|
You have many years to go and my own feeling is that anything legally binding that requires lawyers or a court to change is too much. You need to be able to make decisions based on your child's needs in the moment, not scheduled out three months for a hearing.
Any help you can get from your local agency re supervising visits will make your life easier and actually might make keeping the family connection easier. You might also look into requiring the mother to pay for supervision services.
We are fostering a niece. We have been pressured by the agency to supervise visitation by phone and in person when the parents made the trip. I don't know why agencies think it is OK to dump this on relatives--it is MUCH harder and often almost impossible to supervise visits effectively when you are trying to maintain any sense of family connectedness and normalcy in your interactions. Parents are WAY more likely to start up arguments in front of their child with a relative than with a caseworker. I really think that "leaving it to the family" is much more likely to destroy the family relationship than if these things were managed by a third party.
That said, relatives are often expected to do this duty.
Supervising by phone is extremely difficult--you must talk with the parent(s) for several minutes to see if they are coherent enough to speak to their child. Then you have to listen in on an extension (mute buttons are great) and have a handy list of polite interrupters for when the conversation gets inappropriate. You will need to document all days, times, length of calls and at least the general content as well as specific details of any inappropriate speech, which includes anything that makes your child uncomfortable or interferes with his attachment to you (comments like "you know I'm your real mother, right?..." fall into that category) and any erratic behaviors or speech.
Supervising face-to-face visits is likewise extremely difficult. You must keep everyone in view at the least, hopefully always be in earshot. No alone time and vigilance is key. This is really hard to do, especially if you have other children to parent at the same time. The parent will resent this, no doubt, from you while they may accept it better from a third party. We just finished a visit and it was a nightmare event though the parents were fairly well behaved. At one point, we took the kids to Chuck-E-Cheese's, expecting that the door security would be helpful. Instead of matching ID numbers as they are supposed to do, however, the attendant asked our foster daughter "Is that your mother?" She said yes and they sailed right out the door!!
The point, I guess, is that supervising visits is much, much harder and more complicated for a relative than for agency personnel. Be very careful of what you actually promise; even if it is not legally binding, broken promises hurt the giver as well as the receiver and there would be fallout for your nephew, too.
|