Supervised Visitation

If you haven’t figured it out yet, Tom is a pretty busy guy, but the issue of visitation between children and family members, including non-custodial parents, siblings, and other relatives, has always been a very important issue to him.

Tom has been instrumental in reuniting children with their parents under a host of circumstances when children have not seen their parents for a variety of reasons, for a number of months or even years.  Tom also strongly supports and provides supervision directly, through his associates in this practice. He does so through referral in cases that are already before the Juvenile Court in which the State has custody, domestic relations cases in the Probate Court, and through direct referral by attorneys and clients where they are looking for mediated visitation.

It is Tom’s philosophy that the primary reason for visitation is to provide the child with a “positive experience” and access to individuals he or she might not otherwise have the opportunity to have a relationship with.

“The reasons that supervised visits occur run the gamet”, Carr says. “Sometimes it is clear that a child is in need of supervised visitation, because otherwise the child would be at risk for further abuse or neglect”. Carr notes; “but there are an equal number of cases where unfounded or poorly investigated allegations are made against someone, which lead to an order for supervised visitation that otherwise shouldn’t be happening”.  In these kinds of cases, the supervisor, while having a certain mandate, also wants to keep the basic philosophy, that visits should, as much as possible, be a positive experience for the child.

Carr and his associates are a handfull of individuals who provide “off-site” visitation for children.  They often work in conjunction with visitation centers as a referral source for visitation that can occur outside the structured supervised visitation center settings.

The cost of supervised visitation is generally prohibitive, but Carr tries as much as possible to accommodate families for the sake of the children involved.

In addition to providing services necessary for supervised visitations, Carr and his associates also provide “therapeutic supervision”; opportunities to help strengthen the child-parent interaction to enhance relationships and parenting skills, through direct interaction with the clinical supervisor and the parent and child.  This is also necessary too; “when a parent and a child have not seen each other in some time”.  Carr notes experiences where; “a child hasn’t seen their parent in a number of years and is very anxious about the contact”.  The clinical supervisor can often help in dealing with the child’s anxiety, which very often is shared by the parent in the situation, and help to make an awkward situation a positive one.

Carr’s philosophy about visitation is that many childrens’ memories will be tied to visitation between them and a non-custodial parent.  It is important, therefore, to make those memories as positive as possible, and not additions to past trauma they may have felt.

Carr is also a huge supporter of non-traditional opportunities for visitation, not only between parents and children, but for siblings. Very often Carr often points out one sibling lives in one home and another sibling lives in another home, and they never get the opportunity to do things with each other.  Carr supports programs for allowing siblings to perhaps attend an overnight camp or vacation together and/or allowing parents to share group outings with their children that may be structured in such away to allay at least some of the fears of the decision makers in these kinds of cases.