“The effects of a poorly executed court approved home study can last for generations!”
If you have concerns that a court-ordered child custody report was conducted inappropriately, hiring a licensed professional with years of experience in both writing and supervising home studies may be your best option. A complete and through home study review will look at the quality of the report, what data was gathered and how it was interpreted. The evaluator’s qualifications, training, education, and experience are also critical factors considered in the home study review process. Seriously flawed reports could be excluded if evidence from an expert witness challenges the validity of the report. In that case, a home study review can provide your attorney with the necessary evidence to compel the court to order a new home study.
Court ordered social studies are becoming more common. As women increasingly view their careers as just as important as their male counterparts, less are willing to give up their professional endeavors to stay at home with their children. Fathers are starting to realize that they are just as capable caregivers to their children as mothers. This shift in the way mothers and fathers perceive themselves as parent’s leads to conflicts involving custody, visitation schedules, living arrangements, and financial support. High conflict divorces and court-ordered social studies are becoming more the rule than the exception. As a result of these cultural changes in parenting increasingly more couples are unable to agree on what is best for their children. These issues and conflicts have led to an ever more increasing number of custody studies being completed.
The family law community has started to recognize that many court-appointed evaluators fall short of providing studies that are thorough enough to answer the question: what is in the best interest of the child? The sad reality is that many children have been placed inappropriately based on unprofessional work conducted by study evaluators. This includes things like failure to follow the required protocols, not assessing the critical areas, biases towards one parent or the other (for invalid reasons) or unsubstantiated recommendations for custody. An evaluators’ own professional discipline may also influence their judgments and recommendations. A simple example would be a Licensed Professional Counselor, who did not recognize the importance a parent’s support system or a social worker failing to recognize mental illness in a parent.
What this means is that many custody evaluators lack the necessary training, experience, and education to make appropriate recommendations. The Association of Family and Conciliation Courts has published “Model Standards of Practice for Child Custody Evaluations” a set of guidelines for completing such studies in an attempt to improve the overall quality of custody reports. Unfortunately, most custody evaluators do not follow these standards.
When the quality or conclusions of a custody report is questioned it may be worth the expense to have it reviewed by an appropriately licensed professional with the background and experience necessary to assess these types of reports. A trained professional should identify issues or problems with the way information was gathered and interpreted, how interviews were conducted, what psychosocial data was gathered, how information gathered from collaterals was used, and how all of the data was interpreted and presented. If desired the professional could testify as an expert witness to explain to the court the shortfalls of the study and the reason a new study should be ordered.