An assessment helps create child focused parenting arrangements tailored to a family’s circumstances. It is a comprehensive clinical exploration of a child’s needs, within the family and the wider environment, and it results in recommendations about how those needs can best be met, and how decision making and time sharing should occur.
The assessor may recommend how parental rights and responsibilities for the care of a child should be structured, and will set out a detailed plan for that care.
A different role from therapy
The purpose is to give information to parents, and sometimes to an arbitrator or the court, so that the best parenting arrangements can be decided when parents cannot agree on parenting time and decision making. Assessments provide informed, independent evidence about the child’s needs and about each parent’s ability and willingness to meet those needs.
The assessor’s role is entirely different from a traditional therapist client relationship. The assessor performs a forensic role. Both parents have the opportunity, in court or in an arbitrative process, to challenge the findings, opinions, and recommendations.
What the work involves
An assessment is a detailed investigation. It includes extensive interviews with parents, the children, and other significant family members, new partners, caregivers, and community contacts such as the child’s school and doctor. Stephen observes each parent with the children in various settings.
That information is used to evaluate the children’s relationship with each parent and to make recommendations about parenting time, decision making responsibility, and contact. Recommendations are always made in the best interests of the children.
Often the recommendations and findings can help the parents settle before a full report is written. When a report is needed, it goes to the court, an arbitrator, or a judge, who decide how much weight to give it.
Assessments typically take between 20 and 50 hours and may span three to four months. The time varies from family to family.