While the most of child welfare services toward substance abusing families are focusing on parents, little is known about the impacts of such services on lives of children in child welfare. Similarly, the children-parents visitation status gained relatively less attention in the previous evaluation research in child welfare. The goal of this study is to examine the efficacy of Recovery Coaches in improving children-parents visitations and understand the mechanism that facilitates such visitations in child welfare.

Methods: This study reported findings from the randomized trials for 856 substance abusing parents who involved in public child welfare. Subsequent to temporary custody, parents were randomly assigned to either control (n=244) or experimental (n=596) condition. Parents in the control group received substance abuse services. Parents in the experimental group received traditional services plus the services of a Recovery Coach. The Recovery Coaches assist parents with obtaining needed treatment services and in negotiating departmental and judicial requirements associated with drug recovery and concurrent permanency planning. Chi-squares analysis and logistic regression were utilized.

Findings: Of 840 parents, a total of 141 (23.2%) parents in the demonstration group experience at least one unsupervised visit of a child as compared to 43 (17.4 %) parents in the control group (X2 = 3.436, df = 1, p= .067). The logistic regression also indicated that controlling for a variety of demographic information and types of primary drug, Recovery Coaches approximately increased the likelihood of unsupervised visitation by 44 %.

Implications: The visitation status is known to be a critical factor in making permanency decision in child welfare. Consequently, the child welfare interventions for substance abusing families should utilize the approach that focuses on efforts to preparing children-parents visitation. The results of this study indicate that use of Recovery Coaches is associated with (1) higher rates of unsupervised visits and (2) increased likelihood of such visits.