Working with families where substance use is at issue is one of the most demanding areas in family law. The job requires racing between hearings, reports, and progress notes, trying to make a fair determination on facts that rarely hold still. At that pace, it's easy to fall back on the shorthand our systems have built around addiction: a positive test means unsafe, a clean test means safe, a relapse means the case is closed on trust. It makes sense under this much pressure. It's also, more often than not, the wrong call.

Substance use is one of the most common reasons families end up in the family court system, and a significant proportion of contested custody cases involve a parent's substance use somewhere in their history. Attorneys, judges, and forensic evaluators are routinely asked to interpret toxicology results, treatment histories, and relapse reports without significant formal training in what that information actually means. Attorneys in particular have been cast in a "quasi-expert" role in behavioral health evidence with little grounding in addiction science to comprehend it properly.

Some might think, “I'm not a clinician—how does this apply to me?” Whether you're an attorney, judge, forensic evaluator, or parenting coordinator, how you interpret the case will shape whether families stay connected or fracture. Here's a small portion of what the research shows:

• Substance use disorder is a chronic, relapsing condition. A parent can be stable for months and still have a difficult week without that week erasing the months of stability.
• A child's actual risk depends on the frequency and type of use and on the protective factors in place, not solely on the mere fact that the parent used.
• Medication-assisted treatment (MAT), like buprenorphine or methadone, can sometimes be misread as continued illicit use even though it's an evidence-based, medically supervised treatment.
• Professionals often equate active use with permanent parental incapacity, contributing to separations that may be unnecessary or excessively prolonged for the child's safety or well-being.
• Law school and continuing legal education rarely cover addiction in depth, leaving this gap largely unaddressed for attorneys and judges.

Leading groups with parents involved in the family court system have shown this dynamic firsthand. One father was the third generation in his family to struggle with alcohol use; his father had, and so had his father's father. He didn't have the tools to break that pattern, but all he knew was that he wanted a different future for his son. He was six months into hard-won abstinence when a single positive test nearly cost him four months of the rebuilt trust. The relapse didn't erase that progress. The system treated the test as the truth, without considering past stability. That's backward. The stability was the truth he was fighting for; the relapse was information that got in the way of it.

None of this argues that courts should look past relapse. Child safety comes first, and some parents' use may be genuinely unsafe for a child to be near. But safety and connection don't always run along the same axis, and tools like supervised visitation and graduated contact work best when used to protect a relationship, not to punish a parent for a condition that doesn't progress linearly.

The push towards binary answers isn't a failure of compassion; it's what happens to discretion under caseload pressure, the way any decision-maker leans on simple rules when there's no time or training to do otherwise. This is a literacy gap, and literacy gaps can be narrowed through the same structured, practice-relevant training that has improved decision-making for other professionals working adjacent to addiction treatment.

In the high-stakes world of court-directed or ordered family work, understanding how addiction actually unfolds isn't a luxury; it's essential for the families before us and for the credibility of our decisions. Building that literacy, one case and one training at a time, is how we get closer to plans and courtrooms that can hold both a child's safety and a child's attachment at once.

Eric Friedlander, M.S., PsyD, (c), is a doctoral candidate in School-Community psychology at Hofstra University. His research and clinical interests focus on the intersections between addiction and family law. He is the former clinic coordinator at the Institute for Family Forensic Psychology and just completed his clinical externship at the addiction recovery service at Zucker Hillside Hospital. For his dissertation, he plans to create and evaluate a brief legal education program designed to improve family law attorneys' knowledge of substance use disorders and their capacity to make informed, individualized decisions in SUD-involved custody cases.