In your divorce case, you, your spouse (or other parent) and your children may be required to undergo a custody evaluation. The custody evaluation is governed by Utah Code of Judicial Administration Rule 4-903 (you can click on the link to read Rule 4-903, and you should read it if you, your co-parent, and your children are ordered to submit to a custody evaluation). There is no statutorily- or court rule-prescribed methodology for a custody evaluation, but in Utah most custody evaluators follow the AFCC odel Standards of Practice for Child Custody Evaluation (you can click on the link to read those standards. AFCC stands for the “Association of Family and Conciliation Courts,” and you really should these, if you, your co-parent, and your children are ordered to submit to a custody evaluation).
A custody evaluation is a process by which the court appoints mental health professional (such as a licensed psychologist, licensed social worker, licensed marriage and family therapist, or licensed mental health counselor) to investigate and analyze various aspects of the parents, their children, family circumstances and dynamics, and other factors.
The custody evaluator reports his/her findings and recommendation for the custody (both legal custody and physical custody) and parent-time awards. Those recommendations can take the form of a report and/or deposition testimony before trial. Unless the court finds some reason to reject the custody evaluator’s report, the court may consider the report in determining what the child custody and parent-time awards are.
The idea of a custody evaluator may sound like a good idea. Is it?
The main reason for appointing a custody evaluator is because neither party can be wholly trusted to provide sufficiently adequate accurate information or to communicate appropriately. A good custody evaluator would be one who finds objectively verifiable data that is material and relevant to resolving the issues in the custody dispute.
How will you or the court know if the report is based in verifiable fact and not based in incomplete data, unfinished processes, conjecture, and/or bias? Keep these key factors in mind, and ensure the evaluator is meeting each one:
Custody Evaluators: Ensuring a Fair and Effective Process
Custody evaluations are essential in many divorce cases to help courts determine child custody and parent-time arrangements. A custody evaluator is a trained mental health professional who analyzes family dynamics, gathers evidence, and provides recommendations. Their findings play a critical role in shaping custody decisions.
- Transparency: good custody evaluators are open and forthcoming about their methods, processes, and findings.
- Impartiality: The evaluator must remain unbiased and free of personal agendas or preconceived outcomes.
- Scientific Rigor: The evaluation must follow established, scientifically sound methods. The process should be thorough and based on credible, verifiable data. The evaluator’s findings and conclusions must have support in a thorough and competently performed evaluation.
- Falsifiability: The evaluator’s findings should be based on evidence that is accessible and open to scrutiny. All of the evidence the evaluator considered and claims to have relied upon needs to be made available for review and verification. All key collateral sources need to be identified and interviewed. All of interviews—with the parents, with the children, and with the collateral sources—need to be mechanically recorded (meaning they were sound-and-visually recorded, so that they can be reviewed?
- Clarity: Reports must be written in a clear, coherent manner, avoiding excessive jargon that obscures meaning. The evaluator cannot make claims in the report that his/her findings and recommendations must be accepted without question by asserting that “one cannot understand or divine their meaning unless one is a fellow mental health professional.”
- Humility: Good evaluators acknowledge the limitations of their methods and admit when data and other evidence could have multiple valid interpretations.
It is crucial that you hold your custody evaluator accountable (you cannot count on the court to do it for you) to protect your and your children’s interests.
Custody evaluations expend a tremendous amount of money and time. Yet far too often, custody evaluations are pseudoscientific, ludicrously subjective, and of little evidential value. This happens when parents in the court do not hold the custody evaluator to applicable scientific, professional, and verifiable evidence standards. Don’t let this happen to you. Forewarned is forearmed.
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