Dangers Associated With The Avoidance Of Evidence‐Based Practice

• Author: Michael E. Lamb
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/fcre.12082
• Published date: 01 April 2014
• Date: 01 April 2014

DANGERS ASSOCIATED WITH THE AVOIDANCE OF

EVIDENCE-BASED PRACTICE

Michael E. Lamb

This commentary notes that the report on the AFCC Think Tank on Research, Policy, Practice, and Shared Parenting

acknowledges some well-established research conclusions with respect to the ways in which children’s well-being can be

affected by their parents’ separation, but avoids making explicit or innovative recommendations for practice. This refusal to

engage with implications for practice was repeatedly justified bysuperficial reference to individual differences and the need for

individualized decision making, but the failure to recognize areas where the research literature can be helpful, although not

determinative, is disappointing. The commentary ends with a discussion of the knownrisks of individualized decisions that are

not adequately informed by research.

Key Points for the Family Court Community:

• Empirical research should inform practice.

• Individualization does not preclude guidelines.

• Biased decision making is problematic.

Keywords: Child Well-Being;Custody;Empirical Research;Erroneous Judgments;Individualization;and Parenting Plans.

Forty years ago, I became a graduate student in the Department of Psychology at Yale University.

At the time, the psychology department was located in the medical school, nestled on Cedar Street

adjacent to the University’s Child Study Center. Coincidentally, less than a year before I arrived, a

prominent law professor, a psychologist, and a renowned professor of pediatrics and child psychiatry

who headed the Child Study Center published a book entitled Beyond the Best Interests of the Child

(Goldstein, Freud, & Solnit, 1973) to considerable acclaim and no little controversy. The intellectual

framework guiding this book was psychoanalyticand the discussions that led to the book largely took

place yards from the shared research office and observation room I was using in my first studies of

infant–mother and –father attachment. Of course, such peer-reviewed empirical research on parent–

child relationships—the type emphasized in the Think Tank Report (Pruett & DiFonzo, 2014)—had

no apparent impact on Goldstein, Freud, and Solnit. Indeed, although brief reference was made to

multiple reports concerning children who lived in institutions, even Bowlby’s (1969) revolutionary

synthesis, published four years earlier by this fellow psychoanalyst, was not cited. Although a young

affiliate and subsequent Director of the Child Study Centre, Donald Cohen, championed the research

undertaken by psychologists like me, the inveterate triumvirate sadly paid more attention to colum-

nists like Ann Landers and Art Buchwald than to the scholarly literature on child development.

In some respects, the contrast between Beyond the Best Interests of the Child and the presentThink

Tank Report underscores just how much progress we have made, even if the participants, through the

rapporteurs, are at pains to note, correctly, how much further we have yet to go! Soberingly, further-

more, where Goldstein, Freud,and Solnit were bold and conclusive, the Think Tank Report is cautious

and hesitant, doubtless reflecting increased awareness of the complexity of the issues that need to be

considered when making life-altering decisions about children’s future relationships with their

parents. Does this mean that we now know less than Goldstein, Freud, and Solnit did four decades

ago? Surely not, although, as intimated earlier, Goldstein and his colleagues showed scant interest in

empirical research on child development or on the effects of parental separation. It is undoubtedly

Correspondence: mel37@cam.ac.uk

FAMILY COURT REVIEW, Vol. 52 No. 2, April 2014 193–197

© 2014 Association of Familyand Conciliation Cour ts