A Scoping Review of Australian Aboriginal Early Relational Health Knowledge Systems

Shannon McNeair; Catherine Chamberlain; Naomi Priest; Tracy Evans-Whipp; Suzanne Vassallo; Kayla Mansour; Lisa Ritland; Craig A Olsson; Juli Coffin; Australian Early Relational Health Network

doi:10.1007/s10567-026-00570-w

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A Scoping Review of Australian Aboriginal Early Relational Health Knowledge Systems

Journal article

Open access

Peer reviewed

A Scoping Review of Australian Aboriginal Early Relational Health Knowledge Systems

Shannon McNeair, Catherine Chamberlain, Naomi Priest, Tracy Evans-Whipp, Suzanne Vassallo, Kayla Mansour, Lisa Ritland, Craig A Olsson, Juli Coffin and Australian Early Relational Health Network

Clinical child and family psychology review

2026

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10567-026-00570-w

PMID: 42068494

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Abstract

Aboriginal

Scoping review

Early relational health

Indigenous

Cultural practices

Australian Aboriginal people have evolved advanced relational knowledge systems for raising children and young people over thousands of years. Documentation of this knowledge within peer-reviewed literature is dispersed across a broad set of disciplines and sources that are mostly contextualised within Eurocentric frameworks. In this scoping review, we describe the literature on Australian Aboriginal Early Relational Knowledge Systems. Our aim is to describe how Australian Aboriginal approaches to relational wellbeing uniquely promote health and human development from pre-conception, to childhood, to adolescence and into parenting next generation offspring. We privilege Australian Indigenous authors as the holders of knowledge and limit our review to data sources led by Australian Indigenous people. A systematic search for relevant studies was conducted across four databases: MEDLINE, PsycINFO, Embase and CINAHL. This yielded 5,141 articles, of which 26 met criteria. A further 5 articles were identified through citation searching resulting in 31 included articles. We describe how Aboriginal children and young people develop relational security through engagement with multiple complex social systems within family and community, through interaction with Country, and across human and non-human elements, many features of which are missed in Western theories and Western interpretation of Aboriginal relational knowledge. Culturally valid and reliable assessment measures are urgently needed to accurately represent and monitor population relational health in Aboriginal children and young people.

Details

Title: A Scoping Review of Australian Aboriginal Early Relational Health Knowledge Systems
Authors/Creators: Shannon McNeair - Deakin University
Catherine Chamberlain - The University of Melbourne
Naomi Priest - Murdoch Children's Research Institute
Tracy Evans-Whipp - School of Psychology, Deakin Institute for Lifespan Health and Development, Faculty of Health, Deakin University, Victoria, Australia. t.evanswhipp@deakin.edu.au
Suzanne Vassallo - School of Psychology, Deakin Institute for Lifespan Health and Development, Faculty of Health, Deakin University, Victoria, Australia
Kayla Mansour - School of Psychology, Deakin Institute for Lifespan Health and Development, Faculty of Health, Deakin University, Victoria, Australia
Lisa Ritland - Learning Partnership
Craig A Olsson - Deakin University
Juli Coffin - The University of Western Australia, Crawley, Australia
Australian Early Relational Health Network
Publication Details: Clinical child and family psychology review
Publisher: Springer Nature
Number of pages: 20
Identifiers: 991005882553907891
Murdoch Affiliation: Ngangk Yira Institute for Change
Language: English
Resource Type: Journal article

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