Parental visiting and foster care reunification

Parental visiting has long been a crucial factor in reunification decisions for children in foster care. The purposes of the present study, part of a larger follow-up investigation of permanency planning for children in foster care, were to correlate parental visiting with permanency planning outcomes and to develop a logistic regression model predicting family reunification. Findings show that the majority of children with maternal and paternal visits at the level recommended by the court were reunified, but no association was found between parental visiting and recidivism of reunified children at a 12 month follow-up. Maternal visiting at the recommended level was the strongest predictor of reunification among the five study variables included in the regression model, indicating that a child visited by the mother as recommended was approximately 10 times more likely to be reunified. The paper also includes information on parental visiting in traditional and kinship foster homes and across three ethnic groups. Implications of study findings for child welfare practice and future research are discussed.