Cases in which a child is resisting contact with a parent may or may not fit Gardner's theory of Parental Alienation Syndrome, which emphasizes the psychopathology of the “alienating” parent. Explanations may also include the child's coping with intense conflict and the “rejected” parent's skill with the child Whatever the cause, improvement usually involves legal and therapeutic intervention.
Custody evaluations can serve the dual purpose of providing neutral, objective information to the court while also contributing to the possibility of earlier settlement, which coincides with the therapeutic jurisprudence goal of more positive outcomes for children and families. Research suggests that most cases settle after custody evaluations. However, most of the literature is focused on the use of custody evaluations for litigation. Evaluators, attorneys, and mental health consultants can influence parents to focus more on children's needs and less on their conflict as they go through the evaluation process. This article urges family courts to develop processes and require professionals to learn skills needed for an interdisciplinary process to utilize evaluations in peacemaking.Key Points for the Family Court Community:All custody evaluation processes should aim to reduce and/or shorten children's exposure to parental conflict. Evaluators, attorneys, and mental health professional consultants should use the evaluation process to influence parents to be more aware of their children's needs and less invested in their adversarial positions. Evaluators should learn to write and orally present information and state opinions with consideration of the parents themselves as consumers of the custody evaluation as well as the court. Attorneys and mental health professional consultants should help clients review the report, process their emotional reactions, and consider their options for settlement versus litigation in terms of emotional and financial costs to the family. Court processes should be developed to contain the time and cost of custody evaluations and provide dispute resolution after custody evaluations.
There is a pressing need for a structured method for assessing children's feelings about the behavior of parents and other family members that provides reliable and valid-rather than anecdotal-information to the court. This paper reviews available instruments and presents preliminary data on a new method for measuring children's perceptions of emotional security, positive parenting, negative parenting, and co-parenting. This instrument, the Structured Child Assessment of Relationships in Families (the ''SCARF''), is structured, interactive, and engaging to children age 4 to 14. Forty children undergoing custody evaluations were assessed. Evaluators, blind to the children's responses, rated the quality of parenting. A sample of 131 children was used to assess reliability. The SCARF was shown to be highly reliable and to correlate strongly with evaluator ratings of emotional security, positive parenting, and negative parenting.Family law courts have increasingly turned to custody evaluators and other neutral professionals in the court system to provide information about families involved in custody disputes. Separating and divorcing parents often
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