CURRENT STATUS OF THE FIELD

There were no specialized forensic instruments for parenting abilities available for review in the Parenting chapter of the first edition of EC. In contrast, most of the instruments reviewed here were designed either specifically to address legal questions of parent competency or capacity (the first five "custody" instruments) or to provide information that would be useful in judicial reviews of cases involving suspected maltreat­ment of children.

Research Directions

Functional Component

The adequacy of parenting instruments for maltreatment and divorce child custody assessments will depend on how well they address the functional nature of parenting capacity as a legal construct. Instruments in this context will be helpful if they describe what parents know, believe, and can do in the context of child rearing, in a way that offers guidance to decision makers in legal child custody or abuse and neglect cases.

Development of the new, specialized measures for use in child custody evaluations show some awareness of the importance of parenting functions in assessments for custody cases. The ASPECT, for example, includes items related to parents' caretaking knowledge and skills, as do the PASS and PORT. Future efforts could do better, however, by attending to several things that are dissatisfying about the present instruments.

First, decisions about the specific types of caretaking knowledge, abilities, or skills to include seem to have been based on intuition more than a careful effort to use psychology's knowledge about caregiving as a source of guidance. The primary field of study to be consulted in this matter is not clinical psychology (although it has much to offer) but rather developmental psychology.

Second, the manner in which parents' skills and abilities has been assessed manifests clinical psychology's traditional over-reliance on inter­view questioning and on methods of measurement that involve several levels of inference to arrive at one's conclusion about parents' abilities. Asking people things to determine what they know, or what they would do in various situations, is always a good idea. Similarly, asking children to describe their parents' functioning, or how they feel about their care­taking, is advisable in custody evaluations. But both of these methods are always of limited value if what one learns is not supported by direct observation of the parents' skills or abilities in action.

Third, research to examine the construct validity of some of the instruments has been disappointing. For example, it is possible that our concerns about the relationship between reports of parental caretaking behavior and actual caretaking behavior are unfounded, and that asking parents and children about parental functioning is actually a fairly good index of parents' actual functioning. Indeed, the wealth of research with the CAPI and the PSI indicates that much can be done with self-report measures. But the evidence for or against our skepticism regarding the child custody measures has not been produced. Developers of some of the instruments seem to have directed whatever precious resources for research were available toward determining whether their instruments reach conclusions with which judges would agree. If judges agree with the instruments 100% of the time, this will still not tell us the degree to which the instruments produce reliable and valid indexes of parents' functioning as caretakers.

The field should consider whether it is time to take a different direction in developing instruments to assess parenting abilities related to custody questions. These might profitably focus on instruments that do not try to do so much (that is, determine what is in the best interests of the child), and instead focus specifically on functional abilities of parents based on both verbal report and behavior. Suggestions for developing such meas­ures have been provided (e.g., Azar, Lauretti, & Loding, 1998). Moreover, there is a wealth of existing parenting instruments from which to borrow concepts and methods. The 25 parent ability instruments in Table 2 (ear­lier in this chapter) are only a fraction of available tools. Holden and Edwards (1989) have reviewed 80 measures on parental attitudes toward child rearing, and Holden (1990) reviewed over 150 instruments devoted to parental attitudes, behaviors, and abilities more generally. Although most of these instruments probably would not be appropriate for forensic application, they provide a foundation from which more specialized par­enting ability instruments for child custody and termination of parental rights could be developed.

Causal Component

Generally there has been little research on the relations between cur­rent parenting scales and various psychological measures of mental disor­der, or between parents' scores on these scales and their diagnostic classifications. Knowledge of relations of these types is important for clin­ical interpretation of the results of parenting instruments in individual cases. For example, an examiner is in a better position to offer the exami­nee's mental disorder as a plausible explanation for observed deficits in parenting abilities (poor scores on a parenting instrument) if research has demonstrated (and the examiner knows) that many individuals with this disorder produce the pattern of poor parenting scores made by the exam­inee.

Interactive Component

The interactive nature of parental competence requires that we understand not only the parent's capacities, but also the demands of the legally relevant circumstance that the parent faces. This is, in part, the nature of the child. Children in general have certain needs, but specific children will vary with regard to their own special needs. Assuming that adults also vary in their capacities to meet different needs of children, it is reasonable to speak of more or less congruent matches between adults and their children.

It is interesting that some of the child custody measures reviewed in this chapter have the potential to make use of this perspective. Some assess parents' abilities in reference to the specific child in question, and others use children's own reports of parents' behavior, which is one way of capturing the interactive perspective. Unfortunately, so little research has been done with the instruments that their value in this regard remains unknown.

The first edition of EC discussed two implications of the interactive component for the development of tests of parenting capacities. These are worth restating, because the field has not yet responded to the challenge.

INTEGRATING PARENT AND CHILD ASSESSMENT. The interactive perspec­tive just described calls for empirical methods to compare or contrast the capacities of a specific parent to the needs of a specific child. One approach would be to develop an instrument to assess a child's needs in relation to a set of need constructs, and a parallel instrument using the same constructs to assess a parent's functional capacities and disposi­tions to meet a child's needs. Multidimensional instruments of this type might provide a profile of the child's particular pattern of needs, the parent's particular pattern of functional parenting behaviors, and a description of the congruency between these two profiles.

The interpretation and utility of parallel parent/child instruments would require considerable research on the validity of the congruency assumption—that is, that better matches between parent-functioning and child-need profiles result in favorable development of children. The assumption could be naive. For example, while parent-child congruency would be estimated at a given point in time, child custody decision mak­ers must examine in part the custody arrangement that offers the best prospects for meeting the child's needs in the future, some of which will not yet be manifested. Would a congruent profile match at a given stage in a child's development (and a given stage in a parent's development) necessarily suggest that the match will remain congruent as the child matures?

ATTENDING TO AGE AND DEVELOPMENTAL DIFFERENCES. Current parent­ing instruments generally fail to take into account the effect that a child's age or developmental stage might have on the examinee's responses to the parenting instrument. For example, many items in existing parenting instruments refer the respondent merely to children in general, while other items refer to the parent's own child.

A parent's beliefs about when to ignore a child's crying, what rights a parent has in relation to a child, or how much the parent should be responsible for a child's attire may be more or less appropriate, correct, or wise, depending (among other things) on the age of the child in question.

Judgmental and Dispositional Components

Custody decisions frequently require a moral judgment concerning when a parent-child incongruency has been raised above some subjective threshold for a decision to remove a child from a parent's custody or to place the child in the custody of the other parent. Parallel parent-child instruments, or existing parenting instruments, might be helpful in pro­viding information with which courts can conceptualize the extent of a parent's child-rearing abilities or the degree of parent-child incongruency. Neither the instruments nor the forensic examiner, however, should attempt to define how incongruent a parent-child interaction must be in order to justify a particular custody decision.

Some of the instruments reviewed in this chapter, however, contain features that could encourage one to violate this principle. The BPS, for example, results in a comparison of the scores of the two parents, with the recommendation that the parent with the higher score is to be favored for custody. It is highly recommended that future instruments for assessing parenting capacities should not use cut-off scores or parent comparisons in ways that encourage the notion that instruments can provide answers to the ultimate legal question of custody.

Clinical Application

Description

The child custody instruments reviewed in this chapter have little to no research evidence supporting their construct validity or reliability. Even a relatively low standard for empirical support that is required for test use in legal settings would not encourage the use of the child custody instruments for most purposes. Instruments like the BPS might be useful for simply acquiring information concerning how a child sees his or her parent in terms of parenting behaviors and emotional support. But use of the instrument to describe parents themselves in custody cases cannot be recommended.

At least two of the instruments, the CAPI, and PSI, have a great amount of empirical support and, if interpreted carefully, may be of con­siderable value. Typically they should be used as but one part of a broader assessment. But their current level of sophistication suggests that abuse/neglect evaluations that do not use them may represent sub­standard practice.

Explanation

Special care must be taken to entertain various possible explanations for a parent's manifest weaknesses or strength on the parenting instru­ments. Desirable scores on various attitude or ability dimensions might indicate strengths or merely dissimulation of strengths. Only the CAPI provides an empirical indicator of an examinee's social desirability response bias. Less desirable scores may indicate actual weaknesses or merely the effect of situational variables, among other possibilities.

Generally, other assessment methods will be required to obtain data with which to infer the potential meanings of high or low scores on most of the instruments. In addition, past research with some of the instru­ments suggests their relation to other parent characteristics (e.g., psy­chopathology, personality characteristics). If a parent's status on these related characteristics is known, then the research results may assist in interpretation of parenting instrument results.

Prediction and Classification

The CAPI and PSI manifest some ability to discriminate between groups of parents who have or have not abused/neglected their children. Nevertheless, one should be especially careful not to diagnose or label parents as "abusive" or "neglectful" on the basis of their scores failing above published cutoff scores or within ranges of scores made by abusive/neglectful research samples. For forensic use, the instruments can be used to identify parents about whom the risk of abuse is greater, while requiring a wider range of data to reach any further.

Conclusions

Nothing concerning the current status of these custody and abuse/neglect instruments would contradict the general recommenda­tion that forensic examiners should avoid conclusory opinions concerning whether a particular parent is or is not competent to care for a particular child, or which of two parents should receive custody of a child. In gen­eral, the instruments do not provide a direct empirical indication of pres­ent or future functional ability. Further, current instruments will not provide empirical descriptions of the congruency or incongruency between a parent's abilities and a particular child's needs. Finally, they address only one factor—characteristics of parents—among many that must be taken into consideration in clinical or legal decisions about a child's living arrangements.

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