Services
Visit coaching is currently utilized in over 20 states. Through instruction and supervised visits, parents learn how to plan nurturing and age-appropriate activities, promote healthy development, and meet their child’s unique mental, emotional, and social needs.
- Utilizes Trust-Based Relational Intervention, an evidence-based practice that is attachment-based and trauma-informed to improve the quality of child-parent interactions
- Assists parents in articulating their children’s unmet needs
- Provides a framework for parents to best use limited time with their child
- Enhances parental motivation for reunification
- Empowers parents to affect positive change in their child’s life
- Documents parents’ behavior change to assist CBCs in the determination of reunification
- Appreciates the parent’s strengths in meeting each child’s needs
- Helps parents cope with their feelings so that they can visit consistently and keep disruptive emotions out of the visiting period
- Provides co-parenting support and alignment between caregiver and non-custodial parent, reducing dysregulation prior to and following visits
Why is visit coaching necessary?
Although research correlates visits with faster return home and shorter foster care placement, in most child welfare systems. Visits are rarely more than a weekly encounter. Families can have “okay” visits for months and be no closer to demonstrating that they can keep their child safe.
Services are seldom designed to help families learn more about what their child needs. Drug and alcohol programs and domestic violence counseling focus on adult treatment, not parent responsiveness to children. Parenting classes are not specifically designed to help a parent clarify what he/she could do differently to meet the unique developmental needs of his/her particular child. Parents can be clean and sober, or determined to stay out of violent relationships, or graduates of parenting classes and still unable to demonstrate that they will protect their child from the risks that brought him/her into care.
Visits typically do not attempt to build on a parent strengths or guide parents in responding to their child’s reaction to separation. Parents’ concepts of their child’s needs may remain different from the developmental and safety needs of concern to the case worker, foster parent, parenting teacher, or therapist. The parent’s preoccupation with complying with court-ordered treatment, employment and housing may obscure their child’s needs. They may act out their anger and grief about the child’s removal during visits, not realizing how it may negatively affect their child.
Coaching helps the non-custodial parent and caregiver encourage the child to live happily in two different families, which relieves painful “loyalty” pressures. It is important not only for the caregiver and parent to communicate but for the child to see them interact in a friendly way. When visits include caregivers and parents, everyone has a shared understanding of the child’s needs and behaviors and can use the same approach in navigating them.
Research shows that a responsive and attuned caregiver is critical to healthy emotional-brain development. By providing planning meetings prior to visits occurring, parents develop the life-long habit of identifying a child’s needs and adjusting parenting skills accordingly to meet them
- Williams, Meghan, and Marty Eeyer. “Exploring Options for Better Visiting: National and Local Programs Develop Their Own Best Practices for Visiting.” Children’s Voice, vol. 18, no. 1, 2009, pp. 14–19. JSTOR, https://www.jstor.org/stable/48625840. Accessed 14 Mar. 2023.
- Beyer, Marty (2008). “Visit Coaching: Building on Family Strengths to Meet Children’s Needs,” Juvenile and Family Court Journal, 59, 1, 47-60. http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/journal/119399753/issue
Comparison of Visit Coaching to Other Family Services
Therapeutic Visitation
Designed as a therapeutic intervention and safeguarding tool.
Court-ordered supervised visitation program specifically tailored for high-conflict families facing challenges such as domestic violence, physical or verbal abuse, or parents with a history of parenting difficulties.
Particularly beneficial for cases involving previous allegations of sexual abuse, threats to abscond with the child, or instances of parental alienation.
Interactions during supervised visits guided to enhance the parent-child relationship. promoting a safe and supportive environment.
Goal is to support and strengthen the ongoing relationship between the non- custodial parent and the child.
Because visits are not bound by HIPAA, the CBC is provided comprehensive documentation of visit that allows the judge to make informed decisions, based on the behavior change exhibited during visits.
Family Therapy
Purpose is to support children and families with mental health diagnoses in working through stressors, struggles, challenges, and tough times in a way that results in stronger family relationships and a greater ability to function as a unit.
Goal is for family members to learn to better understand each other as well as communicate and work through conflict and stress more effectively.
Supports parents in understanding the purpose and function behind survival-based behaviors as well as how to support the child in getting their needs met in more attractive ways.
A trauma-informed and attachment-based approach to establishing best parenting practices.
Bound by client confidentiality and information shared with CBC’s is limited.
Visit Coaching
Supports parents in exercising behavior change through attuned and responsive interactions that support their child’s needs.
A child-needs-focused approach rather than a parenting approach to visits that is trauma-informed and attachment-based.
Establishing parenting practices that focus on the child’s underlying emotional dynamics and long-term development rather than the behavior while strengthening the parent-child bond.
Creates a positive visit experience for the child by fostering a co-parenting relationship between the caregiver and non-custodial parent, increasing consistency and minimizing dysregulation prior to and following visitation.
Because visits are not bound by HIPAA, the CBC is provided comprehensive documentation of visit that allows the judge to make informed decisions, based on the behavior change exhibited during visits.