Family Visitation & Exchanges

Family is the foundation of a child’s well-being

Helping Children Maintain Safe and Healthy Family Connections  

A family is where a child should have some of their most basic needs met, including feeling loved and safe.

Today, there are many children navigating shared custody situations because their parents are either divorced or separated. There are also many children in foster care, who still want to spend time with their biological parents. Some children are involved with DHS because their parents need more support when it comes to learning how to take care of their children in healthy ways. In some cases, children are also experiencing abuse or neglect, and they might be feeling powerless to stop it.

Children need solutions to these challenges that they’re navigating so they can live life as they deserve: safe, happy, and healthy. With our family visitation and exchange services, we hope to address these challenges for children. 

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About the Services 

Our family visitation and exchange services primarily have two components: supervised visitations and exchanges.

We have highly trained employees to facilitate supervised visitations. They are able to monitor visits between parents and their children to ensure the child’s emotional and physical safety. We want to support both parents in the process. We have a parent waiting room for the primary parent to utilize while the visiting parent is spending time with their child(ren). We work with the visiting parent through mentorship and skills training. For exchanges, we have two separate parking lots and two separate entrances. This ensures the parents do not need to make contact during an exchange, which decreases the risk of conflict. We also stagger drop-off and pick-up times to enhance safety for all parties. As we continue to work with families, we’ll make referrals for parents and children to other resources that may be helpful like therapy, counseling, financial assistance, parenting classes, and more. 

Our facility is tailored to fit the needs of this program. We have enhanced security features to ensure safety for all parties involved. We have security cameras in both parking lots and by both entrances. We have a secured entrance for the visiting parent with a metal detector. The entire building is secured so that no one can gain access to areas without an employee present. Our employees are equipped with panic buttons for emergency situations. We have policies and procedures about behavior to ensure the emotional and physical safety of the child(ren) during visits.  

For DHS-involved families, we do welcome third parties to use our facility for supervised visitations and exchanges. We want all families to have access to the safety and security of our facility, regardless of if we’re supervising the visit or facilitating the exchange.  

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How to Start Using the Services 

If you’re interested in utilizing these services, the first step to getting started is to call us at 712.722.4404 or email us at visitationcenter@familycrisiscenters.org. During this initial contact, we’ll start with introductions and provide an overview of our services. We’ll listen to your situation so we can decide the next steps together. Once you’re ready to move forward, we’ll set up a date and time for an orientation for each parent.  

At the orientation appointment, we’ll complete paperwork and review our policies and procedures. This is a great time to ask any questions you might have about the services. Once all questions are answered, we’ll provide a tour of the facility, available visitation rooms, and the entrances. Once the orientation is complete, we can move forward with setting up visitations and exchanges.  

We are unable to accommodate walk-ins for visitations and exchanges. However, you can walk in to learn more about the services and complete an orientation.  

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Why These Services Are Important 

Our goal is to create positive outcomes that last a lifetime.

Family visitation and exchange services are beneficial for children, parents, and communities. Our goal is to create positive outcomes that last a lifetime. We believe we can help end generational abuse with these services. Generational abuse happens when a person takes the abuse they experienced as a child and passes it on to other family members. It creates a cycle of violence that crosses generational lines. We also believe we can help children and parents retain a relationship, even in situations where the parent hasn’t always been safe or when parents never regain custody. We believe we can help parents find a healthier style of co-parenting going forward, especially when violence is involved. Finally, we also believe we can help both parents address post-separation violence and trauma through referrals to therapy, counseling, and advocacy in our other programs.  

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What You Can Do to Help 

All of these services we’re providing to children and their parents are completely free.

We’ll never charge for our services because the child isn’t able to pay for them. Asking parents to pay for these services only creates a barrier for the children and can lead to more conflict. If you want to help be part of the positive outcomes of these services, our greatest need is financial support. Consider donating today.

This project was supported by Grant No.15JOVW-22-GG-00233-JFFX awarded by the Office on Violence Against Women, U.S. Department of Justice. The opinions, findings, conclusions, and recommendations expressed in this publication/program/ exhibition are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the U.S. Department of Justice.