Visitation between parents and children in foster care is presumed under Georgia’s new Juvenile Code to be unsupervised unless the Court determines that unsupervised visitation is not in the child’s best interest. To parents, supervised visitation can feel like a penalty, but I counsel my clients that it doesn’t have to be. Especially when the child in foster care is an infant, third party reports from supervised visitation play a huge part in how DFCS and the Court view parents and the parent-child relationship. Supervised visitation is an opportunity for parents to demonstrate to the Court that they are loving, capable, and working hard to achieve reunification. I have always given my clients advice on making the most of visits with their infant and I recently compiled that advice into a VISITATION CHECKLIST FOR PARENTS WITH AN INFANT IN FOSTER CARE. I hope that parents and parent attorneys will use and distribute this document, so that in their cases, supervised infant visitation can be a blessing rather than a curse.
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