Conducting Parenting Plan Assessments

The approach to conducting a Parenting Plan Assessment is based on the premise that children require for their optimal cognitive, emotional, physical, and behavioural development habilitative (conducive to development) environmental conditions most importantly comprised of a nurturing relationship with emotionally adjusted, knowledgeable, and predictably competent primary caregivers. In habilitative environments and through nurturing relationships children develop into adoptive individuals and thus optimize their full individual specific potential.

Primary caregivers who are well adjusted and mature in thought and behaviour are considered to be predisposed, through a variety of resources, to be optimally effective as parents. Such primary caregivers are considered to be cognizant of the onerous responsibilities inherent to parenting and take these to be of such importance as to purposefully apply themselves to the task.

While each Parenting Plan Assessment deals with the unique aspects of a case, there are common themes and a well defined focus in the methodology. Specifically, the methodology is designed to ascertain the differences between the parents' relative strengths and weaknesses that would warrant differences in their respective influence on the growth and development of the children.

The Parenting Plan Assessment methodology also is based on the premise that the perspectives of divorcing parents are often misinformed or based entirely on emotionally derived beliefs. Invariably, each parent expects to be vindicated by the assessment. In their highly charged emotional state, one or both parent also can take the position that children are chattels, as opposed to the onerous responsibility that they willingly accepted by procreation.

Tragically, the archaic and emotionally laden concepts of CUSTODY and ACCESS fuel the largely irrational emotional states of parents during an acrimonious divorce. In each parent's mind, the CUSTODIAL parent is the WINNER and the ACCESS parent is the LOSER. These concepts therefore, are antithetical to the notion of children being responsibilities and to the requirement that parenting arrangements be in their best interest. While a well intentioned alternative, the notion of SHARED PARENTING does not adequately recognize the heightened emotional (irrational) state of parents who require an assessment and/or court intervention to determine what is in the best interest of their children. The concept of sharing embodies rationality and a degree of congeniality which is absent during acrimonious proceedings. Parents who cold not share their lives, interests, ambitions, and homes, and are going through an acrimonious separation hardly are likely to be agreeable to SHARING the children they produced.

Fortunately, there is an increasing acceptance in the court and among professionals that the concepts of custody, access and sharing (to a lesser degree) are contrary to the spirit of various jurisdictional reforms to laws pertaining to family matters. In a number of jurisdictions, the emotionally laden concepts have been abandoned in favour of conducting assessments in order to define PARENTING PLANS. The Plans derived from the methodology are empirically based and define, in as much detail as possible, what influence a parent should have in the lives of the children in whose best interest the assessment was conducted.

The Parenting Plan Assessment methodology also incorporates a therapeutic component. The Assessment, is considered to be a specific intervention modality and also is intended to create a learning experience. While the assessment report is considered to be a necessary component of the intervention, the document is insufficient to achieve the outcome of which it is capable. For their own sake, and more importantly, for the sake of the children, parents always are encouraged to seek out a mental health professional to facilitate their respective learning and insight from the experience.