Child custody evaluation report template
A sanitized custody evaluation report skeleton in Word format, organized around the best-interests standard and jurisdiction-neutral, so it fits whatever statutory factors your court applies. It carries the structural safeguards custody reports get attacked on: parallel parent sections of equal depth, a complete numbered source list, response style addressed before test findings, allegations assessed separately, and a best-interests analysis where every conclusion traces back to documented data.
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Fifteen sections, built for the fairness fight
Custody reports live or die on procedural fairness, so the template is built around symmetry and attribution. It opens with the referral questions quoted verbatim from the appointing order, the statutory best-interests factors enumerated up front, and a notification section documenting that both parents understood the non-confidential, court-serving nature of the process. A numbered sources section separates records, interviews and observations, collateral contacts, and instruments, each with dates.
The parent sections are deliberately parallel: interview and history, behavioral observations, testing, and parenting capacity, in the same order and depth for each parent. Testing prompts address response style and impression management before any substantive finding, because custody litigants routinely produce defensive profiles and the report should say how that was weighed. Child sections cover developmental status, needs, and preferences with the basis for weighting them, followed by structured parent-child observation and collateral sections that separate first-hand observation from repeated accounts.
Allegations get their own section, assessed one at a time against the evidence from all sources. The analytic core walks the statutory factors individually, maps each child's needs against each parent's demonstrated capacity, and feeds recommendations that are offered only to the extent the order requests them, each tied to the analysis. A basis-and-limitations section and attestation close the report, with the custody decision left where it belongs: with the court.
Every heading, table, and guidance note is editable. Placeholders are bracketed, and italic guidance notes explain what belongs in each section before you delete them.
About this template
Which state's custody factors does it use?
None. The template is jurisdiction-neutral: it prompts you to enumerate your court's statutory best-interests factors in the scope section and then walks them one by one in the analysis. That structure works whether your jurisdiction lists nine factors or leaves the standard open-ended.
Why are the two parent sections identical in structure?
Because asymmetry is a cross-examination target. If one parent gets four pages and the other gets two, or one parent's testing is discussed before their response style and the other's is not, counsel will argue the evaluation was tilted from the start. Parallel structure is the cheapest fairness safeguard a custody report has.
How does it handle abuse or alienation allegations?
In a dedicated section, one allegation at a time: the allegation as made, the evidence bearing on it from every source, and the evaluator's assessment with its limits. The guidance notes caution against offering opinions the data and role do not support, which is where custody evaluators most often get into trouble.
Where does the template come from?
It is the sanitized skeleton of the custody evaluation template that ships inside Boreas Workflow, where it is populated from the case file: intake data, instrument scores, interview records, and the clinician's signed diagnostic decisions.
Can I use it without Boreas?
Yes. It is a standard Word document with no macros and no lock-in. If you later want the version that fills itself from an audit-logged case file, that is what the software does.
What do you do with my email?
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The template is the skeleton. Boreas writes the first draft.
Boreas Workflow is a local-first desktop IDE for forensic evaluation. Case data never leaves your machine, every diagnostic decision is rendered and signed by you before the writing assistant drafts a line, and the full decision trail is exportable for discovery. Reports come out in your voice, structured like this template, in a fraction of the writing time.