The Children's Contact Service (CCS) provides supervised contact visits and changeovers for separated parents in Family Court parenting proceedings. The families we work with often experience one or more complex issues such as family violence, substance misuse, mental illness, and other trauma.

We assist children to safely spend time with the parent they don't live with, in our child-friendly contact centre.We also work separately with each parent to increase their parenting capacity and remove any barriers that prevent them achieving safe, self-managed contact. This could include referrals to additional CatholicCare services such as counselling, post-separation case management, parent education courses and children's groups.

Funding from CACF will contribute to the development of the Parent Handbook.

The Parent Handbook is a useful tool to any practitioner working with separated parents. It shares evidence based concepts about how each parent can support their child and work towards safe and respectful co-parenting. It offers suggestions on responding to children's 'tricky questions' about separation or contact arrangements, ideas for helping children transition between parents, and thoughts on the importance of protecting children from parental conflict.It also encourages the use of child-led play and connection centred parenting to help support strong parent-child relationships.The CatholicCare Children's Contact Centre staff regularly have conversations with parents relating to the themes in the Parent Handbook.  Having an easy-to-read written resource will help reinforce these messages and be a tool for parents to further reflect on their co-parenting.

 

 

For more information on the Children's Contact Centre please visit catholiccare.org or call CatholicCare's CCareline on 13 18 19.