Virtual parent-child visitation in support of family reunification in the time of COVID-19

When children are removed from their birth parents and placed in foster care, child welfare policy and practice prioritizes family reunification in permanency planning. Of the many services offered to families in support of reunification, parent-child visitation is one of the most important. The purposes of visitation are to maintain and support the parent-child relationship, facilitate improved parenting skills, and offer social workers opportunities to gauge the family’s progress in meeting reunification goals. Whether supervised or unsupervised, parent-child visitations most often involve face-to-face contact between family members. During periods of sheltering in place in response to COVID-19, however, face-to-face visits have been largely curtailed. In their place, child welfare agencies have begun using virtual visitation through various technology platforms such as smartphones, FaceTime, Zoom, WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger and Skype, often facilitated by foster parents. A number of questions have arisen, however, about the effectiveness of virtual visitations and how best to use them as a means of supporting reunification goals. In the present article, we examine existing data on how children respond to virtual communication with parents and extended family and what practical issues and training needs are encountered when implementing virtual visits in juvenile dependency cases.

Practices and Perceptions of Nurses Regarding Child Visitation in Adult Intensive Care Units

Background Provision of developmentally appropriate support for child visitors in adult intensive care units (ICUs) would benefit patients and young visitors. Research on best practices for child visitation in adult ICUs is limited. Objectives To explore the perceptions and practices of nurses working in adult ICUs in the United States regarding child visitation and the role of child life specialists in this setting. Methods Data were collected from 446 adult ICU nurses via a cross-sectional survey. The survey explored perceptions and practices regarding child visitation, access to child-friendly resources, and the feasibility of having a child life specialist in adult ICUs. Results Several participants (303, 67.9%) felt that children were at risk for psychological trauma from visiting an adult ICU. Some participants (122, 27.4%) reported that their ICUs did not have policies for child visitation. Logistic regression showed that nurses with a master’s degree were 1.8 times (P < .05) more likely to believe that young children (0-5 years) should visit. Nurses (105 of 197, 53.3%) were more likely to allow young children to visit if the patient was the child’s parent or if the patient was dying. Child-friendly resources were not routinely available. Nurses expressed that adult ICUs could benefit from child life specialists facilitating child visitation. Conclusions Nurses were inconsistently open to child visitation. Exceptions for older children (> 6 years), children whose parent was the patient, patients’ illness severity, and end of life allowed more child visitation. Ways to facilitate child-friendly visitation in adult ICUs are discussed.

CHILD VISITATION RIGHTS IN PRACTICE

Child visitation can facilitate the continued involvement of both parents in their children’s lives after a divorce. This study aims to examine the issue of visitation rights and report the results of an analysis of relevant court cases involving Malaysian Muslim families. It describes the structure or type of visitation awarded to non-custodial parents as a result of their loss of child custody. Content analysis technique was applied to elaborate on the reported court cases. A cross tabulation method was also performed to describe the frequency of cases for the respective types of visitation. This study has revealed several details about visitation rights hidden in the masses of case law. These include granted visitation rights which comprise scheduled, reasonable and dual-form visitation, counting omission of access rights which occurred most frequently including cases where parties received legal representation. The study has contributed towards a greater understanding of how visitation orders are made in practice through a quantitative analysis of past court decisions.

“‘It will crush you like a bug’: Maternal incarceration, secondary prisonization, and children’s visitation”

Over the last three decades, the number of children experiencing the incarceration of one or both parents has grown dramatically. Although the children of prisoners are not under legal sanction, they are nonetheless indirectly subject to the coercive apparatus of the state by virtue of their parent’s status and they are directly subject to this apparatus during their visits to correctional facilities. In this ethnographic study of a mother–child visitation program in jail, we examine secondary prisonization among children of incarcerated mothers. Previous research on secondary prisonization has focused primarily on adults, finding that contact with the prison system alters their conception self, body, moral statuses, emotions, and relationships. Our ethnographic data demonstrate that the implications of this for children are considerable. Here, we analyze secondary prisonization as it impacts children across two domains: discipline of the body and regulation of emotion.