Infant Visit Changes

that is great in theory....but who do they expect to transport children to visits 5 days a week? it definitely wouldn't have been me. crazy!

Around here infants usually do have visits 5 days a week, sometimes more.

Around me, infants have visits 3xweekly IF the bioparent asks for it.. If they dont ask for more time, the county will give them less.

I'm in Marshall cty & here it's 5 days a week, or it was for us. The baby spent more time in the carseat then at the visit.

how are foster parents and bio parents expected to work and fit in visits 5 times a week? Even if you stay at home...if you have more than one child thats a lot of time traveling to/from visits. Why not just make the visit times longer? I understand the need for the infants to bond but wonder if those making these decisions have walked in the shoes of a foster parent before. What in the world do you do if you have 2 infants or the mom and dad don't visit together?

Thats crazy!!! To me even the 3 vistis..I can see their reasoning I guess. My infant had only 1 a week. That was for 2 hours. And 9 out of 10 times the parents didnt show to those!! I was frustrated enough because I was doing what I was suppose to be and they werent. In court one day the judge asked if any one had anything to add or address. ( and at this hearing questions had already been presented regarding them not showing up) I spoke up and asked how long I was suppose to take him to have them not show. He canceled visits all together. Drugs in this case were also an issue and they had both failed them previoulsy. Im not sure why me asking that led to his decision to cancel. but that is what he did. Saying that until both could pass 3 screens in a row.. NO VISITS!! That was last march.. and come July.. TPR was complete! So.. if they are not showing.. and you are in court. It pays to ask why they let this continue! If you want to be able to stop making wasted trips that is.

Our Judges order 5 day week visits for all kids (unless parent is in jail), they have been doing this for years now. It all depends on the parents. One set of ours hasn't missed a visit, the other ones mom misses more than she keeps. I do believe that if there is a chance at RU then there should be 5 day week visits.

Who supervises the visits???In Indy, they use visitation centers for most of their visits. There are 1 or 2 now I think. They cannot handle more than 2 visits a week that I last heard. I can't imagine them trying to do 5 visits a week per family. Here the CW's almost NEVER go to observe a visit. My now 4.5 yr old was in care for well over 2 yrs before ANY CW saw her and bio mom together, and that was after a failed TPR. Even due to how she was removed, no one had ever seen her interactions w/ bio mom, outside myself and the various visit supervisors...some who took that serious, some who did not. If this is the new thing across the board, we will close our license after our girls adoption.

In our county we have at least 3 (maybe 4) visitation centers. I would guess that the 2 I have worked with have at least 10-20 CW's working for them, some are just PT, some FT. With all the cuts they may be forced to cut back on visits, I don't know. I did look up one of the visitations corporate profile once and they make over 2 million a year. Of course most of that comes from the State/County, I don't know how many visits they do that are not DCS related.

The ones here are not run by any CW's. Most are just part time average joe people. DH has looked into b/c he's bilingual and they always need help with that, but it wasn't working into his schedule. Some of the people that do them are young 20's, no CLUE what they are doing. Some are so old and deaf, they wouldn't hear a word being said. Some are good, and really monitor. Others, just sit in the door way taking a note here or there. I know the few reports I read once totally neglected to mention the behavior of the child going into the visit. The crying, resistance to bio, etc. It had circled that the bio hugged and kissed the child w/ a greeting. Well true, but no mention of the child freaking out about it! Little things like that that definitely can show a warped picture of what really happens. I WISH there were CW's who actually saw the interactions sometimes.