1. In child custody cases parenting assessments are conducted in an attempt to determine parental fitness. These tests are done to help achieve the goal of determining what is in the best interest of the child. These assessments are highly adversarial as each side is trying to win, and it can be biased when each side retains their own expert to conduct independent evaluations. Like any business, the top experts are the ones that produce the best results for their clients, which are technically the children, but at the end of the day it is not the child picking up the bill. These evaluations are conducted over hours of different observations, interviews and formal psychological testing involving all parties. I do feel that these tests are helpful in the process, but the circumstances around these cases can be ugly and highly emotional. I think a key way to make these tests as fair as possible though, is to have evaluators assigned by judges to cover the entire case and it's individuals versus having separate evaluators on each side.
Greene, E. & Heilbrun, K. (2012). Wrightman’s Psychology and the Legal System (8th Ed.) Belmont, CA., Wadsworth, Cengage Learning.
2. Parenting and custody assessments, I feel, have a perfectly justified place in the family court system. Parents in a custody battle are known to believe that each other is the unfit parent, and will smear the other parent to make themselves look better and cast themselves in a better light to the judges. Parents who do not have to go through the assessment process during court proceedings could probably get away with more slamming on the other party, whereas parents who have to go through an assessment process are evaluated by an impartial third party who ONLY has the child's best interest at heart and pays no mind to the parents' opinion of each other and who's the "better parent" according to the parents, but instead uses their expert knowledge to determine which parent would be better for the child to be around the majority of, or all of, the time.