CLA Visitation/Family Access Guide

In most families, children attach to their parents or caregivers through emotional bonds.  Such attachment is basic to a child’s life, providing a secure emotional base for the child to build relationships later in life.  

So essential is this attachment to a child’s well-being, that children who are in out-of-home care must have access to their parents/caregivers, siblings and other important people in their lives.  Throughout the guide, the term parent(s) but can also refer to the child’s primary caregiver, legal guardian, and birth parent.  

In 2004, CLA Implementation Leadership Forum charged a workgroup to develop a comprehensive Concurrent Planning model.  CLA has defined Concurrent Planning’s purpose as to expedite permanence for children.  It fosters appropriate attachment, relationship building and continuity between child, family and alternative family.  While developing the model, it became apparent that a special subcommittee needed to be formed to develop a best practice guide for visitation and family access.  Increased visitation with a purpose is a guiding principle of Concurrent Planning but also for good child welfare practice in general.

These guidelines include visitation and contact for children who are placed in out-of-home care.  The terms (1) “visitation”, (2) “parenting time”, and (3) “family access” are used throughout these guidelines to describe parent-child, kin, siblings and other relative contacts.  Visits and parenting time are defined as face-to-face contact between the child and their parent and the child and their siblings.  Family access may involve kin, relatives, and other important people in the child’s life.  Other forms of contact would include telephone calls, letters, and exchange of gifts, videos, and photographs between family members and significant others.   

The following guidelines are not intended to serve as a rigid blueprint for practice nor are they intended to establish a legal standard to which professionals must adhere, unless the action described is required by State or Federal statute or rule.  Rather, the guidelines provide a model of best practice professional practice.  The primary audience for this practice model is our Child and Family Services staff and community partners.