Child Custody Evaluations by Social Workers

Understanding the Five Stages of Custody

The custody evaluation is only a document; simply an opinion; merely a page.

Without the voice and the insight of the social worker, and without a contingent insight and acquiescence on the part of the bench and the attending attorney, the custody evaluation that is so rich and so vibrant in its potential loses all of the possibility of manifestation and power in the courts of the land, where real families do real battle for real outcomes for children.

Child Custody Evaluations by Social Workers, by Dr. Ken Lewis, brings together the perspective of the inveterate social worker and the insight of the top-flight legal scholar, speaking eloquently in the service of a more humane and more egalitarian playing field for transitional families and for children across the continent.

Ken Lewis brings thirty years of scholarship and service to the table in this exemplary work. His academic insights are balanced and augmented by his years in the trenches. Dr. Lewis’ work confirms that his perspective from the center of the divorce and custody movement has provided an absolutely unique vision of the needs and nature of the transitional family.

Child Custody Evaluations by Social Workers is a remarkable, valuable, unique resource.

Dr. Lewis is conversant with the modalities of psychiatric practice and social work. But he can simultaneously outline the relevance of “confirmatory bias” and exactly which 30 states may order joint custody, which 14 states might presume in favor of joint custody, and which states can only utilize the equity vested in the bench to underwrite that legal reality.

Many claim to speak for the child. Lewis speaks with absolute authority.

His work is beyond reproach and beyond compare—mandatory material for the desk of the developed family law practitioner, anywhere in North America.

Barry Bien, B.A., LL.B.

Madden, Sirman & Cowle, Napanee, Ontario, Canada