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Five Red Flags in a Custody Evaluation That Signal Evaluator Bias

February 18, 2025 | By Dr. Kristin M. Tolbert, Psy.D.

Most custody evaluations do not get challenged. The report lands, the judge reads it, and whatever the evaluator recommended tends to stick. That is exactly why it matters when an evaluation was done wrong.

Bias in a custody evaluation is not always obvious. It rarely looks like an evaluator openly taking sides. More often it shows up in patterns: what got investigated and what did not, whose concerns were treated as credible, how the same behavior gets described differently depending on which parent did it.

Here are five patterns worth paying attention to.

One parent's documentation is treated as a problem.

When a parent keeps records, saves messages, or hires a private investigator, that is not paranoia. That is someone trying to protect their child. If an evaluator characterizes thorough documentation as obsessive or antagonistic while saying nothing about the other parent's lack of documentation, that is a red flag.

Children were not interviewed, or barely were.

Professional guidelines require direct contact with children when developmentally appropriate. A 20-minute session with one child out of four is not a child-focused evaluation. If the evaluator spent more time with the adults than with the kids, that gap needs an explanation. If the report does not provide one, it is worth pressing on.

The same test results were interpreted differently for each parent.

Psychological testing in custody cases follows specific rules. When both parents produce similar profiles on the same instrument and one is described as showing mild personality traits while the other is flagged for potential aggression, that is not a difference in findings. That is a difference in how the evaluator applied the lens.

Research on MMPI-2 interpretation in custody cases establishes that defensive response patterns are common and typically reflect the high-stakes context, not pathology. When that context is used to pathologize one parent but not the other, the interpretation is not defensible.

Collateral contacts cannot be verified.

Evaluators are required to document who they spoke to, when, and what was learned. If the report states that school staff were interviewed but no names, dates, or specific information appear anywhere, and the school later says no one called, that is not a documentation gap. That is a credibility problem with direct implications for every other factual claim in the report.

The evaluator never read the court filings.

This sounds too basic to be real, but it happens. If the evaluation was ordered specifically to address a particular concern and the evaluator never reviewed the motions that prompted the appointment, the evaluation did not address what the court actually asked for. That is a foundational failure, not a methodological nuance.

None of these issues resolve themselves on appeal. They have to be identified, documented, and challenged while there is still time to do something about it.

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