Evaluating Child Custody Evaluations
| Publication year | 1993 |
| Pages | 2541 |
1993, December, Pg. 2541. Evaluating Child Custody Evaluations
CRS § 14-10-127 provides that a custody evaluation shall be ordered on the motion of a court or the motion of either party in a child custody dispute. Such evaluations yield written reports, which may be decisively helpful in assigning custodial roles. Not all reports are equally persuasive, however. The statute permits ordering a second evaluation if the first evaluation is contested. The motion for a second evaluation should be made in good faith, and not merely as a litigation tactic.
This article suggests various customary standards that apply to child custody evaluation reports. Adequate reports will meet these recognizable standards or explain why they do not. Inadequate reports will noticeably fail to achieve them.
The article is organized to follow CRS § 14-10-127(7)(b)(I)-(V), which enumerates the necessary features of reports. The sections are: Procedures, Report of the Data, Conclusions, Recommendations and Limitations of the Report. Within this framework, standards are developed with reference to related statutory criteria. It is therefore mandatory that family law attorneys and child custody evaluators know the relevant statutes, particularly the following: CRS § 14-10-124, best interests of the child; § 14-10-127, evaluation and reports; § 14-10-131, modification of sole custody; and § 14-10-131.5, joint custody modification/termination. Further, failure of evaluators to recognize current practices and guidelines that are promulgated by their professional organizations and the relevant professional literature may result in the report being attacked and being rendered invalid.
Interviews are the heart of custody evaluations. Indeed, custody evaluators are drawn from the ranks of mental health professionals largely because of their assessment interviewing skills.
Each parent and child of the family should be individually interviewed several different times in the course of an evaluation. This affords evaluators a chance to understand in depth each person's communication patterns, views about the family and attitudes toward one another, along with their reasons for holding these attitudes and views. Reports that do not claim at least several hours interview time with the principal participants are vulnerable to criticism on grounds of insufficiency. At the end of a fair evaluation, each contesting parent should feel satisfied that his or her side of the story has been heard.
Equally important as the individual interviews are interactive interviews between each parent and child. Often parents, and the children themselves, will make claims about the quality of parent-child relationships that can only be verified by firsthand observations of the parents and children together. These observations permit the assessment of each parent's sensitivity to the children, the parent's helpfulness and knowledge of the children and the balance struck between the parent's nurturing and control. Interactive observations also tend to demonstrate the children's level of comfort with each parent and their confidence in relying on them. It is best to include structured and unstructured portions of such interviews to allow standardized comparison of the parent-child dyads.
In general, the credibility of reports can be weakened by the appearance of any unequal treatment of the contesting parties. Clearly, human assessments, including custody evaluations, cannot achieve decimal-point accuracy. However, evaluators...
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