In recent years, there is an important, growing trend to look for new, less costly, approaches to parenting evaluations. Simultaneously, experience has shown that many families going through such evaluations are dealing with significantly complex problems such as family violence and coercive control, parent-child contact problems and refuse-resist dynamics, relocation matters, including complex international relocations, and sometimes all those matters within the same family. Parenting evaluation Guidelines, such as the revised AFCC Guidelines for Parenting Plan Evaluations in Family Law Cases, and the AFCC Guidelines for Examining Intimate Partner Violence, guide professionals into considering the important processes that help families, and also help the court to understand what’s in the children’s best interests on these issues.
This workshop will provide guidance and direction to assist evaluators to performing thorough evaluations and assist lawyers and judges in critiquing evaluations to understand if the evaluator had a reliable basis for their recommendations.
Learning Objectives:
- Participants will be able to differentiate between which types of cases are suitable for Brief Focused Assessments and more comprehensive evaluations
- Participants will be able to critically consider how to apply AFCC Guidelines in those cases
- Participants will be able to use the tips provided in this program to improve evaluation skills.