Access to Parents in Supervised Settings: Children Speak out about Their Experiences

Background and Purpose: Supervised access and exchange programs are intended to provide children the opportunity to visit with their parents while being supervised by trained service providers in safe, neutral, and child-centred settings. Supervised access and exchange programs have been created to monitor parent-child contact while ensuring children are protected from the risk of harm due to exposure of interparental conflict, intimate partner violence, parents’ substance abuse, and/or harmful parenting practices. A small body of research has explored supervised access and exchange programs, but no known study has explored the perspectives of the children involved.  This paper helps to fill this gap by exploring children’s accounts of their use of supervised access and exchange programs.  The purpose of this qualitative study was to explore children’s understanding of the reasons for using these services, the impact of services on children’s feelings of safety and the impact of these services on maintaining parent-child relationships.  Based on their own experiences, children offered suggestions regarding the ways to deliver services to best meet the needs of the children involved. 

Methods: Twenty-three in-depth semi-structured interviews were conducted with children who were recently involved with supervised access and exchange programs.  Using a purposive sampling strategy, participants were recruited via advertisements via an email sent through the Ministry of the Attorney General of Ontario, Supervised Access Program. Interviews were audio recorded, transcribed verbatim and then transferred into NVivo qualitative softwarefor for thematic analysis.  Guided by grounded theory, a constant comparative analysis was used to explore the connections among participants’ experiences and to revise the semi-structured interview guide as themes reached saturation.

Findings: Twelve girls and elevent boys participated in the interviewed with an average age of 10 years old (range = 7 to 15 years old). The length of time in supervised settings ranged from two months to seven years. All children had been exposed to high levels of interparental conflict, parental drug or alcohol abuse and/or intimate partner violence. No contact between the parents was viewed as the most benefical aspect of the program, especially in terms of keeping their parents safe from intimate partner violence. Chidren generally viewed the supervised setting as an important stepping stone for improving parent-child relationships. While some felt their relationships with their parents had improved, others felt their relationships had remained unchanged or strained. Almost all children were satisfied with the staff, but few wished for staff to more actively mediate uncomfortable parent-child interactions. Some also expressed feeling restricted and confined, not wishing to be so closely supervised

Conclusion and Implications: Findings highlight the importance of listening to children’s voices, especially when providing feedback about the delivery of social work programs. Social work services shoud implement strategies to allow children with greater opportunity to share their experiences about the process and implementation of program services. Future research should focus on connecting children’s experiences to a greater understanding about short and long-term outcomes.