Having worked in a contact centre I think that the lack of
consistency in contact is the key rather than it's existence (as that
is a case by case issue). As a worker if I had a case that was fully
supervised then it was just that. I didn't let parents take the
children to the toilet alone, outside alone, I was present at every
moment, however not all workers saw supervised contact as this and the
lack of consistency between workers led to huge problems for the
children and the workers. One child verbalised the lack of supervision
as feeling a worker didn't care about her as much, especially when mum
was known to coherse the children into lying about dad's abuse. Other
children saw the workers who did supervise contact appropriately as OTT.
As
for phone and email contact, again, I think issue here is whether the
contact is to be supervised. I was always shocked that if contact were
to be fully supervised then why were the parents allowed to call the
children where conversation is completely unsupervised? I had a mother
tell her teenage daughter, who was in long term foster care, that she
planned to kill herself, when this case had a court order for fully
supervised contact.
As for which is preferred, I think it
completely depends on the case. Although I know my team had no room in
budgets for facilitating text communication, however the older children preferred this.