Parent Coordinators in the Family Court: Another Questionable Venture

Parent Coordinators in the Family Court: Another Questionable Venture

Christopher R. barbrack, Esquire, Ph.D.

I have always been fascinated by the mutual attraction between the family court and mental health professionals. I would call it at best a marriage of convenience and it is about to give birth to a new offspring: the Parent Coordinator. When such a new development reaches a critical mass, as this one has, it is difficult to argue against it, yet I would urge caution before any such role is endorsed by the court. I should not be surprised by this new development in view of a history that includes the court’s wholesale acceptance of child custody evaluations and non-economic divorce mediation. The first question that occurs to me is who is advocating the Parent Coordinator idea.  I doubt that parents or children are behind this movement. Whose interests are being served?

I am not among those who claim to know what ought to be done to remedy the situation in the family court. In fact, I don’t even understand the problem. Hence, one might question my standing to comment on this issue. I am not a Parent Coordinator. I have never used the services of a Parent Coordinator. However, I have had the privilege of representing, before licensing boards, Parent Coordinators against whom parents have lodged complaints.  In addition, before being admitted to the Bar in1989, I was a tenured associate professor at Rutgers University’s Graduate School of Applied & Professional Psychology and a practitioner of clinical psychology. I have also served as an ESP panelist in Mercer County for the past fifteen years. Whoever is pushing the Parent Coordinator role may have different perspectives than mine but I don’t believe they could be any more informed.

Like so many other solutions, the Parent Coordinator role makes a lot of sense on the surface. Certain divorcing or divorced parents, who cannot resolve there differences over their children, would be referred to Parent Coordinators to work things out. This proposal seems to be based on four basic assumptions, each of which is questionable. First, the family court is overwhelmed by motions and trials involving parent conflict over child rearing issues. Second, managing these disputes requires certain knowledge and expertise that exist but that the family court lacks. Third, the court has the power to transfer the management of these disputes to non-judicial surrogates. Fourth, there are non-judicial options for handling these disputes that are better than the family court.

I do not know if family courts are overwhelmed with cases involving parental disputes over children. Anecdotally, over the span of my legal career, I have not noticed family courts having to cope with a surge of parent –child issues. In fact, if anything, sitting in the halls of court on a given day, the activity in and around the family court seems to be less than it was fifteen years ago. This is a factual issue and I may be way off base. For the sake of argument, I am willing to
assume that the family courts are overwhelmed by cases involving parental disputes over children.

The next assumption involves whether there is a knowledge base and expertise to apply to parental conflicts over children. This is a big question and requires more space than afforded here. In brief, I do not believe that there is an empirically valid knowledge base or expertise in the area of helping divorced or divorcing parents to resolve their child-related conflicts.  Further, this issue has to be considered in relation to what alternatives are available. Here is where the Parent Coordinator role comes into play and the question becomes: does a Parent Coordinator, or anyone else for that matter, have greater expertise in resolving parental conflicts than the court? If you express an opinion, I would ask for the bases for this opinion just as I would in cross examining an expert witness. I would be stunned to receive any meaningful responses. The answer is simple: there is no evidence that Parent Coordinators have any more expertise than the family court in resolving parental conflict over children. Put another way, there is no evidence to suggest that Parent Coordinators are as effective or more effective than the family court in managing parental disputes over children.

In light of these facts about effectiveness, I am not surprised when my Parent Coordinator clients express the need for two things: power and protection. They want power to direct parents to do this or that and they want insulation against the inevitable avenging parent. Parents have learned that filing a complaint with a licensing board has a dual role: vengeance against and evisceration of the Parent Coordinator. I don’t think it is a coincidence that power and protection are facets of the judicial role. A court can coerce and a parent can’t strike back at the court. I read where one advocate of Parent Coordinators believed that the Parent Coordinator would “force” parents to face “reality” vis-à-vis their child-related disputes. In fact, it is the court’s role to use its coercive authority to force parents to face reality. Any mental health professional that functions as a Parent Coordinator should eschew the coercive role as it is inconsistent with virtually all widely accepted approaches to resolving human problems from a mental health prospective. Parent Coordinators may wish to function as mini-courts but this should not be permitted.

How does the Parent Coordinator proceed without coercive authority and without immunity from parental attacks? A good book published last year by Boyan & Termini, The Psychotherapist as Parent Coordinator in High Conflict Divorce describes a very ambitious picture of the Parent Coordinator role – one that requires much professional training and experience. What is missing here is any evidence that these experienced professionals are effective or are more effective that the court in managing parental disputes over children. As a matter of fact the “effectiveness” construct has not even been defined. Assuming that effectiveness will be a concern to someone at some time, the most elemental issues needing attention would involve questions like this:  Is effectiveness defined by process variables such as number of cases resolved, time taken to resolution, participant satisfaction with the process? Or is it defined by outcome variables such as reduction in children’s emotional and behavioral problems? In a related vein is the issue of when such measures are taken. Or both? An interesting study published last year of the longitudinal effects of divorce mediation by Sbarra & Emery (Coparenting Conflict, Nonacceptance, and Depression Among Divorced Adults: Results From a 12-Year Follow-Up Study of Child Custody Mediation Using Multiple Imputation) revealed some very troubling negative outcomes for male participants in divorce mediation. These negative outcomes would never have surfaced if outcome measures had not been taken at all or not taken over a period of years. Is this scientific rigor too much to expect before sending parents and children into the embrace of Parent Coordinators?  In short, before the role of Parent Coordinator is endorsed and formally launched, it should be defined and studied. I am not optimistic that this will be done. The grandparent of these family court-mental health professional liaisons is child custody evaluations despite the fact that basic terms such as “the best interests of the child” have never been defined and, even if they were defined, mental health professionals would not have the technical and empirically validated tools to measure such constructs. Nonetheless, parents retain custody evaluators or are referred to them in droves often, I believe, to their detriment.

Again, borrowing from the literature on mediation suggests that these ancillary judicial services involve more than meets the eye. For example, the issue of screening or assessment of competence to participate in mediation has elicited widely different positions. Crawford (Determining Capacity to Facilitating Competencies: A New Mediation Framework, Conflict Resolution Quarterly, 20, 2003) objects to such screening while Beck (Defining a threshold for client competence to participate in divorce mediation. Psychology, Public Policy and Law, 12, 1-35, 2006) argues that it is essential. One theme that bridges these widely divergent views is that when a participant is found to be incompetent to participate, the remedy for that person goes beyond what non-mental heath professionals can or should handle. I would argue that a substantial number of parents referred to a Parent Coordinator would require some kind of remediation before meaningful participation is likely to occur.

One aspect of all of these mental health interventions in the family court is cost shifting. When a case is referred for a child custody evaluation, divorce mediation or parent coordinating, one or both parents have to pay very high fees. Granted, there may be a reduction in lawyer’s fees but I have seen no hard data that show that these interventions are cheaper than using the courts that are supported by tax dollars.

The next issue is whether the courts have the authority to shift these parental disputes over children to Parent Coordinators. . While attorneys and trial courts have been quite ready to grant some kind of role to mental health professionals, appellate courts have always been properly critical of such surrendering of the court’s authority [See P.T. v. M.S., 325 N.J. Super. 193, (App. Div., 1999); Capell
v. Capell, 358 N.J.S. 107 (App. Div. 2003), cert denied, 177 NJ 220 (2003); Pergoy v. Pergoy, 358 N.J.S. 179 (App. Div. 2003)]

What do we do in the meantime? This is what I do. I have counseled my Parent Coordinator clients to accept the fact that they might as well accept that are paid to be emotional shock absorbers for the court, for attorneys and for the society at large. If you agree to do this work, you should be prepared to be ineffective and abused from time to time.

I have heard about the possibility of lay persons functioning as Parent Coordinators. I am not as put off by this prospect because it is modest and lacks the usual professional pomp and expense. In 1979 a psychologist from Rochester published a research article about the psychotherapeutic techniques used by hairdressers. The hairdressers seemed to hear the same kind of problems that are brought to psychologists and they seemed to apply the same kinds of interventions, all for the price of a permanent wave. Are hairdressers as effective as psychologists in helping to ameliorate human problems? This is a very subversive question and no one knows. Could hairdressers or any one else for that matter function effectively as Parent Coordinators? No one knows for the reasons given above. However, if laypersons are permitted in this role, why pay high priced professionals? For me, this question brings into stark relief the difference between airline pilots or plastic surgeons on one hand and Parent Coordinators on the other. I am not going to fly with an untrained pilot nor will I have my wrinkles smoothed by an amateur surgeon.

I don’t question the good intentions of those who are advocating the Parent Coordinator role. However, the fact that family courts are overwhelmed should not lead to the endorsement of yet another role that is poorly defined, only vaguely understood and of questionable effectiveness and cost. The best place for these parental disputes over children may be the family court. This may not be perfect for the participants but it may be the best we can honestly do at this time.