Custody by Committee?

Courts agree that in custody cases the basic issue is "the best interests of the child," but a big question remains: Who is the best judge of the child's interests? Traditionally, parents battle it out between themselves in contests often marked more by emotion than reason. When they reach no decision, they appeal to the courts, where rulings may be based more on custom than psychology. In any case, the child may be the chief casualty. Now, an eminent psychiatrist recommends a novel approach: custody by committee.

In the Yale Law Journal, Dr. Lawrence S. Kubie, former president of the American Psychosomatic Society, criticizes present methods of determining custody and visitation rights as often being imperfect and inflexible--representing "a compromise between the demands and feelings of contending parents." There is, he says, a lack of "machinery first for discovering and then for serving the changing needs of the child . . . There may be times when a child needs the constant attention and affection of his mother, others when his father's masculine image is of primary importance." But although courts can and do change custody provisions, which is just what Mrs. Nelson Rockefeller is asking the New York Supreme Court to do for her four children (TIME, Sept. 11), the process is almost always slow and distasteful.

Group Wisdom. Under Kubie's plan, which he reports is being tried by a growing number of separated and divorced couples, the parents agree privately to share the child, then select an impartial committee composed of a pediatrician, a child psychiatrist, an educator and a lawyer or clergyman. The committee arbitrates any disagreements the parents could not work out themselves. The parents also appoint a separate "adult ally," another child specialist, with the job of winning the child's confidence and reporting to the committee on problems that the boy or girl might not confess to either mother or father.

"Adjustments can thus be made without publicity, controversy or great expense," says Dr. Kubie. "The child will also have the psychological advantage of retaining active contact with both parents. No individual and no committee can hope for the wisdom of Solomon. Yet it is likely that the committee will arrive at wise conclusions more consistently than the parent."

Prerogatives Preserved. Psychiatrist Kubie is aware that his suggestion of custody by private committee appears to raise a legal question: If widely adopted, might it tend to usurp court prerogatives in custody matters? The answer, he feels, is probably no. And in a student note appended to Kubie's article, the Yale Journal agrees. It points out that courts, as the ultimate arbiters of family disputes, would always have the right to review committee decisions at the request of either parent. Moreover, suggests the note, overworked courts might be helping themselves by heeding the consensus of such private councils in difficult custody disputes.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.