It’s time to establish a moratorium on child custody evaluations. 

Custody evaluations are assessments conducted by mental health professionals to determine which parent should get custody of a child and make a recommendation to the court.

The use of custody evaluations is DANGEROUS.  Due to the unreliable practice of using custody evaluations to construct reports for court, children have suffered untimely and preventable trauma and EVEN deaths. 

Decades of research show that custody evaluations have zero reliability, zero validity and are simply a “junk science”, which is fraught with bias, inequity and lack of standards. Custody evaluations are NOT science, they are not based on any underlying constructs or principles of professional psychology, the recommendations of custody evaluators represent an opinion of a single individual evaluator, and these opinions may or may not be accurate and are highly vulnerable to cultural and personal biases (Turkat, 2018).  Moreover, there is also no professional oversight or review for the accuracy of the custody evaluator’s recommendations. And these psychologists have zero liability regarding the consequences of their recommendations. 

We should make every effort to advance and support the permanent elimination of custody evaluations and keep this “junk science” out of the family courts, where the well-being of OUR KIDS is at stake, and where “junk science” should have no place. 

The judges should do their jobs and fairly and fully evaluate facts and evidence and not rely on so-called “experts” who have abandoned the scientific core of their discipline. 

Let’s protect our children and stop injustices. Otherwise, the next child harmed or murdered because of custody evaluation could be someone you know and love. 

“We simply cannot have children subjected to a psychologist’s faulty opinion that results in their murder.” (Turkat, 2022)