Emotion work in out-of-home care: How supervisors help parents regulate emotions before a contact visit

Background and purpose
Maintaining meaningful contact between children in out-of-home care and their parents is widely recognised as important for children’s well-being. In Denmark, around one fifth of such contacts take place as supervised or supported visits. A well-established practice is for supervisors to meet with parents before and after the meeting to prepare for the upcoming meeting and evaluate after. While existing research documents the significance of high-quality contact, little is known about the interactional practices through which professionals support parents before and after supervised visits. This paper addresses this gap by exploring how supervisors help parents regulate their emotions when preparing to meet their children.
Methods
The study is part of the ViSAM project (Knowledge about Supervised and Supported Contact), which investigates practices and dilemmas in supervised family contact in Denmark. The data consists of 25 video-recorded pre- and post-visit conversations between supervisors and parents. Using discursive psychology and conversation analysis, the analysis focuses on the practices through which supervisors respond to parents’ emotional displays, including sadness, anger, or nervousness, and how they work to recalibrate these emotions in ways that re-orient them toward the upcoming contact.
Preliminary findings.
Pre- and post-visit conversations with parents are often emotionally charged: parents may display grief, anger, nervousness, or exhaustion related both to the visit itself and to broader life circumstances. Supporting parents’ emotional regulation in these moments is a key institutional task. Our analysis shows that supervisors use a range of conversational resources to acknowledge parents’ affective states while simultaneously redirecting their focus towards the the child’s perspective and the anticipated visit. These resources include affiliative formulations that validate parents’ feelings, but also practices such as normalisation, perspective-shifting, and future-oriented framing. These practices can be understood as a form of “emotion work” (Hochschild, 1983) embedded within the institutional task of safeguarding the child’s well-being during contact with biological parents.
Conclusions and implications
The study demonstrates that emotion regulation in supervised contact is is not only an individual but also an interactional accomplishment. It makes visible the subtle communicative labour performed by supervisors in preparing parents for highly sensitive encounters with their children. These insights are of relevance to both researchers and practitioners concerned with supporting children’s relationships with their families in contexts of care. By grounding the analysis in naturally occurring interaction, the study also speaks to the subtheme of Methodological development and innovation in social work research.
References
Hochschild, A. R. (1983). The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling. The University of California Press.
Lausten, M., & Jørgensen, T. (2017). Anbragte børn og unges trivsel 2016. SFI.
Sen, R., & Broadhurst, K. (2011). Contact between children in out-of-home placements and their family and friends networks: A research review. Child & Family Social Work, 16(3), 298–309.