development and its impact on child welfare practices for ethnic minority families in Australia. It begins by outlining recent critical discussions on Whiteness in the discipline of psychology, and acknowledgments from national psychological bodies (mainly in the USA) for their role in perpetuating and failing to challenge racism and systemic inequities. The discipline continues to grapple with understanding its racist history and having it as core aspects of curricula for emerging psychologists. It critiques the pervasiveness of Western models of thinking in relation to child development, parenting practices, and family structures. This chapter argues that the failure to emphasize historical and contextual factors results in incomplete understanding of ethnic minority families who live in countries with White-majority governments. The chapter concludes with examples illustrating the iatrogenic impact of White dominant frameworks of development on vulnerable families, focusing on ethnic minority families in the Australian child welfare system. Cultural safety is a critical matter for both Indigenous and ethnic minority families in the system, yet the latter group has received little attention in professional practice.