Home > Visitation

Parents (and in some jurisdictions grand-parents) frequently believe that they have a right to visitation or access; however, courts in several countries have held that this privilege is determined by what is in the best interests of the child and promotes healthy development of the child — except in the case of a parent who has severe psychological problems that may prohibit him or her from having an ongoing relationship with their child.

Visitation may be supervised, i.e., there may be a social worker, psychologist or other neutral third party present while the non-custodial parent visits with the child to insure that there is no child abuse or offensive behavior on the part of the parent.

Most parents have visitation orders that allow the child to visit with them without any supervision, often away from the custodial residence without the permission of the custodial parent often the non-custodial parent is granted overnight visitation, weekend visitation or vacation visitation.

Parents may also share custody and may agree to allow visitation in these situations a court order may not be needed, though sometimes it is obtained to forstall later disputes about what the parents had previously agreed to and to allow the courts to have some oversight over the children which they normally have under statute and under the parens patriae power.

1 Legal aspects

1.1 Japan

In Japan, there is no legal guarantee of visitation by a non-custodial parent. Despite this, courts do often grant visitation rights to a non-custodial parent of a divorce, or to the father of an unwed child, who by law is declared non-custodial by default. However, these court ordered visitations are often only for several hours once a month, and in some cases, only once a year. Further, courts will not enforce these visitation provisions when the custodial parent is not cooperative. Several groups are working to change related laws and provide more detailed information on these laws and alternatives:

2 Other usages of the word

In English history, a visitation was an official visit, usually for purposes of inspection, and the record of that visit. Visitations were made to establish the right of a person to bear arms, and are used today in genealogical research. These visit are usually titled according to the year they were made (e.g. Visitation of 1345), and the genealogical information contained in them is often erroneous.

The Visitation is a CatholicGeneral meaning Catholic means universal or whole''. With respect to the Christian Church, the early Christians used the term to refer to the whole undivided church. It is in that sense that all Christians today claim ownership of the term, including Prot feast day ( 2 July) commemorating the visit of the Virgin MaryThe term Virgin Mary has several different meanings: For the historical and multi-denominational concept of Mary, see Mary, the mother of Jesus. For the Roman Catholic theological and doctrinal concept of Mary, see Blessed Virgin Mary. For the issue of Ma to Elizabeth as recounted in Luke.