Resources

• Visit Coaching: Building on Family Strengths to Meet Children’s Needs
  Visits between children in foster care and their families often do not build on family strengths or help them demonstrate they can meet their children's safety and developmental needs. Visits can alienate parents, children, and foster parents, and the parent's grief, anger, and preoccupation with complying with court-ordered treatment often obscure their children's needs. Visit coaching is an innovative approach that can replace parenting classes and office-based visits with hands-on guidance for families in meeting their children's needs. The visit coach, who may be their caseworker or a variety of other trained individuals, helps parents take charge of visits and demonstrate more responsiveness to each child. (Abstract of article by Marty Beyer published Juvenile and Family Court Journal.)

• Familyconnect Guides
  Family Alternatives, a private foster care agency in Minneapolis, MN conducted a 3-year research initiative to identify best practices in family visiting in response to the growing research on the topic as well as their own experience with children living in the foster homes they serve. They put together the Familyconnect guides to provide a hands on, practical tool for foster parents, children, and birth parents. The guides are designed to help: Reassure everyone of the importance of family visits and connections; Normalize typical reactions and difficulties related to family visits; Provide strategies for communicating and working with one another in a child centered way. The information in the guides is organized according to five themes: emotion, communication, preparation, connection, and transition.

• Familyconnect: Making Family Visits Work for Children in Foster Care
  The Center for Advanced Studies in Child Welfare features the October 2008 Familyconnect: Making Family Visits Work for Children in Foster Care conference. On the website, you can watch or listen to the event, view samples of the foster care guides (for young children, teens, and parents), and access the Familyconnect Guides order form. The site also offers a literature review (Innovative Practice in Foster Child Visitation: A Review of the Literature for Family Alternatives, Inc.); this document includes an annotated bibliography of resources.

• Programs that Provide Services to Support Family Visiting of Children in Foster Care
  To provide a resource for child welfare professionals, the NRCFCPPP has established a database of agencies and programs providing services that help children in foster care visit with their families. The purposes of the database are to (1) support child welfare agency staff in the identification of visiting programs that might be resources for children in care and their families, and (2) assist agencies and professionals that are interested in developing visiting services in identifying and contacting programs that provide the types of services they wish to develop, thereby supporting the further development of such services.

• Visiting Between Children in Care and Their Families: A Look at Current Policy
  Peg Hess of the Institute for Families in Society at the University of South Carolina authored this study of state visiting policies for the National Resource Center for Family-Centered Practice and Permanency Planning.

• Accounting for Culture in Supervised Visitation Practices
  The Summer 2006 edition of Synergy, a publication of the National Council of Juvenile and Family Court Judges Family Violence Department, contains this interesting article. While the focus is on family visiting centers used in domestic violence cases, it has great applicability in the field of child welfare visiting practices, as well.

• Visitation: Through the Eyes of the Child
  The January 2003 issue of Practice Notes from the Center for Advanced Studies in Child Welfare looks at visiting with aspecial emphasis on two situations of separation and loss requiring specific attention: sibling separation and children with incarcerated mothers.
  

• Toolbox #1: Using Visitation to Support Permanency by Lois Wright
  This publication, which can be ordered from the Child Welfare League of America, presents the best professional child welfare practice in planning and implementing visitation between children in out-of-home care and their parents, within the context of current federal legislation emphasizing permanency planning. This toolbox contains helpful aids and tools that practitioners can use quickly and easily to guide their thinking and the information necessary to use the tools fully and meaningfully.
  

• Making Visits Better: The Perspectives of Parents, Foster Parents, and Child Welfare Workers
  Mothers of children recently placed in foster care, foster mothers and child welfare workers participated in semi-structured, clinical interviews focusing on the challenges of parent visitation with young children. Many mothers described their feelings of grief, trauma and rage about the forced separation from their children; and prioritized emotional expression and communication during visits. Many child welfare workers described the complexities of supporting emotionally close parent-child interactions while monitoring and assessing parental behavior during visits. Many foster mothers described the importance of preparing children for visits, and the difficulties of supporting them afterwards. Implications of understanding mothers', foster mothers' and child welfare workers' perspectives for enhancing the quality of visits with young children are discussed in this 2001 study from the Children and Family Research Center.

• Visitation Policies and Practices in Child Welfare Agencies
  The Child Welfare League of America's National Data Analysis System contains summary information on the way states approach visitation between children in out-of-home placement with their parents or caretaker (of home from which they were removed). States have reported whether they have a visitation policy in place, including sibling visits, the frequency of required visits and the location for the visits. Notes provide greater details about each state's practice in this area. Select Data & Statistics>Access the Data>Out-of-Home Care>Out-of-Home Care Homes & Facilities>Visitation Policies and Practices in Child Welfare Agencies.

• Parent-Child Visits as an Opportunity for Change
  This 1999 article describes how to make supported visits a powerful child welfare tool. It includes a proposal for a visit program, as well as a list of visit principles that can be used by individuals involved in visit support.

• Judicial Oversight of Parental Visitation in Reunification Cases
  This article from Juvenile and Family Court Journal explores the issue of visitation between a child and parents in the context of child protection proceedings. It concludes that visitation between a child and her parents often occurs too infrequently; as a result, the relationship between the child and parents can be damaged, the child can suffer further trauma, and the chances for successful family reunification may be reduced. Finally, judges and social service agencies can and must improve both the quality and quantity of parent-child visitation.

• Minnesota
  • Visitation/Family Access Guidelines
    Olmstead County, Minnesota has created this guide to family visiting as part of its Child and Family Service Review Program Improvement Plan. The Guidelines are an opportunity for social workers to enhance their practice with children and families and include a job aid to help in the documentation of visits, family access, and parenting time.

  • Minnesota PIP TIPS
    The state provides these resources to counties for assistance in their individual Program Improvement Plans. They include tips on:
    • Worker Visits with Child
    • Visits with Parents
    • Visits with Siblings in Foster Care
    • Worker Visits with Parents

  • Trial Home Visits: Strengthening Reunification Practices
    Volume 18 of Practice Notes from the Center for Advanced Studies in Child Welfare at the University of Minnesota addresses the topic of trial home visits, which are court-ordered placements of a child with his or her parents after a stay in foster care. The visits are closely monitored to assess parent readiness for reunification and the child's safety, and the agency maintains legal custody of the child. The issue provides information on trial home visits specific to Minnesota, as well as more general information on visits and best practices, red flags for reentry, strengthening parenting capacity, the ethnic and cultural factor, and closing the case.

• New Mexico: Best Practices in Parent-Child Visitation
  This bulletin outlines best practices and describes the roles of caseworkers, judges, attorneys, court staff, and CASA volunteers.

• New York: Family Visiting for Children in Out-Of-Home Care : A Practice Paper
  This resource paper is designed to provide guidance to agencies in New York State as they consider ways in which their family visiting practices could be strengthened and contribute to more rapid achievement of permanency.

• Oregon: Effective Visitation Planning
  Training materials from the Child Welfare Partnership at Portland State University for a course that addresses preparing children, parents and foster parents for visitation in the context of working as a team and developing a solid visitation plan.

• Pennsylvania: Family Reunification through Visitation
  This 12 hour curriculum examines knowledge related to the development of successful Visitation Plans and strategies to enhance caregiver involvement in the visitation process so that families in Pennsylvania may have better opportunities to achieve reunification.