I am sharing an article I wrote while dealing with visitation.

Visitation do we or don’t we that is the question.
I know we don’t always have a choice about weather or not the bios get to see the children. They may get visitation for a few hours, overnight or they may have supervised visits.

Most grandparents in a situation like ours are required to take children to supervised visits or to supervise them ourselves. We are actually doing both I supervise my daughters visits with her three children she supposed to have six hours a week. In the beginning she was probably here 12 hours a week and then it was six hours a week and this week so far it’s been Two hours. I take the three-year-old girl to see her daddy once a week for an hour of supervised visitation.

Visitation that you supervise is a lot more convenient you can schedule it at your home or near your home. You can schedule it on your time frame a time that’s good for you. And you know what’s going on. This is how it is with my daughter I’m able to coach her and help her. She comes over in the evenings to help with dinner bath and bedtime. We’ve been working with her on how to be a mother do motherly things for her children. Showing her the proper way to speak to her children, discipline them, and praise them. These visitations are court ordered as part of her parenting plan.

Visitation with the father is a little different our case manager schedules them at the Dcf office. I have to pick them up early from school to take her there. It’s in the evening at rush hour traffic not convenient at all. I’m not allowed to go in the room so I don’t know what is happening during visitation there. He is scheduled for one hour a week as for the court order and his parenting plan.

I have found out that there is different types of supervised visits. When we began visitations it was with our case manager she constantly forgot to confirm. She canceled often. She allowed the phone in the room and the three-year-old to talk on the phone without it being on speaker to another family member of her Daddys , That’s not allowed. After a few visits it was going well daddy was bringing snacks and we talked him into bringing dinner. The problem was he kept bringing soda and sweet tea and sugary drinks for her. Once he even brought chopsticks to eat dinner with her . It seems there was a lot of inappropriate conversations, he talk to her like she was an adult not a three-year-old. He brought games for her to play that were for ages above hers. He gave her puzzles when she tends to eat the puzzle pieces. It felt like the visitations were going downhill at one visitation the three-year-old became very upset and wanted to leave. She said that daddy scared her and she wanted mimi. This upset her father and he stormed out which is again inappropriate. The following visit she did not want to go in she was afraid to go in I had to bribe her to go in. Again I found this very inappropriate I talk to the counselor I talk to my guardian ad litem in order to try to make some changes to these visitations so they were positive. Then we started visitations between the father and the three-year-old at a visitation center. There is supposed to be a counselor present that will help move along the visitation in a positive manner. After visitation the three-year-old was in a much better mood than she been in a long time after seeing her dad. She hugged her daddy and was sad that he was leaving. That’s the way it was when he first started visitations. The visits continued to be positive and it was what saved bio dad’s relationship with his daughter. After over a year he was granted unsupervised visits then reunification at 19 months. I truly believe that without this type of visitation he would have never been able to be reunified with his daughter. Yes it was more of a pain to do but it was well worth it for the childs emotional healing.

So if you have to do visitations wether you do them on your own or you have someone else supervise them remember it’s supposed to be a positive experience for the child and the parents. If you don’t feel like it’s positive please make sure you talk to somebody. There’s always an alternative and another way to go about it so that everyone enjoys the visitation and it doesn’t become something that’s dreaded.

The type of visitation yhat most people do not want to do is visits to the jail. I have an article that adresses visting prison to see biological parents. Please read that article or watch the episode on our YouTube channel.

As always please continue to follow along as we raise these beautiful souls!

Comments and questions are welcome.