The Place for Custody Evaluations in Family Peacemaking

• Author: Mary Elizabeth Lund
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/fcre.12162
• Date: 01 July 2015
• Published date: 01 July 2015

THE PLACE FOR CUSTODY EVALUATIONS IN

FAMILY PEACEMAKING

Mary Elizabeth Lund

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.

Keywords: Attitude Change; Bias; Brief Evaluations; Court Reform; Custody Evaluations; Dispute Resolution; Expert

Opinion; Neutrality; Settlement; and Therapeutic Jurisprudence.

INTRODUCTION

After 25 years of doing custody evaluations, I still struggle with how evaluations might contribute

to peace between parents and a better future forchildren. My professional journey to become a custody

evaluator started when the results of my postdoctoral research in England, similar to many other stud-

ies, showed the biggestpredictor of poor adjustment for childrenof divorced parents was their exposure

to parental conflict. Off I went to become a mediator because the logical step to help these children was

to resolve parental conflict as quickly as possible. When I returned to Los Angeles in the early 1980s,

the family law court was moving away from using dueling mental health experts and urging both par-

ties to use a joint neutralcustody evaluator. I saw using neutral custody evaluations as a way for courts

to focus more on children’s needsand help solve problems in the family and less on parents’ anger and

desire to win in court. I learned that evaluations could play a role in peacemaking because most cases

settle after a custody evaluation, but little has been written about how or why. Allfamily law professio-

nals should be challenged to develop the knowledge and skills for using custody evaluations in thepar-

allel tracks toward probable settlement byparents themselves and possible decision by a judge.

Babb (2014a), using the framework of “therapeutic jurisprudence,” writes that family law processes

must focus on outcomes that positively affect and even improve the lives of individuals, children, and

families. We now have a large body of research pointing to ways to promote better adjustment for

Correspondence: mlund@lundstrachan.com

FAMILY COURT REVIEW, Vol. 53 No. 3, July 2015 407–417

V

C2015 Association of Family and Conciliation Courts