When Custody Evaluators Lose Focus

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.

The nature of the task accepted by evaluators obligates them to assess and describe parenting characteristics that are likely either to facilitate or to hamper each parent's efforts to provide effective parenting to the children who are the focus of litigation. Where deficiencies are noted in the manner in which a parent interacts with a child, the evaluator's task is to describe the way(s) in which the interactions are problematic and, if possible, to offer professional opinions concerning the likely long-term consequences for the child of residing with a parent who deals with the child in the specifically described ways. It is not the task of an evaluator to undertake efforts to alter problematic parent-child interaction patterns.