Visit Coaching/Family Time Coaching

Parents whose child(ren) are living in foster care and see them only during visits

For parents/caregivers of children ages: 0 - 17

Visit Coaching (developed by Marty Beyer, PhD), also called Family Time Coaching, is fundamentally different from supervised visits because the focus is on the strengths of the family and the needs of the children. Visit Coaching supports families to meet the unique needs of each child during their family time in the community, family homes, visit centers, or offices. Visit Coaching includes:

• Helping parents understand the unique developmental needs of their child and demonstrate that understanding during visits with their child
• Preparing parents for their children’s separation- (and trauma-) related needs and reactions during visits
• Helping parents give their children their full attention at each visit
• Building on the parent’s strengths in meeting each child’s needs
• Helping parents visit consistently and keep their sadness, anger, and other issues out of the visit

Marty Beyer, PhD

• Website: www.visitcoachingcommunity.com/
• Email: www.visitcoachingcommunity.com/contact

The goals of Visit Coaching/Family Time Coaching are:

• Parents articulating each of their children’s unique needs
• Parents meeting their children’s developmental, separation- and trauma-related, and safety needs during visits
• Parents keeping their own issues from distracting them from giving their children their full attention during visits

The essential components of Visit Coaching/Family Time Coaching include:

• Visit Plan Meeting (prior to starting Visit Coaching):
  • Ensure that the parent takes ownership of their family time
  • Draw their children’s needs out of the parent
  • Validate the parent’s concerns and help the parent plan how to keep their worries from getting in the way of giving their full attention to their child
• Pre-visit Coaching (at the beginning of each visit):
  • Remind the parent of each child’s needs to be met during the visit
• Coaching During the Visit:
  • Support the parent in being responsive to each child’s individual needs without directing parenting
  • Support the parent in keeping their issues from getting in the way of being responsive to their children’s needs
  • Appreciate the family’s culture and unique ways of meeting their children’s needs
  • Support co-parenting if more than one adult is visiting the child
  • Support fathers, parents with intellectual disabilities, incarcerated parents, and parents in early recovery
• Post-visit Debrief (at the end of each visit):
  • Help the parent assess their responsiveness to each of their children’s needs in the visit
  • Help the parent appreciate how they could more effectively meet their child’s need
• Partnering:
  • Encourage Shared Parenting defined as communication between parent and caregiver (foster parent/kin) about the child’s needs
  • Encourage regular meetings of parent-caseworker-visit coach to review child’s needs and how parent is meeting them and ensure parent understanding of the importance of both visits that meet the child’s needs and lifestyle changes that will address the child’s unmet safety needs that brought them into care
  • Facilitate relationships between child providers (such as early intervention and pediatricians who traditionally work with foster or kinship placements) and parents so that the parent can better understand and meet their child’s needs as the parents work towards reunification

Parent/Caregiver Services

Visit Coaching/Family Time Coaching directly provides services to parents/caregivers and addresses the following:

• Parents with children in foster care who may have difficulty meeting the children's needs during visits; decreased parent engagement of their children’s developmental needs and concerns; fathers; parents with intellectual disabilities; incarcerated parents; and parents in early recovery; parents who have children who may have difficulties with attachment and adjustment to separation from family

Recommended Intensity

1- to 3-hour family visit at least once per week, but can occur as often as three times per week

Recommended Duration

Varies with the family, about 3-6 months

Delivery Settings

This program is typically conducted in a(n):

• Birth Family Home
• Community Daily Living Setting
• Community-based Agency / Organization / Provider
• Foster / Kinship Care
• Other
• School Setting (Including: Day Care, Day Treatment Programs, etc.)

Homework

This program does not include a homework component.

Resources Needed to Run Program

The typical resources for implementing the program are:

Optimally coached visits occur in outdoor or community locations. If the coached visits are inside, visit rooms must have child-friendly furniture; space for activities; music, books, art supplies, and toys appropriate for the child’s age; and clean, comfortable floors for young children. In family homes, parents, caregivers, and/or coaches can provide play supplies

Prerequisite/Minimum Provider Qualifications

No minimum requirements other than training and experience. Visit Coaches can have master’s or bachelor’s degrees, but can also have had years of experience with children and not have degrees.

Manual Information

There is a manual that describes how to deliver this program.

Program Manual(s)

Manual information was not provided by the program representative. Training is also required to become a trained visit coach (see below).

Training Information

There is training available for this program.

Training Contact

Training Type/Location:

On-site or virtually, arranged with each site to include visit coach trainees and their supervisors.

Most Visit Coaching/Family Time Coaching programs are providers on contract with the public child welfare agency, typically in individual counties. Some locations implemented Visit Coaching/Family Time Coaching within the child welfare office, training staff who had formerly supervised visits.

Number of days/hours:

Visit Coaches receive a 2-day training program provided by Marty Beyer, PhD, or Auguste Elliott, PhD, followed by 2 half-day virtual group consultations where coaches present their work with families and refine their approaches. Dr. Beyer & Dr. Elliott are also available to continue to provide consultation for coaches virtually and to support the implementation team at each Visit Coaching/Family Time Coaching site.

If a program has only a few staff members, they are able to have those staff participate in a virtual training offered twice a year, which includes staff from a variety of programs across the country. The virtual training is offered as four half-days with the same 2 3-hour consultations following the foundational training.

A virtual Train the Trainer program is available for coaches recommended by their agency who have completed the foundational training, the two group consults, and have experience coaching families. The Train the Trainer includes observation of a full foundational training of new coaches with accompanying debriefs and additional didactic and experiential sessions. These trainers are able to then train new coaches within their agency. They also become part of an international group which meets quarterly to keep up to date with the practice and discuss fidelity.

Pre-Implementation Materials

A virtual pre-implementation consultation tailored to the agency is provided prior to training to guide them to readiness to implement.

Formal Support for Implementation

In addition to the embedded pre-implementation consultation and the coach consultations, follow-up with agency administrators after the training is provided as requested.

Fidelity Measures

Self-reporting checklist primarily used by supervisors.

Established Psychometrics

There are no established psychometrics for Visit Coaching/Family Time Coaching.

Fidelity Measures Required

No fidelity measures are required for Visit Coaching/Family Time Coaching.

Implementation Guides or Manuals

There are no implementation guides or manuals for Visit Coaching/Family Time Coaching.

Implementation Cost

There are no studies of the costs of Visit Coaching/Family Time Coaching.

Research on How to Implement the Program

Research has not been conducted on how to implement Visit Coaching/Family Time Coaching.

Child Welfare Outcome: Safety

“What is included in the Relevant Published, Peer-Reviewed Research section?”

• Burnson, C., Ocampo, M. G., Harris, E., McClure, S. & Malloy, M. (2025). Evaluating the impact of Family Visit Coaching on future system contact. Children & Youth Services Review, 169, Article 108077. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.childyouth.2024.108077

  Type of Study: Pretest–posttest study with a nonequivalent control group (Quasi-experimental)

  Number of participants: 375

  Population:

  • Age — FVC: Mean=3.37 years; Comparison: Mean=3.05 years
  • Race/Ethnicity — FVC: 63 White, 47 Latinx/Hispanic, 11 Black/African American, 3 Asian/Pacific Islander, and 1 American Indian/Alaska Native; Comparison: 117 White, 92 Latinx/Hispanic, 31 Black/African American, 7 Asian/Pacific Islander, and 3 American Indian/Alaska Native
  • Gender — FVC: 70 Male and 55 Female; Comparison: 141 Male and 109 Female
  • Status — Participants were children whose parents participated in FVC and were reunified with their parents after time in out-of-home care.

  Location/Institution: County of San Diego

  Summary:

  The purpose of the study was to evaluate Family Visit Coaching (FVC) [now called Visit Coaching], and answer whether program participation affected the likelihood that children would have subsequent interactions with County of San Diego Child Welfare Services and the outcomes of those interactions when they occurred during a 12-month follow-up period after the end of the program. Participants were a group of children whose parents were referred to FVC and a comparison group of children whose parents did not receive FVC. Measures utilized include administrative data from the Child Welfare Services/Case Management System (CWS/CMS). Results indicate that children whose parents participated in FVC experienced significantly fewer substantiations within 12 months than children whose parents received services as usual. There were no significant differences in re-reports. Limitations include the variability in implementation, including referral process, resulted in the study sample being uncharacteristic of the general population served by CPS in this community, which affects the generalizability of results to the local and larger context; the small sample size reduced researchers’ ability to detect statistically significant effects that could be seen in a larger sample; analysis focused only on FVC completers and did not examine those referred to FVC who did not participate nor those who began but did not finish FVC services, and it was also restricted to families who reunified.

  Length of controlled postintervention follow-up: 746 days after index removal (381 plus 365).

• Note: The following study was not included in rating Visit Coaching/Family Time Coaching on the Scientific Rating Scale.

  Fischer, S., Harris, E., Smith, H. S., & Polivka, R. J. (2020). Family Visit Coaching: Improvement in parenting skills through coached visitation. Children and Youth Services Review, 119, Article 105604. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.childyouth.2020.105604

  Summary:

  The purpose of the study was to evaluate the Family Visit Coaching (FVC) model [now called Visit Coaching] as an alternative to traditional child welfare visitation to build pragmatic parenting skills and improve parental emotional capacity to engage with their children. Measures utilized include a San Diego County adaptation of the Parenting Skills Assessment, 10th edition. Results indicated that there is a statistically significant improvement in parenting and a statistically significant association between each additional visit and improved parenting skills on specific measures. Limitations include that the study was limited to examining parenting skills among parents who were referred to FVC by their County of San Diego child welfare caseworkers; program dosage was limited to number of visits, not the number of hours of the visits; the study did not use a randomized design, so it is unknown whether the parents in this study are typical of the county’s overall child welfare population; it is also possible that the coaches who completed the assessment were biased in their assessments of the parents or biased in perceiving improvement in parenting behaviors; interrater reliability was not assessed in the study; the lack of a control or comparison group, and the lack of follow-up. Note: This article was not used in the rating process due to the lack of a control group.

• Casey Family Programs. (2020, May). How can frequent, quality family time promote relationships and permanency? Strategy Brief: Strong Families. https://www.casey.org/media/20.07-QFF-SF-Family-Time.pdf

• Children’s Bureau, Administration of Children and Families. (2020). Information memorandum on the importance of family time and visitation for children in out-of-home care. https://www.acf.hhs.gov/cb/policy-guidance/im-20-02

• Department for Children and Families; Family Services Division. (2014, December). Initial caregivers meeting, shared parenting meetings and family time practice guidance. https://outside.vermont.gov/dept/DCF/Shared%20Documents/FSD/Publications/Family-Time-Guidelines.pdf