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Clinicians who perform child custody evaluations have an implicit faith that the practices that have been developed over the years are valued by the reports’ consumers – attorneys and judges. But is this so? Given that the intended use of such products are members of the legal profession, it seems important to determine that the criteria attorneys and judges employ to assess the quality of child custody evaluations matches those developed by mental health professionals. If this is not the case what does this tell us?

Over the past two decades, mental health professionals have dedicated considerable effort to delineating the standards of what makes a good child custody evaluation, including:

In a good child custody evaluation, there are certain components that professionals have come to expect including:

• An account of early family history
• Educational and employment history
• Adult and inter-personal relationships
• Medical, psychiatric, substance abuse, and legal history
• Account of court dispute
• Parenting functioning
• Parent-child observation
• Conclusions
• Recommendations

Because of the explicit agendas in these evaluations, it is crucial to corroborate the data obtained from clinical interviews by gathering additional information. These methods include psychological testing and reports from collateral sources, who are familiar with the parties, such as therapists, school teachers, and pediatricians. The intent is to achieve convergent validity, that is, reach similar conclusions from multiple and diverse sources of information. While collateral sources are extremely valued from the perspective of a mental health professional, from a legal standpoint, information from collateral sources is potentially problematic as it could be considered hearsay.

Research findings point to overall agreement between mental health and legal professionals with respect to the particular components of a child custody evaluation, outlined above, and in particular of the value of a careful assessment of the parties’ parenting capacities. What has been less explored are the implicit criteria by which mental health professionals and legal professionals judge a construct such as parental capacity, and how they judge the quality of custody reports purporting to address this construct.

While mental health professionals have a set of criteria to assess parenting capacity, it is not clear whether these criteria are shared by judges and attorneys. In order for our custody report to be valuable to our consumers, that is, the legal professionals, it would be important to develop an agreed upon standard to judge each section of the child custody report and in particular the parenting construct. What could then be a next step to improve the process? Develop an agreed upon set of criteria to judge each section of the child custody report and in particular the parenting construct.

For an in-depth look of these issues please refer to Dr. Yohananoff’s recent article published in the Journal of Forensic Practice (Vol 1, Issue 2, pp.127-133.)

What is your experience with child custody reports? Comment in the section below or send an email to DrYohananoff@nycforensics.com.

Dr. Alberto Yohananoff
NYC Forensics
dryohananoff@nycforensics.com
P: (646) 284-5600
F: (212) 706-9136

Posted in Forensic Evaluations