Improved Visitation for Detained Children

Introduction
The public child welfare system in California is responsible for ensuring that children are living in a stable and safe environment. When the social workers within each county agency finds that it is unsafe for the child (ren) to remain in the home the children are detained from the primary caregiver and generally placed into the foster care system.

There are steps that the primary caregiver must go through to reunify with their child(ren). The first part of the process is called Family Reunification (FR) this is when the family is participating in a case plan which can include many items such as supervised visitation, random drug testing, drug and alcohol services, or obtaining appropriate housing. The items must be accomplished before Family Maintenance (FM) can begin. Family Maintenance begins once the children return home during this time the county child protection agency continues to be involved with the family meeting with them approximately once monthly. This part of the process lasts approximately one year if the family continues to progress satisfactorily in their case plan. Once the FM period is completed successfully, the child protection agency terminates their involvement with the family.

Statement of Need
Reunification for families in the United States that have received supervised visitation services is approximately 42% compared to only 29% for families that do not receive supervised visitation services (Ansay & Perkins, 1998). According to a study completed by McWey and Mullis (2004), the weaker the attachment a child had to the biological parent, the more foster care placements the child would be in. Also, the length of time in the foster care system was longer in comparison with a child that had a secure parental attachment.

It appears from the studies examined that supervised visitation lends in reunification of at risk families. However it is apparent that the devotion of the parent or guardian is vital to make this goal a reality. According to Haight (2002)(as cited by Children’s Home Society n.d.), “Parents can go through services without any problems but if they cannot interact with the child in a positive manner then the child cannot return home”(p. 3). After reviewing the literature and completing a series of formal and informal interviews, it is seems that a family needs to bond to be successful in the long-term.

Description of the Intervention
Initially, our intervention plan included construction of three activity boxes for each visitation room at a local child protection agency. The boxes would be filled with age appropriate activities that the parents and their children could participate in together. After constructing the boxes, we were planning on obtaining donations for the materials needed to complete the activities in the boxes. Unfortunately, we were not able to secure funds to make three copies of the activity boxes.

We concluded that fostering a bond between the parent and child is essential for the family to remain stable. In order to facilitate this secure attachment the parent and child should interact together in an appropriate manner while participating in supervised visitation. There are not many interactive materials at the local child welfare agency which provides supervised visitation. We decided to try to obtain donations of toys, art supplies, books, and other materials that would allow parents to interact with their children in a positive manner. We wrote a persuasive letter with statistics to local businesses to show them that there is a need for this in our community.

Evaluation of the Intervention
The research that we preformed before beginning this project displayed that if a child has a strong parental bond that their success at reunification is higher. We believe that teaching parents how to relate and interact with their children on an age appropriate level could help to strengthen the already strained bond between the families. This project received excellent feedback from the supervisors and social workers at the local child protective service agency that we interned for. Everybody involved in this project felt that it could be extremely beneficial to the at risk children that this agency serves.

Reflections on the Project
We believe that this project has the potential to help parents be successful at building and maintaining a bond with their children. The main problem that we had in completing our project was time restraints. We were extremely busy while at the agency and did not have much extra time to work on our community project during internship hours. The agency would have allowed this however we wanted to spend our hours at the agency in the field. We feel that this project has the possibility of being helpful to parents and the social workers that supervise the visitations if it is continued in the future. We were able to obtain $50.00 from a local department store and there is still a possibility for more donations because there are still many donation requests still out in the community.

References
Ansay, S.J. & Perkins, D.F. (1998). The effectiveness of a visitation program in fostering visits with noncustodial parents. Journal on Family Relations, 47, 253-258.
Children’s Home Society (n.d.). Visitation. Retrieved September 20, 2005, from http://www.chs-wa.org/2_advvisitationBACK.htm.
McWey, L.M., & Mullis, A.K. (2004). Improving the lives of children in foster care: The impact of supervised visitation. Journal on Family Relations, 53, 293-300.