‘You can’t hear a smile’: how video visits help dads in prison stay connected with their kids

Many Australians know December 21 as “Gravy Day”. This is a reference to Paul Kelly’s song and new film How to Make Gravy, where a prisoner named Joe writes a letter to his family four days before Christmas. In it Joe, missing his wife and relatives, asks, “Won’t you kiss my kids on Christmas Day?”.

It’s estimated half the men in Australian prisons are fathers. While they are incarcerated, maintaining contact with their children is vital, both for the dads and the kids.

It allows fathers to keep contributing to their children’s lives and provides important social support. It can also reduce psychological distress for children.

One important way to do this is via “video visits”, which were spurred on by COVID restrictions. In our recently published research, we look at how families experienced video visits in two New South Wales prisons.

Our research

Video visits can be challenging if there is a lack of facilities in homes and prisons or problems with technological support. But our study set out to understand how they might support father-child relationships, given their widespread use during lockdowns.

We looked at one prison in an urban area and another in a regional area. A total of 27 fathers participated in interviews, of whom 11 identified as Aboriginal and four identified as culturally and linguistically diverse.

We also interviewed 17 carers, who were mostly mothers. They looked after children ranging from infants to teenagers.

Recognising each other

One way video visits support father-child relationships is allowing children to see and get to recognise their father’s faces and for the father to see the growing child. As one carer said:

She knew and recognised over the last two years that daddy’s on the phone, daddy’s on the iPad […] So, even though it was once a week she got familiar, seeing his face.

Fathers valued the visual contact with their children as well, to allow them to see how their children were changing and growing:

[…] there’s a huge difference, such a big difference between a phone call and a video call. The visual contact, you can’t hear a smile. You can hear laughter, but you can only see someone’s joy in their face by seeing them visually.

Another carer added:

As you know, five years is a long time, especially for a little kid. So, he got to watch him grow every week.

Part of family life

Carers appreciated the flexibility of video visits and how they could integrate them into daily life. Visits could take place at children’s sports activities or the beach. They could show their fathers their rooms, their art or the dance they just learned. One carer said they organised events like blowing out candles on a birthday cake around video visits.

When organised in the home, it means video visits are happening where children are secure and familiar. As one carer told us:

[The child] does better on video than he does in person. On video, you know he’s in his home. He’s in his comfort [zone]. He can do whatever he likes. He can show [his father] his room. He can get new toys […] his options are a lot more there.

A father told us:

They’re happy, they’re comfortable, they’re not shy, they actually want to talk to you. It’s not like they have to stay here and talk to you. They can run off and come back.

Another carer described how video visits enabled the child’s fathers to observe some of his “firsts”:

When [the child] first learned to crawl. I put the phone up against the lounge and I moved [the child] maybe about half a meter away from the phone and I said to [the child], ‘go on, crawl to Daddy’, and [the child] crawled straight up to the phone and gave the phone a kiss.

Better for kids?

Several carers pointed out that the prison environment could be distressing for children. Not only did this sometimes involve hours of travel, but there were people they did not know, long waits and security processes to go through.

As one carer said, “it’s not somewhere you bring kids”. Another told us:

[the child] was really quite scared at the other inmates around. And yeah, so he actually prefers the video calls.

There are challenges

Interviewees also described some challenges with video visits, noting younger children quickly lose interest and “run off”.

They also said children could be upset at the end of a visit, particularly when it ended abruptly.

You know you’d get a beep, and then it’s switch off […] But you know there was times where that was very difficult, with [the child] in the middle of something like chatting about her day, and then, all of a sudden it will cut off, and she will get quite upset and not understand.

What next?

Our study strongly suggests these types of visits are important for families. Future work should focus on ways to improve the quality of visits and ask children for their views about what they want.

This is not to suggest video visits should replace in-person visits but they can help fathers and their children maintain a genuine relationship.

If they can’t be together, at least dads can give their children a virtual kiss on Christmas Day.