SUPERVISED VISITATION |
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| Authors: | Jessica Pearson Nancy Thoennes |
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| Affiliation: | Jessica Pearson is the director of the Center for Policy Research in Denver. She has conducted numerous demonstration and evaluation projects dealing with a variety of social and legal issues that affect families. She is currently principal investigator for several national projects that examine domestic violence, welfare reform, and child support program developments, as well as initiatives to provide services to noncustodial parents and programs to increase voluntary paternity acknowledgment in hospital settings.; Nancy Thoennes is the associate director of the Center for Policy Research in Denver. She is currently working on the National Violence Against Women Survey funded by the National Institute of Justice and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. She has also conducted work on court-based dependency mediation throughout the United States, studies on the effectiveness of programs to alleviate child access and visitation disputes, and an examination of the three major models through which foster care reviews are currently conducted. |
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| Abstract: | Reviews of case files for 676 families who received supervised visitation services at one of four programs and interviews with 201 participating parents provide a portrait of the families receiving services, their experiences, and the outcomes. Programs successfully serve a wide variety of families and garner high ratings of user satisfaction, but half of the families exit without formal closure. Families that drop out receive fewer court hearings and evaluations for the problems that brought them into the programs in the first place, suggesting that they may feel neglected. In most cases that formally exit the program, the visitation situation improves over time, although interviewed parents give mixed reports about their visitation situations after they leave the programs. |
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