Best Interest of the Child

Dr Bahrie Veliu

In Family Court, this phrase is everywhere. Every Parent declares it.

Here’s the real question

Is it just a declaration, or is it evident in the way the parent thinks, speaks, and acts toward their child?

A practical test: the Five-Minute Speech Sample (FMSS)

Ask the parent: “Tell me about your child for five minutes, uninterrupted.”

The FMSS was developed for clinical and research use to assess family dynamics and reveals whether a parent can truly hold their child in mind (Magaña et al., 1986; McCarty et al., 2019). While not created for Family Court, it can be adapted as a powerful tool to assess child focus.

What to listen for

a. Does the story stay with the child, or drift into grievances and self-focus?

b. Is the child described as a whole person with feelings, vulnerabilities, strengths or only as a performer of tasks and achievements?

c. Is the focus on what the child needs, or what the child does for the paren?

d. Do you hear warmth, joy, curiosity or detachment, tension, performance?

e. How often do intrusions occur where the child’s story collapses into adult conflict?

Child-focused narrative

“She’s curious and sensitive. She worries about new situations, but she lights up around animals, she wants to be a vet. I can see her confidence growing at school.”

Self-focused narrative

“She’s top of her class, everyone says she’s just like me. I’m always the one taking her to lessons, her dad never does that. She’s proof of my effort.”

Who can use this tool?

The FMSS isn’t just for psychologists. This five-minute exercise has value across disciplines, yet the greatest opportunity lies in how it can be used by lawyers for the parties.

Lawyers for the parties can use this tool to test whether their client is truly child-focused. This reveals how much guidance the parent will need to move from declarations to behaviours AND how firmly the lawyer must step in as the holder of the child’s perspective.

Lawyers for children assessing the parent’s capacity to be child-focused Mediators & social workers exploring a parent’s ability to keep the child in mind during conflict.

Best interest of the child is not a declaration, it needs to be shown.

Note

The Five-Minute Speech Sample (FMSS) was developed for clinical research. What I’m sharing here is an adaptation for Family Court practice.

References

Magaña, A. B., Goldstein, M. J., Karno, M., Miklowitz, D. J., Jenkins, J., & Falloon, I. R. (1986). A brief method for assessing expressed emotion in relatives of psychiatric patients. Psychiatry Research, 17(3), 203–212. PubMed: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/3745591

McCarty, C. A., Lau, A. S., Valeri, S. M., & Weisz, J. R. (2019). Parent Five-Minute Speech Sample coherence predicts youth mental health. Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, 61(2), 152–161. PubMed: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31609307