Intervening with care: Interactional practices for navigating authority in supervised contact visits

Abstract

Research on supervised contact visits between children placed in care and their birth parents highlights the need for professional skills in facilitating these encounters. While most studies focus on visit frequency and location, less attention has been given to the interactional dilemmas supervisors face when supporting parents and fostering the parent-child relationship while safeguarding the child. This article examines two instances of supervisory intervention during a video-recorded contact visit in a Danish municipality to show how supervisors navigate these dilemmas in practice. Using Conversation Analysis (CA), the analysis demonstrates how interventions are designed as trouble alerts, deploying three interactional strategies: ambiguity, indirectness, and inviting co-experience by sounding the sensation of the child. These findings highlight the delicacy of the supervisor’s management of authority and the careful balancing required to make interventions explicit enough for parents to understand, yet implicit enough to preserve parental authority.