Child Safety

Maintaining Family Connections

Family contact is primarily about the child’s needs and their right to have opportunities to develop and maintain an attachment and connection with family members and significant others when they are in care. Connecting with family is much more than just meetings between the child in care and their parents. Family contact is considerably broader than this and extends to the child’s wider family circle, and may include the child’s siblings, grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins. There are a range of mediums that enables direct or indirect communications with the child’s family members and significant others, such as meetings, outings, visits to the family home, telephone calls, FaceTime, social media messenger services, email, letters and so on. For some children, contact may need to be supervised for safety reasons, or for a specific time-limited purpose, like an assessment of interactions between the child and the parent. BigDog staff participation or role in family contact will be negotiated with us and documented in the case plan and placement agreement. This might include assisting with transport arrangements or supervision of family contact, and only where we are able to do this and agree to the proposed plan. For siblings who are separated in care, contact is an important means of sustaining their relationship, enabling them to stay ‘familiar’ with each other and remain ‘close’ despite no longer living together. A number of training modules are now available on our NGO Training Portal and it is mandatory for those support workers in Child Safety that they undertake and complete these modules as they become available.