How I Can Help You with Family Assessments
The best way I can help you is by not providing you with legal advice. I am not a lawyer and you may already have legal counsel. I can work with you to help you to understand and leverage legal or psychological material upon which the Family Court relies to make its recommendations, decisions and judgements about your family situation. By engaging with this material, it may be possible for you change the outcome of your case in relation to your children, or at least accept that you will not be the one to ‘shoot the hostages’ (the children). You could also be a more informed client of your legal counsel and may end up being in a better position to instruct them.
Working with Family Consultants
The Family Court (also the Federal Magistrates Court) will often order a family report to be prepared by court-appointed psychologists or social workers. Clinical specialists in the fields of family therapy, child development and psychology and other related fields usually undertake these. Their reports are mainly commissioned for the purposes of assessment, and to inform the court of the dynamics of a particular family situation. The family court and in particular the independent children’s lawyers (ICL) will generally rely very heavily on the recommendations in a family report.
If you have not already figured it out, the family law system is based on “trial by expert” and more often than not you are paying for that expert and you, through your legal advisers, have often asked for such an expert to be appointed in the first place!
I can coach you in how to examine the family report in detail and how to make permanent changes in the way you parent and the way you relate with your children in a manner consistent with the recommendations of these reports, where they make sense. Family consultants can only tell you who is doing what, and what you are supposed to do. It does not help you go about doing it!