Legal Psychological Assessment in Custody Processes in Brazil: Professional Practices / Avaliação Psicológica Jurídica em Processos de Guarda no Brasil: Práticas Profissionais

This research aimed to understand the structuring of psychological assessments in custody actions and, on the other hand, to identify the existence of homogeneity or heterogeneity in these practices. Twenty-nine Brazilian legal psychologists participated in this study and answered an online questionnaire built based on the literature. The analysis of the results was carried out through deductive and semantic Thematic Analysis, whose previous categories were created based on national and international guidelines. The most salient results indicate some divergences from the literature, but that its actions and dimensions are compatible with those found in the literature. Based on these results, a guide of systematized practices is proposed, aiming to promote greater uniformity in parental assessment.

Resumo Esta pesquisa teve como objetivos, por um lado, compreender a estruturação das avaliações psicológica em ações de guarda e, por outro, identificar a existência de homogeneidade ou heterogeneidade nessas práticas. Participaram neste estudo 29 psicólogos jurídicos brasileiros, que responderam a um questionário online construído com base na literatura. A análise dos resultados foi realizada através da Análise Temática dedutiva e semântica, cujas categorias prévias foram criadas com base em orientações nacionais e internacionais. Os resultados mais salientes indicam algumas divergências face à literatura, mas que as suas ações e dimensões são compatíveis com as encontradas na literatura. Com base nestes resultados, propõe-se um roteiro de práticas sistematizadas, visando promover uma maior uniformidade na avaliação parental.

Procreative responsibilities and the parental obligation objection.

This essay presents a challenge to the parental obligation objection. This objection is usually made by abortion opponents who argue that because child support laws hold men postnatally responsible for children they helped bring into existence (even when they did not intend to become parents), women too have prenatal parental responsibilities that should prevent them from ending pregnancies through abortions. My essay draws on recent publications in bioethics that distinguish procreative from parental responsibilities. This distinction was originally developed to clarify the duties of third-party participants in assisted reproduction. However, the distinction inadvertently poses a problem for the parental obligation objection, for it raises questions about whether women who do not wish to carry a child to term have parental rather than procreative responsibilities. It does not necessarily follow that the objection must be wrong. But rather, that there is an explanatory gap in it. If abortion violates procreative responsibilities, then drastic changes must be made to fertility medicine. Conversely, there does not appear to be non-question-begging criteria that would explain why pregnant women must have parental responsibilities, in addition to procreative ones, whereas third-party participants in assisted reproduction, such as fertility doctors, embryologists, gamete donors, and surrogates, have only procreative responsibilities.

The impact of changes in job security on mental health across gender and family responsibility: evidence from the UK Household Longitudinal Study.

PURPOSE: While there is strong evidence that job insecurity leads to mental distress, little is known about how gender and parental responsibilities may exacerbate this relationship. Examining their contribution as potential effect modifiers may provide insights into gender inequalities in mental health and inform gender-sensitive labour policies to ameliorate the negative effects of job insecurity. Our study addresses this gap by examining the longitudinal association between job insecurity and mental health across different configurations of gender and parental responsibilities. METHODS: Our sample includes 34,772 employed participants over the period of 2010-2018. A gender-stratified fixed-effect regression was used to model the within-person change over time in mental health associated with loss of job security, and effect modification by parent-partner status (e.g. childfree men, partnered father, etc.). RESULTS: Loss of job security was associated with a moderate decrease in mental health functioning for partnered fathers, partnered mothers, and childfree men and women ranging between a reduction in MCS-12 by 1.00 to 2.27 points (p < 0.05). Lone fathers who lose their job security experienced a higher decrease in mental health functioning at - 7.69 (95% CI - 12.69 to - 2.70), while lone mothers did not experience any change. CONCLUSION: The effects of job insecurity on mental health is consistent across gender and parent-partner status with the exception of lone fathers and lone mothers. Future studies should investigate the effects of policies that may reduce mental distress in the face of the threat of job loss such as reducing wait time for payment of unemployment benefits.

Two Futures: Financial and Practical Realities for Parents of Living With a Life Limited Child.

Today more and more children are living with complex health care needs, many of these children are living with life limiting and/or threatening conditions, some are medically fragile. To live a childhood these children must live in communities and with their families. In most cases this means the child's carers, their parents, most often their mothers, are required to undertake a great deal of the child's care. During a project on parental coping I became aware of the ways in which parents were restructuring their working lives in order to meet the demands of the nursing and medical care needs of their children. In this paper I relate the stories we discovered in this qualitative study and discuss the tensions between parental and state's responsibility for children, carers and the political and cultural rights and responsibilities pertaining to children's care. I use Margret Urban Walker's ideas of expressive collaborative morality to argue that the care of life limited and life threatened children should be framed in a negotiation between the state and the carers, both informal and professional. That such an agreement should include a covenant to assist parents and siblings when a child dies to recover and adjust to their loss, in recognition of the work they have performed in caring for the child during their child's life and their death.