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The Caseworker’s Role in Child Visitation

Working Together

While your child is in foster placement, you have a right to regular visitation. The benefits of consistent visitation are clear. Visitation between the parent and the child in placement helps the child cope with the change in his or her life, ensures the resource family has all the information it needs to care for the child properly, helps the parent stay involved in the child’s life, and increases the chance of successful reunification.

A Group Effort

Your caseworker plays a significant role in facilitating visitation. Parents have a right to regular visitation—ideally weekly—with their child unless it is not in the child’s best interests. In many cases, parents can safely visit their child in foster placement with no problems. A major barrier to visitation, however, is your caseworker’s motivation to make it happen.

For an overworked caseworker, ensuring every child’s safety is the number one priority. Once a child is safe in foster placement, ensuring the continued connection between the child and his or her parents or even helping a family reunite will be second to making sure all other children the caseworker is responsible for are in a safe home.

The Facilitator

Your caseworker will help you with many aspects of your case, and facilitating visitation is one of the most important. The caseworker should be coordinating visitations and creating a visitation schedule, which will take legwork. Coordinating visits involves the resource family and the child’s parents, and, not surprisingly, it can be difficult to do.

Nevertheless, you have a right to regular visitation, and the caseworker must help you exercise that right. Don’t expect the courts to make sure you have regular visitation. It is really up to the caseworkers who work with the parents and resource family.

If your child is in foster placement and you want to visit, your caseworker should be working to make that happen. If he or she isn’t, you should consult with an experienced New Jersey child welfare attorney. Attorneys can often work with the caseworker to ensure the parent’s rights to visitation are respected and that regular visitation is scheduled. Your attorney can’t necessarily strong-arm the caseworker, but caseworkers are often more cooperative with an attorney is involved.

Do you want to visit with your child in foster placement? If so, Williams Law Group, LLC can explain your rights and help you facilitate regular visitation with your child. Located in Short Hills, New Jersey, Williams Law Group, LLC provides compassionate and dedicated legal services to Union, Bergen, Essex, Hudson, Morris, Monmouth, and Middlesex counties, and the surrounding areas. Our knowledgeable attorneys handle divorce and family law, child custody, and child abuse/neglect cases. Call our office at (908) 810-1083, email us at info@awilliamslawgroup.com, or contact us through our confidential online form to schedule a consultation and ultimately get connected with an experienced New Jersey divorce and child custody attorney.

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