Australia has no shortage of policies relating to children.

In fact, these policies are often in the headlines. We invest billions of dollars each year trying to improve outcomes for children and young people.

Yet we continue to see stubbornly high rates of child maltreatment and family violence, mental ill-health, school disengagement, youth offending and child protection system involvement.

The problem may not be that we are doing the wrong things. It may be that our policy architecture lacks the most important piece of the puzzle: parents.

From birth to death, we all need to be cared for, but as years of headlines have shown, Australia’s care economy faces big challenges. In this four-part series, experts examine how the country’s increasingly for-profit models of care and the government policy that spurred them on are failing those they’re supposed to protect – and what can be done about it.

For three decades, I have examined child maltreatment, child protection systems and family welfare.

Across these areas, one theme repeatedly emerges: we are remarkably willing to invest in systems that respond to problems, but much less willing to invest in parents – the people who have the greatest influence on children’s lives.

Parenting is one of the strongest determinants of child wellbeing. Warm, responsive, consistent parenting is associated with better mental health, stronger educational outcomes, healthier relationships, and lower risks of abuse, neglect, violence and offending.

But for all its importance, parenting remains largely invisible in........

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