In the Witness Chair

The court has appointed someone to look at your family.

Maybe it’s a custody evaluator who’ll interview you, test you, visit your home, and write a report. Maybe it’s a guardian ad litem who’ll meet your kids. Maybe you’ve been told you’ll testify. Either way, strangers are about to form an opinion of you as a father, and their opinion may shape your children’s lives for years.

Most fathers walk into this process frightened, defensive, and badly prepared. Some over-prepare in all the wrong ways: binders of grievances, coached children, rehearsed answers that ring false. A few walk in steady, honest, and focused on their kids. Those are the fathers this book is meant to make.

I’m a licensed clinical social worker with more than twenty years of practice in high-conflict co-parenting, family reunification, and work with children and adolescents. I’ve testified in family court as a treating clinician — a fact witness, describing what I observed in my work with families. I’m also a divorced father. I’m not a custody evaluator, and I don’t write their reports. What I can offer is the view from the chair and from across the table: what the process looks like, what tends to help a father, and what tends to hurt him.

You’ll learn who the professionals are and what each one is for, how custody decisions tend to be made, what happens in an evaluation from first interview to final report, how to handle the home visit, what to say (and never say) to your kids about their interviews, why honesty is the only real strategy for psychological testing, how to respond to a report you disagree with, and how to sit in the witness chair yourself.

This isn’t a book about winning. It’s a book about being seen accurately.