- $Visits: Staying Connected While Your Child Is In Care
Visits: Staying Connected While Your Child Is In Care
Rise’s very first issue is about staying connected to your children while they’re in foster care. It hurts to be able to spend only a few hours each week with your children. Saying goodbye is always tough. In their own words, parents who have been there explain how they advocated for the visits they needed and made the best of the time they had with their children.
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How You Can Help Your Child Cope During COVID-19
Adapted from the Brain Architects Podcast with Jack Shonkoff, Harvard Center on the Developing Child
Adults are really struggling with the pressures and tensions of this time. When we’re feeling significant stress, anxiety, unease and even depression about what’s going on, you don’t... Read More
Visiting During COVID – Resources for Parents
We know that if you’re visiting your children in foster care only by video or phone because of the pandemic, you are suffering. We hope this tip sheet and resources on coping with virtual visits, self-advocating and taking care... Read More
Making the Most of Virtual Visits in a Time of Separation and Uncertainty
Since the COVID-19 shutdown began, my emotions have flip-flopped between anger at the system, understanding for the safety of my children, and sadness in not seeing them, holding them, playing with them and reading to them. I feel a... Read MoreVideo for Frontline Staff: Tips for Supporting Parents in Supervised Visits
A new bill aims to preserve family bonds after TPR
A coalition of NYC lawyers and advocates has proposed a new bill, Preserving Family Bonds, which would give New York City family court judges the power to order contact between adopted children and their biological families after the termination... Read More
Noticing Trauma in Visits – How caseworkers can respond to signs of possible trauma
Interview by Nancy Fortunato, Jeanette Vega and Robbyne Wiley
Glenn Saxe, a developer of Trauma Systems Therapy and professor of child and adolescent psychiatry at NYU School of Medicine, explains how caseworkers can respond to signs of possible trauma.
Q: How... Read More
Parent Toolkits: Setting Parents Up for Success
VIDEO: Parent-to-Parent TIPS for Supervised Visits
Parents come to foster care agencies experiencing not only the trauma of losing their child but also the confusion of navigating a complex system. Parents must:
• Keep track of appointments at multiple agencies... Read More
Rise’s TIPS Approach to Supporting Parents in Supervised Visits
Rise’s TIPS handouts, videos and posters offer parents clear information and peer guidance to navigate their cases, and provide frontline foster care professionals with tools to strengthen communication and trust with parents.
Developed in partnership with parents and frontline staff at... Read More
Rise Visiting TIPS – Set of 4 Handouts
Rise’s TIPS handouts offer parents clear information and peer guidance to navigate their cases. Developed in partnership with parents and frontline staff at three NYC foster care agencies, this set of TIPS focuses on visits. Caseworkers and parent advocates... Read More
When child protective services took my son Logan, I thought my life was over. Logan was 9 months old. I didn’t know anything about the foster care system.
After an emergency hearing, I got visits with him twice each week for... Read More
When I learned about a program called Visit Coaching, which is designed to help families have better quality visits, I decided to get trained to be a coach.
I know from experience how important visits are. My own son was... Read More
Visit Coaching: A Parent-to-Parent Guide
Visit Coaching is a service to support parents in making the most of visits with children in foster care. This parent-to-parent guide explains Visit Coaching through two stories by parents — a parent who benefited from coaching, and a... Read More
Winning Him Back – My visits proved I was worth my son’s trust.
My baby’s father passed away when I was pregnant. After, I felt I had to block out everything I was feeling so I wouldn’t lose the baby. But I found out later that those feelings were still with me.
For... Read More
A Time to Bond – How to make the most of your visits
Jacqueline Israel, a former parent advocate whose children spent six years in foster care, explains how to make the most of your visits:
1. Bring Toys and GamesWhen you visit at the agency, the room just isn’t a home... Read More
Doing What It Takes – When My son went into care, I stepped up.
People say there are no real men with real fatherly love for their children, or that a father can’t have the same bond with his kid that a mother has. When I hear people saying that, I... Read More
Eat, Play, Love – Visits helped me become a good mother.
A sample story from the A Time To Bond workbook
When my daughter, Little Mama, was a year and a half, she was removed from home because my husband and I were using drugs. At our first visit, my husband... Read More