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Contact centres for parents and children are provisions that have been emerging for several decades in Western Europe with a partly converging operating procedures. In this article, the authors consider the analogies between the various European systems based on professional or institutional discourse. They hypothesise that the latter are sustained, in part, by common cultural meta-frameworks. To address this issue, a twofold synchronic and diachronic methodological perspective is adopted, based respectively on the testimonies of professionals and institutional representatives from the various countries concerned and the writings of the founding psychotherapists of these Espaces de Rencontre (contact centres) in France. The discussion revolves around the cultural meta-frameworks identified around three axes: that of maintaining the parent-child bond, that of relations between generations in terms of rights and authority, and finally that of gender relations within the parental couple.