Frank Parlato
What Is Supervised Visitation?
Supervised visitation is a court-ordered arrangement requiring that an approved third party monitor a parent’s time with their child. It means a stranger gets paid to watch you see your kid.
One hour in a room you didn’t choose, under the eyes of someone you didn’t ask for. It’s like daycare in reverse. You show up. You’re watched. You’re labeled.
No crime, no trial—just an opinion and a check you better be able to write. This is not visitation—it is surveillance.
You walk into a room with crayons, a smile, and a clock ticking above your head. They say you need a chaperone now.
When Is It Ordered?
Judges most commonly impose supervised visitation in cases involving allegations of abuse, substance misuse, mental instability, or high-conflict custody disputes. No proof, no trial. The GAL says, “Just to be safe,” and you’re paying to see your kid under watch.
Supervision is often ordered in moments of fear—sometimes real, sometimes staged, All they need is a hunch, a hearsay, or a therapist note. You had no hearing. No witness. No verdict. And because someone felt something, you lost what once was unconditional.
Who Benefits
Judges do not order supervision in pursuit of justice, but in the maintenance of bureaucratic control. Sometimes they order it because they’re scared, sometimes because they’re tired. Sometimes because they just don’t know. Sometimes they know damn well that there’s no problem. But there would be a problem if they did not keep the money train going.
And the child? He just wants to go home.
A network of service providers, including visitation centers, therapists, custody evaluators, and attorneys, benefit from supervised visitation. It’s a gravy train. Visitation centers rake in $200 an hour. Therapists stretch “reunification” for months. GALs get paid to write reports. And the state cashes in on federal Title IV-D money for every support order they keep alive.
It’s family court for sale. There is money in pain. Money in accusation. Money in a parent’s willingness to pay just to hold their child’s hand for one hour.
It’s a fine hustle. A good business.
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Shes cooked She entered family court where the judge has unchecked power Judge orders supervision. The Center charges by the hour. Therapist says, “Needs more time.”
Want to see your kid? That’ll be $200 an hour. The therapist says you need 12 sessions. Great. Lawyer says fight it? Even better—billable hours.
The courtroom is silent. The register is loud. Every hour of supervised visitation is a transaction. You are not entering a courthouse. You are entering an economy built on estrangement.
The system is not broken. It is functioning exactly as intended—for those who benefit. Courts maintain control. Contractors extract fees. Families are destabilized, then monetized.
And the more you fight for your child, the more the system finds a way to bill you. Someone is always counting—but just not the hours you’ve missed with your child.
Frank Parlato is an investigative journalist, media strategist, publisher, and legal consultant.
Please leave a comment: Your opinion is important to us!
Um, and what exactly makes Frank an authority on this?
Nothing.
It’s a fact. This really happens all the time. As soon as a mother brings facts of abuse, the tables in the courtroom are turned on her, immediately.
“… He pays nearly $1,000 a week for these visits with his son. He has no criminal record. No history of domestic violence. No findings of abuse. Yet he is watched as if he were a danger to his own child.
For more than a year, the doting dad has seen his only child for just a few hours each week, a fraction of the boy’s life — under court orders issued by a family court judge. …”
https://davisvanguard.org/2025/06/judge-favors-mother-in-custody-case/
The system is not operating as intended. Protection of children is essential however adding the profit motive to it is in opposition to the idea of protection. Parents are at risk for being abused and defrauded.
Education needs to start with those at the top: the judges who make decisions and family court prosecutors that recommend these harsh, costly measures. Parents have rights and the courts should not recommend punitive, protective measures without proof a parent is harmful.
They are not recommending them based on nothing. Ex-parte TROs are a stopgap measure, generally lasting 10-14 days until the other side can be heard. A judge hears from the restrained party (assuming they show up) and looks at the evidence. Supervised visitation is recommended when evidence of harm to children by the parent is demonstrated. No one is getting rich off of these cases. Court appointed supervisors earn about 60 grand a year. Courts are not flush with cash. Someone has to pay for these services, generally a determination is made based on each parents’ income.
This is absolutely false. Most ex parte TROs are continued after the hearing. You will almost never encounter a judge who issues an ex parte TRO essentially saying oops I made a mistake and am wrong after a hearing. Same for doing that to one of their colleagues.
This is precisely why the constitutional criminal standard needs to be used for TROs and not the lesser civil one.
Many of the people complaining about protective orders are the people who everyone needs to be protected from. These protective orders are not handed out like Candy. Many of the people manipulating the system are the biggest complainer. There are absolutely some cases where they are obtained by dishonest people. TRO do not prevent the person from child access and visitation. Even when they should.
You are fundamentally incorrect
Right, because most of the time they aren’t granted without cause. Use your brains people, most people who have children don’t actually want sole custody if the other parent is safe and healthy. People here act like restraining orders are routinely requested for no reason.
Criminal trials take months. You don’t leave helpless children in a potentially dangerous situation for months while you sort it out. And some issues that aren’t actually crimes are still harmful to a child. Supervised visitation is a way to try and protect the children while also maintaining sone kind of relationship with their parent.
Dear judicial branch, the attorneys are messing around. They are not engaging in above board eithical conduct in some cases. People lie like rugs in the court house. We are respectfully request that you stop constantly defending the attorneys. Please allow people to have evidence interduced into the court. Supervised visits are not always bad and needed. Please don’t stop digging into information. Why don’t we have a parenthood initiative? Instead of tossing money at dad jokes why couldn’t there be more money tossed into the service to help people? The money should follow the child, not the parents. Could we have a childhood initiative? These children deserve counseling that is tailored for them not the parents. There are definitely parents being harmed and the services fees are being used to subdue them in to poor agreement. Our funding systems surrounding the family court system needs to be resolved around the kids.
You clearly have never had your children held financial hostage by the family court
The system is corrupt. It was created to traffic children in exchange for high fees from the parents and federal tax dollars.
Only in delusional fantasies.
ZERO corruption in EVERY “family court” case?
The system is operating as intended.
In Connecticut, particularly in lower Fairfield County, supervised visitation is primarily handled by one entity: Dennis Puebla & Associates. They charge an hourly rate plus travel time. Notably, Dennis Puebla himself—a licensed social worker—does not attend the visits. Instead, he sends associates, some of whom are college students or individuals with minimal training or education in this sort of thing to conduct the supervision.
These associates document every interaction between the parent and child, often using their cell phones to take notes. Parents are not even permitted to know the supervisors’ last names. Yet, these same associates don’t even testify in cour, Dennis Puebla does—based solely on the notes and reports compiled by others. These reports are, in essence, hearsay.
It’s quite a system, isn’t it?
Definitely a messed up system. However, there are some exceptions to Puebla’s dominance. For example, the third party who supervised Fotis Dulos’s visit with his kids at Jennifer Farber Dulos’s house in New Canaan just days before she was murdered testified at Michelle Troconis’s trial in Stamford.
The comment wasn’t to highlight “Puebla’s dominance”. It was to note the chaos of the system in which only a few “visit supervisors” are willing to risk involving themselves in dangerous custody cases forced into lawless family courts.
“Dr.” Herman played “the evaluator” in the Dulos case. Did Mr. Herman notice, ignore and or hide Mr. Dulos’ homicidal and suicidal inclinations?
If someone in Connecticut judicial branch offices knows the answer to that question, they haven’t told public what happened in that case or any other cases in which there’s been so much malfeasance.
Corruption at its finest. When will the feds investigate this corrupt cesspool of a state?
Many businesses offer “supervised visits” in Connecticut.
The Connecticut Judicial Branch lists six offices on the Judicial Branch website stating, “The Judicial Branch is not responsible for the quality of services provided or for verifying the content, accuracy or completeness of any of the information contained on this list.” 🧐
(That means: Connecticut family court judges order supervised visits, and aren’t liable for whatever happens next.)
For example, Dennis Puebla’s business is one of a few offices in Connecticut offering “supervision” outside of the office setting “in the community”. Mr. Puebla’s office “supervised” Fotis Dulos and then Jennifer Dulos disappeared.
The Nicholas J. Sarno & Company is another venture offering “supervised visits” outside of an office setting. In The Worst Interests of the Child by Keith Harmon Snow, Mr. Harmon Snow wrote about the Liberti v. Liberti case:
“… Maureen Murphy produced the name of the supervising agency N.J.Sarno & Company … For six days in December 2011, alone, Sunny Kelly was billed $3,910 for 46 hours of supervision (at $85 an hour) … Sarno’s business office was originally located at the law offices of attorneys Sandra Lax and Louise Truax in Fairfield, Conn. …”
Investigators of crimes in “family courts” should be interested to know: Ms. Truax now “serves as the President of the Overcoming Barriers’ Board of Directors … Attorney Truax frequently lectures both in Connecticut and across the country regarding family law and child custody issues”.
Information about the “psycho-educational Overcoming Barriers”:
California, Minnesota and Connecticut were the three states first targeted in the HHS funded research on families in “family courts”.
Ralph Underwager founded the Institute for Psychological Therapies in Northfield, Minnesota in 1974. For reference, French president Emmanuel Jean-Michel Frédéric Macron was born in 1977 in Amiens, France.
Brigitte Marie-Claude Macron née Trogneux was born in 1953 — also in Amiens.
Those are actual lyrics of a song the “Overcoming Barriers” staff told their camp residents to sing.
QUESTION:
Which office stores research data for that “parent-child” camp? 🤔
Does HHS know what they’ve done?
Do they accept health insurance? If so, where’s the oversight? If not, where’s the oversight?
So what’s the solution? Do you let parents have private alone time with their kids if they are mentally or physically abusive, substance abusing, or neglectful? Leave the kids in danger while going through a lengthy criminal trial? Supervised visits are a way to protect kids from abuse while determining final outcomes. Should the supervisors have to do this for free?
What’s the operational definition of “supervisor”?
How about they use the money they are paying fathers in Connecticut to come explain what programs worked for them? . Why not use the access and visitation grants? Saturday supervised visits and one night during the week. Community centers. Just like they have at the prison. With people watching and cameras. The state loves to pass out nonprofit money. What about the funding for experimental psychology. The use of Tanf block grant funding for studies. Let use the money from the fatherhood initiative trip to Newport. They can meet at the comfort inn near Bradley airport. Breast feeding boot camp. Wasteful spending can be turned into the project. What is Doug Edwards colleting a salary for as a judicial branch employee? Stop the fatherhood initiative media funding.
Generally, there should be another human right added to the bill of rights, the ‘right not to have to pay.’ Example: you put a tiny scratch on a rich-guy’s car, and now he can bill you 3,000 dollars rather than just buff it out. Even though your car cost 500. Example: A charity comes into a country to ‘lift people out of poverty’ and cleans up the drinking water stream by culverting it and eventually just like here, everyone gets water bills. Now everyone has to have a paying job, there is no choice, and if there is only one employer, you’ve basically created slavery. Example: In Britain, under Thatcher, newly-privatized train companies put a very very high charge for carrying a bicycle on a train, meaning bike commuters could no longer get across cities. When people wrote to complain, their answer is, they set the fee at the point that maximizes profit. Suddenly in Britain there was ‘A charge’ for everything. Banks always let accounts go just a little bit negative (an overdraught), and when that happened they would send you a letter to let you know, there was a 25 pound ‘charge’ for them writing the letter. All this creates a very fast moving treadmill, with no right to step off it.
Once a few people owned the railroads, they and their ancestors established the infrastructure we see today — for better and for worse.
Commuters, tourists, diplomats and spies, private mail, business mail, bank notes, gold and consumer goods — all controlled on those rail cars.
Today’s public-private “family courts” destroy families around the world the same way very very high charges for bicycles on trains stop bike commuters from traveling freely in cities.