Vol. 5, No. 4
October 2000

Parent-Child Visits

Visitation can be a place where the system breaks down. Birth parents may have little understanding of how important frequent and successful visits are to their children, DSS, and the courts. As a result, they may permanently lose custody of their kids, who themselves may experience long foster care stays.

Foster parents, too, may not fully understand the importance of visits, or they may feel unprepared to help children afterwards. Feeling unsupported, they may even quit fostering.

Yet the opposite can happen. Trained, committed foster parents can reassure birth parents and foster children. Guided by social workers and motivated by a clear understanding of the consequences, birth parents can demonstrate improvements during frequent visits with their kids. As a result, children can be returned sooner to safer, healthier families.

Visits are a critical part of child welfare, a part clearly related to our goals of stable foster care placements and timely, permanent outcomes for children.

We hope this issue of Practice Notes helps you, as a child welfare social worker, use your significant influence to make the most of parent-child visits.

Contents

	Making the Most of Visitation
	Suggestions for Visitation
	Checklist for Facilitating Visits
	Visitation and Concurrent Planning
	Visits are a Crucial Part of the Principles of Concurrent Planning
	Involved Foster Parents Can be Crucial to Successful Visits
	Ways to Support Foster Parents Around Visitation
	Want to Know More?
	Click here to read or print the entire issue as a pdf file.