“Ask Three Mentors” is a question-and-answer column, produced exclusively for Insights, that highlights the fact that members of AFCC are attorneys, judges, and mental health professionals. Many of our most experienced members are committed to mentoring and passing on the wealth of knowledge they’ve acquired through years of work in the field of family law. Each month we will pose a custody-related question to three members of our panel of exceptionally experienced and widely respected family law experts. Our readers will then have the benefit of hearing the answer from the perspective of a judge, a mental health professional, and a family law attorney. Please submit your questions for our Mentors here. For biographies of our Three Mentors panel members, go to this page.
Commissioner Marjorie Slabach, Retired
1. Evidence-Informed Interventions For Court-Involved Families, edited by Lyn R Greenberg, PhD, ABPP, Barbara J. Fidler, PhD, CPsych, AccFM, and Michael Saini, PhD, MSW. RSW. (Oxford University Press 2019) The book covers education programs, parenting coordination, using activities therapeutically, resist/refuse cases, high conflict cases, childhood trauma issues, the previously absent father, children exposed to family violence, children diagnosed with special needs, and much more. It is both a “sit-down-and-read-it-through” book as well as a timely resource for each of your cases. [Caveat: I’m one of the authors of the chapter on the Role of the Courts]
2. Overcoming Parent-Child Contact Problems: Family-Based Interventions for Resistance, Rejection, and Alienation, edited by Abigail M. Judge, PhD and Robin Deutsch, PhD, ABPP. (Oxford University Press 2017). The chapters in this book are written by well-known AFCC members and founders/consultants of Overcoming Barriers including Dr. Matt Sullivan, Dr. Peggie Ward, Dr. Barbara Fidler, and Dr. Leslie Drozd. The book details the lessons learned through Overcoming Barriers Family Camp experiences, individual family intensive interventions, and ongoing therapeutic interventions by these experienced clinical psychologists. It covers indicators, models, and clinical challenges of family-based interventions; the Overcoming Barriers Approach; and a conclusion chapter from Dr. Janet Johnston.
3. Family Court Review, An Interdisciplinary Journal (The Journal of the Association of Family and Conciliation Courts), Editor in chief Dr. Barbara Babb. (Publisher: Hofstra University School of Law) I could not choose any one article or study, because the Family Court Review is the one journal that carries them all. Become a member and you get the journal!!
Dr. Matthew Sullivan
Early Career: Impasses of Divorce: The Dynamics and Resolution of Family Conflict, Johnston, J. and Campbell, L. (1988). This was my bible, coming from intensive family system’s training, as a young professional, this book provided me the link to applying the systemic model to my work with complex high-conflict child custody cases. These authors explained how Intrapsychic, interpersonal and broader systemic factors all mutually interact to contribute to interparental conflict and how all factors must be assessed and addressed to support effective legal and mental health interventions. Jan Johnston has been my mentor since — Just finished writing an article with her on Parental Alienation, which is a highlight of my late career.
Mid-Career: Divorce Poison: How to Protect Your Family from Bad-mouthing and Brainwashing, by Dr. Richard Warshak (2010). Dr. Warshak spoke articulately and vividly about a phenomenon, severe parental alienation, that was emerging in family law cases and in my practice at the time. It spoke to my experience working with a subset of shared custody situations where a child resists and refuses contact with a parent without justification. It helped propel me into working in these difficult family law cases, a mixed blessing.
Current: Evidence-Informed Interventions for Court-Involved Families, Greenberg, Fidler and Saini (Eds.). (Oxford University Press 2019) What a rich resource of our current knowledge of legal and mental health interventions, stressing early and preventative interventions. The chapters are written by the leaders in our field of family law and provide best practices to assist court-involved families to increase their children’s coping and adjustment.
Attorney David Donner
1. The Emotional Life of the Toddler by Alicia Lieberman, Ph.D. Dr. Lieberman replaces the myths of toddlerhood with user-friendly developmental information and insights and entertaining anecdotal advice for parents. We all have heard or read distressed accounts of toddlers from parents (e.g., crying at transitions, clinginess, poor parental attunement, tantrums/nightmares, etc.) and sometimes are urged seek legal remedies in response to these reports. Dr. Lieberman makes the scientific literature comprehensible and brings the reader into a toddler’s experience and reality. Dr. Lieberman’s views reflect breadth, depth, and compassionate understanding for little ones and their parents, and hopefully forever dispenses with referring to toddlers as ‘terrible twos’. I feel smarter and wiser about toddlers, their world, and parenting every time I reread any portion of this book.
2. Spoiling Childhood: How Well-Meaning Parents are Giving Children Too Much – But Not What They Need by Diane Ehrensaft, Ph.D. Dr. Ehrensaft is another Bay Area psychologist and writer who also has written wonderfully accessible books on the impact of surrogacy on families and gender fluid children. ‘Spoiling Childhood’ embraces all the contemporary anxieties and questions about what it means to parent, what do kids need, and offers a tonic to parents who feel that they can’t ever do enough or do right by their kids. Dr. Ehrensaft gently expounds on psychologically sound principles regarding kids and parents which professionals easily can dispense to parents. The book also helps professionals and parents reframe many of the recurring challenges the prevailing culture imposes on well-meaning hard-working parents. If Yoda were a parenting coach, they would have written this book.
3. The Best Interests of The Child by Joseph Goldstein, Albert J. Solnit, Sonja Goldstein, and the late Anna Freud (1996 Edition – A revised and updated compilation). This volume combines a trilogy of writings by these authors: Beyond the Best Interests of the Child, Before the Best Interests of the Child, and In the Best Interests of the Child. The notion of best interests permeates considerations of custody decisions in family law and in the juvenile dependency system. Although these writings are focused on placement issues in the dependency system, the writers’ highly informed and clear thinking about children, families, and judicial decision making render these useful for family law practitioners. Family law practitioners and Judges know that determining best interests often requires discerning what is the least detrimental alternative. These authors expound on that notion and illuminate the inchoate biases and values that drive decision making. The writers make deep psychological phenomena and thinking useful to professionals making best interest decisions.