As we write this post, our kiddos are on a visit. Visitation is an aspect of being a foster parent that is quite interesting, but honestly, not that unique in the world of parenting. If you were raised in a family that experienced a divorce, visitation in foster care can be compared to visitations or shared custody between divorced parents. This post is a guide to help foster parents navigate the intricacies of visitations, and hopefully set themselves, their kiddos, and the bio-family up for success.
See our previous post for a discussion on why visits are so important, Foster Care Visitation (Pt. 1)
Visitations can be very hard for kids. It can be difficult for them to understand and process all of the emotions they are feeling. The whole event can be very exhausting, overwhelming, exciting, anxiety inducing, amazing, disappointing, as well as a myriad of other emotions and feelings. All of this can make for a pretty difficult build up and come down for you and your family, if you are not properly prepared for visits. Hopefully some of the suggestions in this post can help you navigate, survive, or even flourish during visitation days.
1. Drive Them to the Visit
In many states, it is the responsibility for DHS or the agency to provide transportation to visits. However, if you can, and are comfortable doing it, driving your kiddos to a visit can be a very powerful and impactful gesture. It shows the kiddos that you want them to see their family, and that you are supportive of the visit. It can also provide an opportunity for conversation on the way to the visit, when they may be having a lot of feelings and questions about what is going on.
Only drive your kiddos to visits if it is something you feel comfortable with, and it works with your routine. Do not do it if it causes you too much stress, anxiety, or inconvenience, as that is not a good experience for you or your kiddo. If that is the case, by all means, let the agency handle transportation to the visit.
2. Interact with the Bio-Family (if you can)
If you do transport your kiddo to a visit, there are ways to do this without ever having to set foot into DHS or have contact with the bio-family attending the visit. You might be able to have the person supervising the visit meet you in the parking lot and take the kiddos in. However, if you are comfortable and interested in having a relationship with the bio family (which we highly encourage if safe and possible), drop off at visitation is a great opportunity.
Seeing and talking to the bio-family at visitation drop off is a great opportunity to check in with them, see how they are doing, and to provide them with updates on how their kids are doing. We all know kids are not always great at elaborating on what they have been doing lately, so this gives you an opportunity to fill in the blanks. Also, if you are working on potty training, or certain subjects in school, you can pass this information along as well, so the bio-family has a chance to participate and work toward achieving common goals.
Just don’t take it personally if the bio-family doesn’t seem to interested in small talk with you. Remember, they are there to see their children, who they may not have seen in a long time. They may be a little preoccupied hugging and talking to their children, and not as interested in catching up with you, which is ok. Even just letting the bio-family see you at visits as you drop off the kids can give them peace of mind that you are supportive of them seeing their kids.
3. Send Notes and Photos
If you can’t transport to visits, send a note. You can even send a notebook or journal, to allow the family to write back. Even if you do transport to visits and intend to try and talk with the family, you should still try and send a note. Drop off can be hectic, you may forget to say something important, or the bio family may not be interested in talking. A note allows you to provide updates, ask questions (especially with new placements or younger kids), and even start developing a relationship with the bio-family. Notes typically come across as a very thoughtful gesture. For the initial visits, we created a document “All About My Child” that can easily be sent with your kiddo, to learn information from the bio-parent about their kiddo and their desires for their kid.
Sending photos on a visit is very important, especially if you don’t have a relationship with the bio family where you can send e-mails or texts. Sending a photo that they can take with them after the visit, to share with their friends and family, or post on social media is huge. They can also have these photos to document the growth and see the change in their kiddos, even if they don’t get to see them everyday. As mentioned in Foster Care Wishlist, the Instamax Camera is a great thing to have at home and allows you to easily send photos on visits.
4. Send Snacks
Pack a bag for the visits. When sending a bag, realize that there is a chance that everything you send, including the bag itself, might not make it back from the visit… things happen. In the bag, you can send notes, pictures, maybe toys, clothes and diapers if necessary, but you should definitely send snacks. The parents may have to take public transportation to get to the visit, or becoming straight from work, or struggling financially, and bringing food to a visit could be a burden for them. If you can lessen the stress load for the bio-family involved, everyone is more likely to have a successful visit.
Food makes everything better and easier. Depending on time of day, your kids may be missing a meal during their visit. Depending on situations, your children’s parents may be coming to visits hungry as well. Set everyone up for success by sending healthy snacks. Sharing a snack or meal together can be a great bonding experience and parenting experience during visits as well. This will make the transition back from visits easier on you as well, as you won’t have hungry kiddos.
5. Do Not Pick Them up from Visits
Picking kids up from visits is a very different scenario than taking them to a visit. Think about it. Dropping a child off for a visit shows that you are supportive of their relationship with their bio-family. Picking them up from a visit, having them leave their bio-family, which can be very hard and emotional, can feel like another “removal” from their family.
Leaving a visit can be a very hard process, and very emotional. If you can, allow the professionals to do this difficult task. This way you are not putting yourself in a position where it can feel like you are making them choose you over their bio-family, or that you are taking them away from their family. It can be a much cleaner transition, with less emotions involved if the DHS workers navigate this process at the end of visits. In our location, DHS is required to provide transportation to and from visits. The ride home with the social worker can be a nice period of processing and calming down for the kiddos, and hopefully make transitions back into your home a little smoother.
6. Communicate with Visit Staff
From our experience, most visits, especially those early on in the plan, are supervised by DHS staff. Sometimes it can be the caseworker who supervises, but a lot of the time is it the SSA, who also does the transportation to/from visits. There are a lot of reasons to establish a relationship with these workers. They are transporting your kiddos, which is a great help, and creating a relationship, especially one where you can communicate through text or calls can allow for planning and flexibility around schedules and transportation. You can also get a heads up if visits are ending early or are cancelled for one reason or another.
The people supervising your kiddos visit can also provide you with a lot of helpful information at the end of the visit, when the kids return to your home. Our typical plan of attack when the kids get back from a visit is for us both to go out and greet the SSA and help unload. Then, one of us will shepherd the kids in and talk to them about the visit, feed them if they want, and just help them transition. The other person will stay outside and spend some time talking with the worker to get an understanding on how the visit went. This will help you know if the kids ate, and if it was healthy food or sugar (which usually will explain to the other person watching the kids inside, why the kids are bouncing off the wall). You can learn about how the family interacted together, like if the parents were engaged or required a lot of support from the supervisor. Maybe some inappropriate comments or false promises were made, so you can be prepared to address these if the kids bring it up. Some social workers even feel comfortable giving you an update on how the bio-family is doing in regards to working their plan.
Although visits can be infrequent and feel like a relatively short period of time, they are a major part of your kiddos life and have a huge impact. Unfortunately, even though visits are extremely impactful, you often are not involved. The more you can create a relationship with the workers supervising and transporting the kids to visits, the more you can learn about what is happening at the visits and gain understanding on how to help your kids process.
7. Have Comfort Food Ready
Visits can be stressful, overwhelming, exciting, happy, exhausting and a multitude of other emotions and feelings. This can make the transition back to your home and the normal routine difficult for some kids. An easy way to prepare for the transition back from a visit, and to help kiddos decompress is to provide healthy but satisfying comfort food at the ready when they walk in the door.
The transition home from a visit is not the time to try and introduced new and exotic foods to your kids. Liver Pate and stinky cheese is not the best “welcome home” meal. It is also quite possible that they did not eat or only had treats during the visit (even if you sent snacks), so they may be hungry and their blood sugar might be all over the place. This is the time to have their favorite snacks at the ready, to refuel them and also give them something calm and easy to do…eat. Having snacks at the ready also creates an opportunity for your family to all sit around the table together and talk about how the visit went and how they are feeling. It is a real two-for-one!
8. Talk to Your Kids
Talking to your kids about the visit, much like taking them to the visits, will show them that you are supportive of them, interested in the visits, and care about them. You can talk to them before the visits, after the visits, or even talk about visits on non-visit days. Make sure you are genuinely interested in how their visit was, what they did, and how they are feeling. These conversations will give you an insight into how your kiddos view visits, how they are feeling about their bio-family, questions they may have, fears they might have, and even hopes they have. Always be therapeutic and an adult throughout the conversation, and meet them at their level. Remember, you are there to love, care and support these kiddos, so always be respectful of their feelings and supportive of their needs.
9. Expect Every Time to be Different… but Similar
Just like anything in life, there can be good days and bad days. The same goes for visits and your kiddos response to visits. Some visits may go better than others, and somedays, your kiddo can feel excitement around going to or coming home from a visit, while other days they have anxiety around it. This is why having a plan for transitions back from visits, like the ideas listed above, can be very helpful. Routine can make everything just a little easier for everyone. That being said, just because your kiddo came home in a great mood after the last visit, does not mean that they will come home in the same cheerful spirits next time. Understand that this is normal. It is safe to say that your kiddo is most likely feeling similar emotions before, during, and after each visit, but they may express themselves differently each time. That is why it is important to give them the same amount of attention, love, and care if they come home distraught or if they come home happy. There is a lot going on for them, some things they don’t even recognize, but that doesn’t mean it is not happening.
Because each time can be different, we recommend not making any major plans for your family after a visit. Visit days are not the days where you should plan on a dinner outing with another family, or heading out on a family adventure. It can be difficult to plan around visits, because the transition home can be unpredictable. Instead, having a routine in place, letting your kiddos take a lead on what they comfortable doing, and going with the flow is going to be a more successful approach on visit days.
10. Don’t Put Visits on a Pedestal
When we say “don’t put visits on a pedestal”, what we mean is don’t promise that a visit is going to “definitely” happen, or spend the entire week “building up” the visit. There is always a very real possibility that the visit gets cancelled. The more build up to the visit, the more devastating it not actually happening can be. Instead, meet your kiddo on their level, answer questions they may have, but be somewhat non-committal. Talk about visits, answer questions your kiddo may have about them, and even tell them when the next one probably is, but do not promise them. If they ask “when is my next visit” you can say “we are planning on Tuesday”, or “we are working on getting one scheduled very soon”. Hopefully the visit happens, but what do you do if it doesn’t? No matter what, whether visits happen, visits get cancelled, visits go great, visits go awful, or some combination of all of that and more, meet your kids at their level. Support them. Be therapeutic. Be understanding. Be empathetic.