We study the Schouten-van Kampen connection, which is one of the most natural and important connection adapted to a pair of distributions on a differentiable manifold. Especially, we are interested on Schouten-van Kampen connections which are adapted to almost contact metric as well as almost paracontact metric structures. With the help of such a connection, we find necessary and sufficient conditions for an almost (para) contact structure to be normal, or (para) contact, or (para-)Sasakian.