Parents’ supervised contact visits with their children in care : Factors associated with cancellations

Introduction
Contact is an important part of the out-of-home care system and for maintaining birth family relationships, but little research has sought the parents’ perspective. It is important to understand parents’ experiences of contact and the reasons why they may cancel contact visits, in order to both reduce cancellations and improve the contact experience and associated outcomes for all involved.

Methods
As part of the larger Australian kContact trial of a contact intervention, 90 parents having supervised contact with their children in long-term care were interviewed at baseline. The parents’ description of their contact visits is provided. Logistic regressions were used to estimate the odds of parent cancellation of contact visits for the predictor variables.

Results
Parents in the study reported a number of health, financial, and support issues, and had large numbers of children. Most of their children were in long-term foster care with visits primarily supervised by agency staff. In the multivariate analyses two significant results were found: parents were less likely to cancel visits when carers supervised contact and more likely to cancel when they, the parent, were on psychiatric medication. There was also a small effect suggesting that hosting contact visits away from an agency space may reduce parent cancellations.

Discussion
The need to provide supports for parents, particularly those on medication for mental health problems, to attend visits is an important finding from this study. Normalising contact visits by holding them in locations other than agency spaces and providing support for carers to supervise is recommended.