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| In family law, contact (or in the United States, visitation)
is one of the general terms which denotes the level of contact a
parent or other significant person in a child's life can have
with that child. Contact forms part of the bundle of rights and
privileges which a parent may have in relation to any child of
the family. Following ratification of the United Nations
Convention on the Rights of the Child in most countries, the
term "access" was superseded by the term contact. The
terminology reflects a substantive change in the law. A parent
is not necessarily any longer entitled to have "custody" of or
"access" to a child. Instead, a child may be allowed to reside
or have contact with a parent. In most jurisdictions the nature
of a couple’s relationship changes when a child is born to that
relationship. In law, there may be differences in the
consequences depending on whether the re