Rebuilding Families

I am fortunate to have been the first psychologist faculty member of two prestigious judicial colleges: The National College of Juvenile and Family Law in Reno, Nevada and the American Bar Association’s affiliated National Judicial College at the University of Nevada. My teaching topics have been Child Abuse and Neglect and Child Custody Decision Making. I have given keynote speeches including one on Child Custody for the Association of Family and Conciliation Courts. As a Clinical Associate Professor of Psychiatry, at the University of Vermont, I co-founded the first Child Forensic Service in the country. Later, I founded the Vermont Family Forensic Institute in So. Burlington, Vermont that offered training on child custody evaluations and on child abuse. I have directed child custody team evaluations for over two decades in both university and private practice settings. What I propose in this book comes from my experience of doing hundreds of such custody evaluations, listening to judges who have been my Judicial College students and from training child custody decision makers: psychologists, psychiatrists and social workers.

Each year thousands of children and their divorcing parents experience the loss of a known family life, and land in a divorce quagmire that occurs when the parents cannot agree about what is best for the children. The licensed professionals who help the court extricate these families from being stuck in litigation can be from a number of backgrounds.

I have learned that good child forensic teamwork spans many disciplines, yet we lack a common blueprint and a comprehensive team protocol for examining a shattered family with the award of child custody as the rebuilding beginning point. States’ Statutes have guidelines for judges to consider (The Best Interests of the Child), but they vary by location. Psychologists and psychiatrists have aging ethical guidelines and some “Best Interests” criteria from the older Uniform Marriage and Divorce Act (UMDA 1987). In fact, there are no ethical guidelines for team evaluations performed by the psychologist or psychiatrist. A major oversight in my opinion. Therefore, the ethical guidelines of the professional’s discipline prevail.

Judges consider certain guidelines when they are forced to be the architects of the broken home, but these statutes may not be the basis for the judge’s findings of fact. The custody evaluation and the resulting expert testimony often impact judicial decisions. Many mental health professionals and parents do not know that ‘Best Interests of the Child,’ the usual reference for construction of a post divorce family, are legal constructs set by the legislature of the state where the case is heard. These are not psychological terms but legal ones. This book blends both by offering a ten point best interests outline on which to base the definition of Best Interests of the Child in a custody dispute. I call these ‘Building Plans.’

While perhaps only 5% of divorce custody cases are decided by courts, this minority of course is the most bitter, challenging and complex of all divorces involving children. Caught in the center of the fury, the children struggle to adapt and wait for the fighting to stop. Rebuilding a family with the judge and lawyers, the mental health professionals are usually solo practitioners or court personnel with widely differing training and experience. For children and their parents, there can be a “luck of the draw” outcome. In fact, few if any, graduate programs in psychology, social work, law or medicine have courses on ‘How to Rebuild Divorcing Families.’ Yet many professionals are doing just that with ‘expert’ influence and what is decided usually is the final construction, an awesome power in the hands of a few.

I would like to share with you a protocol to aid in custody decision making that can be used in any state and referenced by judges, lawyers, parents, and child advocates who want to know what to expect where custody and visitation is to be decided by strangers. Some basic assumptions underlying the recommendations you will read are:

1. Two Heads are Better Then One! The task of conducting an evaluation of warring parents, their supporters and their offspring is difficult and demanding under the best of circumstances. No matter how detailed the blueprint for Best Interests of the Child happens to be, and no matter how carefully the evaluation may be planned, a protocol that elicits family dynamics is important. Using a two person Forensic Team (a psychologist and one other professional, for example) and an informed child custody evaluation affords hope that a comprehensive, logical all out effort was made to evaluate and offer a plan for the distressed family.

2. In general people (parents, families and especially children) do better in anxiety provoking situations (a custody evaluation) when what to expect is made clear by members of a strong team of professionals. I am opposed to solo evaluators using tests as a “team mate” for child custody decisions. When it comes to helping restructure the future of a family, the team offers objective reassurance and depth of expertise.

3. Child/Adult Forensic evaluators may not know what the well trained judge is using as a reference for fact finding when rebuilding a family. It is the state’s Blueprint for Best Interests of the Child. If you are doing custody evaluations, you want to know what that means and how it can be used in a team format.