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When Custody Evaluators Lose Focus

By David A. Martindale

None of those who have written on the subject of performing parenting evaluations has asserted that the task is an easy one. There has, however, been broad agreement among writers in the mental health fields, and reasonable clarity in law, concerning the objective that evaluators should endeavor to meet. The Association of Family and Conciliation Courts' Model Standards for Child Custody Evaluation, in its Preamble, states, in part: “The child custody evaluation process involves the compilation of information and the formulation of opinions pertaining to the custody or parenting of a child and the dissemination of that information and those opinions to the court, to the litigants, and to the litigants' attorneys.”

Elsewhere in the Preamble to the Model Standards, evaluators are admonished to “perform their professional activities with a recognition of the investigative nature of the task ' .” Students in introductory psychology courses learn that we cannot objectively investigate that which we are simultaneously endeavoring to alter, yet it is not uncommon to find that evaluators have endeavored to improve the family relationships that they have been assigned to observe and describe.

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