Welcome to our readers! The July 2023 issue of Family Court Review features an immediate and highly concerning problem discussed in scholarly circles, in practitioners' fora, and among all professionals involved with families inside and outside the legal system. Adolescent mental health has taken a hard hit from both COVID-19 and all of the social and psychological forces impacting families at the current time. Drastic times call for bold measures. As youth and their families experience broader and deeper mental and physical health issues among children and adolescents, our July issue offers a novel format that allows us to hear directly from people working with adolescents “in the trenches” of family law—about their experiences, challenges, and innovations.

In this month's special feature on adolescent mental health, special feature co-editors Amy Wilson and Marsha Kline Pruett provide a detailed introduction within which they describe the prevalence and nature of the mental health crisis associated with severe adolescent distress. They introduce a series of interdisciplinary articles that draw upon topics associated with anxiety, depression, and suicidality. These articles explore limitations to current law related to age of adolescent consent to treatment; interventions in parenting coordination, parenting plan evaluations, guardians ad litem, and parent–child contact problems; a toolkit to promote dispute resolution and adjudication; and techniques to manage youth health issues amid parental conflict. A conclusion by the special feature co-editors summarizes promising practices for working with families of adolescents in distress who intersect with family law professionals in various roles, with the aim of promoting awareness and new possibilities to aid a vulnerable generation.

Four articles follow the special feature. The first two continue the theme of modern life's impact on family law cases. “Attorneys, tell your clients to think before they post: Social media data may influence how evaluators view their parental fitness,” by Ashley Jones, Ashley Batastini, Michael Vitacco, Rheanna Standridge, and Sean Knuth, highlights social media as a pressing issue in family law cases. The authors' study has explored social media data impacts on forensic evaluators' opinions related to parental fitness. The critical attributions associated with social media posts in contentious legal situations evoke a “clients beware” message that delineates risks of posting on social media. Next, in “Popular post-separation parenting smartphone apps: An evaluation,” Bruce Smyth, Jason Payne, Michelle Irving, and Genevieve Heard evaluate popular post-separation parenting smart phone apps. They catalog benefits the apps offer for conflict management between parents, but they also caution how some features of the apps might do as much harm as good, enabling ongoing power imbalances in intimate relationships to sustain control and abuse.

The next two articles are studies of implementation aimed at shining a light on potentially better practices in family cases. In “The development and pilot testing of a family treatment court best practices assessment: The model standards implementation scale,” Jessica Becker, Margaret Sieger, Kelly Earles, Karin Thompson-Wise, and Kaitlin Hagain focus on the intractable problem of untreated parental substance use as it negatively impacts foster children in the child welfare system. Specialized family treatment courts with careful assessment systems and integrated case management offer a promising approach for better outcomes. Jennifer Dealy, Beth Russell, and JoAnn Robinson, in “Comparing targeted intervention modalities for high conflict co-parents: A quasi-experimental study,” contrast intervention modalities (in-person and hybrid [in-person/online]) with high conflict parents. Their findings raise more questions than answers, indicating the need for more research.

This rich issue continues with four student notes, each on a relevant and unique aspect of family law practice. Nicole Case, our fabulous FCR Managing Editor this past year, in “There's an app for that: Modernizing domestic violence support through the creation of new technologies, tools, and services,” advocates for technology use to ensure follow-up support services for domestic violence victims identified by New York state police reports. In “All hat and no cattle: How House Bill 2926 paves the way for progress in the reinstatement of parental rights, but falls short of providing parents with an accessible resource,” Heather Coffee moves the locale of focus from New York to Texas. She calls out the lack of proper care given to children in the foster care system and discusses how a new Texas House Bill clears the way for parents to petition to reinstate their parental rights. Evan Ryan, in “Save the kids: The need for regulation of cryptocurrency to protect adolescents from fraud,” takes aim at cryptocurrency, as influencers capitalize on the naivete of young investors. He argues for measures that could protect minors from such exploitation. Nicholas Trotta, also ending a very successful role as FCR's Peer Review Editor, in “Like bringing a knife to a gunfight: Why IRC Section 2036 is not the right weapon to combat abusive family limited partnerships,” discusses why Family Limited Partnerships (FLPs) sometimes are misused at the hands of Internal Revenue Code (IRC) Section 2036. He argues that IRC Section 2036 is not the appropriate tool to combat abusive FLPs as created in estate plans.

This July issue of FCR identifies current dilemmas interwoven into the family law system, which often has insufficient or ineffective responses. FCR is devoted to identifying, studying, and analyzing potential antidotes through increasingly sophisticated and powerful methods of harnessing skills and wisdom to address new challenges as they arise.