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

Clinical Child and Family Psychology Review5/2/2026·DOI·Read paper

Abstract

Abstract 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.

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