Before the Best Interests of the Child

Joseph Goldstein, Anna Freund, Albert J. Solnit

• Publisher: Free Press
• Year: 1986
• eBook ISBN: 9781439106150
• Topic: Law
• Subtopic: Family Law
• Index: Law

The second volume in a classic trilogy of reference works often cited in child custody cases, which introduced the concept of the "least detrimental alternative" when addressing a child's welfare. The second volume in a classic trilogy of works by Joseph Goldstein, former Sterling Professor Emeritus of Law at Yale Law School; Albert J. Solnit, the former director of the Yale Child Study Center, and Anna Freud, daughter of Sigmund Freud. These texts ( Beyond the Best Interests of the Child was the first in the series, and In the Best Interests of the Child was the third) are classic references often cited in child custody cases; Before the Best Interests of the Child specifically addresses when the state should intervene. Rather than the familiar legal "best interests of the child" doctrine, the authors's work is based on the more realistic standard of finding the "least detrimental alternative." This is indispensable reading for social workers, family court judges, lawyers, psychologists, and parents.

Part One
The Problem, Our Convictions, and a Framework for Examining State Decisions to Intrude on Parent-Child Relationships

Chapter 1
The Problem and Our Convictions

When and why should a child’s relationship to his parents become a matter of state concern? What must have happened to orin the life of a child before the state should be authorized to investigate, modify, or terminate an individual child’s relationshipwith his parents, with his family? Considering what a child loses when he passes, even temporarily, from the personal authorityof parents to the impersonal authority of the law, what grounds for placing a family under state scrutiny are reasonable?What can justify overcoming the presumption in law that parents are free to determine what is “best” for their children inaccord with their own beliefs, preferences, and life-styles?

We did not ask these questions in Beyond the Best Interests of the Child.

In Beyond the Best Interests of the Child we restricted our inquiry almost exclusively to problems involving children already caught up in the legal system. We focusedprimarily on contested child placements “where the adults involved [including parents as well as state and private agency personnel] resort to the legal processfor a resolution of their disputes.”¹ We did not endorse existing grounds for coercive state intrusion on parent-child relationships, but generally took them asgiven. We did not consider, for example, whether the divorce of parents or the separation of unmarried parents should in themselvesbe grounds for the state to intervene—to decide not only who should have custody of their children but also to dictate thecircumstances under which the newly established or reaffirmed legal relationships should be changed. Nor did we question theunderlying justifications for invoking state authority to make placement decisions in such variously labeled proceedings asneglect, abandonment, abuse, delinquency, foster care, separation, and divorce. We sought merely to establish guidelines,based on psychoanalytic knowledge and reinforced by common sense, for assuring that the least detrimental placement wouldbe selected by the least detrimental procedure for each child whose custody had become a matter of state concern.

The guidelines that we developed in Beyond the Best Interests of the Child rest on two convictions. First, we believe that a child’s need for continuity of care by autonomous parents requires acknowledgingthat parents should generally be entitled to raise their children as they think best, free of state interference. This convictionfinds expression in our preference for minimum state intervention and prompts restraint in defining justifications for coercively intruding on family relationships. Second, we believe thatthe child’s well-being—not the parents’, the family’s, or the child care agency’s—must be determinative once justification for state intervention hasbeen established. Whether the protective shell of the family is already broken before the state intrudes, or breaks as a resultof it, the goal of intervention must be to create or re-create a family for the child as quickly as possible. That convictionis expressed in our preference for making a child’s interests paramount once his care has become a legitimate matter for the state to decide.

So long as a child is a member of a functioning family, his paramount interest lies in the preservation of his family. Thus,our preference for making a child’s interests paramount is not to be construed as a justification in and of itself for intrusion.* Such a reading would ignore the advantages that accrue to children from a policy of minimum state intervention. The goalof every child placement, whether made automatically by birth certificate or more deliberately following direct interventionby administrative or court order, is the same. With the possible exception of the placement of violent juveniles,² it is to assure for each child membership in a family with at least one parent who wants him. It is to assure for each childand his parents an opportunity to maintain, establish, or reestablish psychological ties to each other free of further interruptionby the state.

With these convictions and that common purpose in mind, in Beyond the Best Interests of the Child we proposed and explained the following guidelines for determining the placement and process of placement for children whosecustody becomes the subject of legal action:

Placement decisions should safeguard the child’s need for continuity of relationships.

Placement decisions should reflect the child’s, not the adult’s, sense of time.

Placement decisions must take into account the law’s incapacity to supervise interpersonal relationships and the limits ofknowledge to make long-range predictions.³

These guidelines, designed originally to pour content into the best interests standard—or what we call the least detrimentalavailable alternative standard*—have substantial implications for defining justifications for state intrusion on family relationships.

The question we pose and seek to answer in this book is: “Why and under what circumstances should the state be authorizedto invade family privacy and to overcome the presumption of parental autonomy?” But before attempting an answer, we focusfirst on the meaning of and reasons for favoring a policy of minimum state intervention.

In the eyes of the law, to be a child is to be at risk, dependent, and without capacity or authority to decide free of parental control what is “best” for oneself.To be an adult is in law to be perceived as free to take risks, with the independent capacity and authority to decide what is “best” foroneself without regard to parental wishes.⁵ To be an adult who is a parent is therefore to be presumed by law to have the capacity, authority, and responsibility to determine and to do what is “good”for one’s children, what is “best” for the entire family.

As long ago as 1840 Jeremy Bentham observed:

The feebleness of infancy demands a continual protection. Everything must be done for an imperfect being, which as yet doesnothing for itself. The complete development of its physical powers takes many years; that of its intellectual faculties isstill slower. At a certain age, it has already strength and passions, without experience enough to regulate them. Too sensitiveto present impulses, too negligent of the future, such a being must be kept under an authority more immediate than that ofthe laws….⁶

That “more immediate authority” is the authority of parents. They offer children protection and nurture, and introduce themto the demands and prohibitions as well as to the promises and opportunities of society. Charged with the duty of initiatingthe relationships of their children to the adult world and to its institutions, parents shelter their children from direct contact with the lawby being their representatives before it.

By 1926 Freud brought a psychological dimension to Bentham’s societal view of the “feebleness of infancy.” He refers to “thelong period of time during which the young of the human species is in a condition of helplessness and dependence,” that “incomparison with … most animals…. it is sent into the world in a less finished state,” and “the dangers of the external worldhave a greater importance for it.”⁷ He explains how this “biological factor” on the one hand burdens the parents with the full weight of responsibility for thesurvival and well-being of their offspring and, on the other hand, assures that the day-to-day ministering to the child’smultiple requirements will turn the physical tie between them into a mutual psychological attachment.

Such constantly ongoing interactions between parents and children become for each child the starting point for an all-importantline of development that leads toward adult functioning. What begins as the experience of physical contentment or pleasurethat accompanies bodily care develops into a primary attachment to the person who provides it. This again changes into thewish for a parent’s constant presence irrespective of physical wants. Helplessness requires total care and over time is transformedinto the need or wish for approval and love. It fosters the desire to please by compliance with a parent’s wishes. It providesa developmental base upon which the child’s responsiveness to educational efforts rests. Love for the parents leads to identification with them, a fact without which impulse control and socialization would be deficient.⁸ Finally, after the years of childhood comes the prolonged and in many ways painful adolescent struggle to attain a separateidentity with physical, emotional, and moral self-reliance.⁹

These complex and vital developments require the privacy of family life under guardianship by parents who are autonomous.The younger the child, the greater is his need for them. When family integrity is broken or weakened by state intrusion, hisneeds are thwarted and his belief that his parents are omniscient and all-powerful is shaken prematurely. The effect on thechild’s developmental progress is invariably detrimental.¹⁰ The child’s need for safety within the confines of the family must be met by law through its recognition of family privacyas the barrier to state intrusion upon parental autonomy in child rearing.¹¹ These rights—parental autonomy, a child’s entitlement to autonomous parents, and privacy—are essential ingredients of “familyintegrity.” * “And the integrity of that life is something so fundamental that it has been found to draw to its protection the principlesof more than one explicitly granted Constitutional right.”¹²

Two purposes underlie the parents’ right to be free of state intrusion. The first is to provide parents with an uninterruptedopportunity to meet the developing physical and emotional needs of their child so as to establish the familial bonds critical to every child’s healthy growthand development. The second purpose, and the one on which the parental right must ultimately rest, is to safeguard the continuing maintenance of these family ties—of psychological parent-child relationships—once they have been established. The two purposes are usuallyfulfilled when the parental right is assigned at a child’s birth simply on the basis of his biological tie to those who producehim. Likewise, for the adopted child, these purposes are usually met when the parental right is assigned simply on the basisof his legal tie to those who adopt him. But the assignment and recognition of parental rights do not guarantee that biologicalor adoptive parents will exercise them or that these parents will establish significant psychological ties to their child.Indeed, when parents abandon a child or when parents and children are separated “too long,” their legal entitlement cannotand does not prevent the establishment of familial ties—psychological bonds—between their child and longtime substitute caretakerswho have no parental right, no legal claim to raise him. These new relationships merit the same protection from state interventionas is accorded to the relationships in functioning biological and adoptive families.¹³ Thus, rights which are normally secured over time by biological or adoptive parents may be lost by their failure to providecontinuous care for their child and earned by those who do.*

Put somewhat differently, two stages in the parent-child relationship generally define the right of family integrity thatdeserves recognition and protection from interruption by the state. The first is the stage at which the opportunity for the development of psychological ties between parent and child exists; the right usually comes about through a child’sbeing placed with natural parents at birth, or through legally sanctioned adoption. These opportunities merit protection fromstate intrusion because it is only through continuous nurture of the child within the privacy of the family that the secondstage can be reached. At that stage, primary psychological ties between parent and child have been established and requirefor their maintenance continuous nurture free of state intrusion. The liberty interest in these familial bonds, including bonds established betweenchildren and longtime fostering adults who are not their parents, has not yet been clearly perceived or firmly establishedin law. It is as deserving of recognition and protection as is the first stage, normally associated with biological reproductionor with adoption.¹⁵

Beyond these biological and psychological justifications for protecting parent-child relationships and promoting each child’sentitlement to a permanent place in a family of his own, there is a further justification for a policy of minimum state intervention.It is that the law does not have the capacity to supervise the fragile, complex interpersonal bonds between child and parent.¹⁶ As parens patriae the state is too crude an instrument to become an adequate substitute for flesh and blood parents. The legal system has neitherthe resources nor the sensitivity to respond to a growing child’s ever-changing needs and demands. It does not have the capacityto deal on an individual basis with the consequences of its decisions, or to act with the deliberate speed that is requiredby a child’s sense of time. Similarly, the child lacks the capacity to respond to the rulings of an impersonal court or socialservice agencies as he responds to the demands of personal parental figures. Parental expectations, implicit and explicit,become the child’s own. However, the process by which a child converts external expectations, guidance, commands, and prohibitionsinto the capacity for self-regulation and self-direction does not function adequately in the absence of emotional ties tohis caretakers.

A policy of minimum coercive intervention by the state thus accords not only with our firm belief as citizens in individualfreedom and human dignity, but also with our professional understanding of the intricate developmental processes of childhood.

To recognize how critical are the developmental stages and how essential are autonomous parents for the protection of theirchildren is also to recognize that parents may fail. Not all parents are able or willing to safeguard their child againstthe succession of risks which bedevil development from dependent infancy to indepe...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• PART ONE
• PART TWO
• PART THREE
• PART FOUR
• Notes
• Index
• ABOUT THE AUTHORS