Parenting capacity: Definitions, indicators, and assessment

Parenting capacity: Definitions, indicators, and assessment Parenting capacity is a broadly defined term that refers to the ability of parents to meet their children's needs. The assessment of parenting capacity is crucial to child-protection concerns and often an essential task in psychological evaluations for family law proceedings. Despite the relevance of the construct as a factor influencing child development and its frequent use in normative legal decisions, there is little consensus in the psychological literature regarding the definition of the construct. This literature review identifies, analyzes, and systemizes the national and international definitions of parenting capacity and the associated indicators. Following a comprehensive literature search, we included the work of 12 authors in this analysis. After checking for overlaps in content, we were able to categorize 58 indicators of parenting capacity into 29 different groups of indicators. The literature review also identifies German instruments that assess the construct of parenting capacity and its limitation. No instrument exists in the German literature which explicitly measures the parenting capacity as a construct. We did, however, identify five instruments that measure related constructs. We evaluated these instruments for their psychometric quality and their applicability in the context of psychological evaluation in family law. We discuss the diagnostic relevance of the identified definitions and indicators of parenting capacity as well as the practicality of the assessment instruments for psychological evaluations in family law proceedings.