Facts: Child entered DCS custody in August 2023 after DCS found the family living in a van without running water. One cooler contained only milk and potatoes, while another contained discarded food and maggots. Child was extremely dirty, and boards with exposed nails created safety hazards. Both parents tested positive for drugs, and Father tested positive for methamphetamine and buprenorphine.

DCS developed permanency plans focused primarily on Father’s drug use and unstable housing. DCS arranged assessments, supervised visitation, random drug screens, homemaker services, and assistance with housing applications. Father continued testing positive for methamphetamine, including less than two months before trial, and never produced the two consecutive negative screens required to resume visitation after it was suspended. He also failed to maintain verifiable, stable housing or provide DCS with reliable address information.

Child moved to a pre-adoptive foster home in June 2025, was thriving, and was developing a strong bond with the foster parents. The juvenile court terminated Father’s parental rights on all grounds alleged by DCS. In finding termination in the Child’s best interest, the juvenile court found 12 statutory factors favored termination and treated the other eight as inapplicable, mirroring DCS’s petition.

On Appeal: The Court of Appeals affirmed all grounds for terminating Father’s parental rights but vacated the best-interest determination and remanded because the juvenile court failed to consider eight of the 20 statutory best-interest factors.

Once at least one statutory ground for termination is established, DCS must also prove by clear and convincing evidence that termination is in the child’s best interest. The law directs the court to consider all relevant and child-centered factors applicable to the particular case, and it sets out 20 such factors. That list is nonexclusive, and the analysis is not a rote exercise in counting how many factors favor each side; instead, the relevance and weight of each factor depend on the case’s unique facts.

The child’s best interest must be viewed from the child’s perspective, not the parent’s. And because the law requires appellate review of the best-interest determination even when a parent does not challenge each factor, the trial court must make findings sufficient for meaningful review.

The Court held that DCS may not use its pleading choices to remove statutory factors from the juvenile court’s independent best-interest analysis, and that the omission of 8 factors on that basis required vacatur and remand:

DCS may argue a factor or factors are not relevant in a particular case, but the trial court must make its own determination as to relevancy in the particular case – not decline to consider the factor because it was not pleaded.

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Moreover, DCS’s decision to characterize some of the factors as inapplicable in this particular case is, respectfully, baffling. Indeed, Factors (A) and (B) consider the child’s well-being as affected by either the termination of parental rights or a change in caretakers of physical environment. We have difficulty seeing how these factors are not relevant in nearly every termination of parental rights case. … But DCS cannot claim that a factor is inapplicable simply because they cannot meet their burden to demonstrate that a given factor favors termination.

Likewise, the question of whether the child has made a parent-like attachment to another, such as a foster parent, is incredibly relevant in many cases. And allegations like those in this case—that a child was forced to live in a van without access to running water or food not contaminated with maggots and arrived in DCS custody filthy and with decaying teeth—arguably constitute neglect of the type that factor (N) is meant to address.

The Court chose the same remedy recently ordered In re Mercury H., i.e., vacating the trial court’s best interest determination and remanding for the trial court to consider all twenty of the statutory best interest factors.

K.O.’s Comment: DCS cannot plead around Tennessee’s best-interest statute. The law requires the trial court, not DCS, to decide which child-centered factors are relevant under the evidence. Lawyers should present proof and request findings on every plausibly relevant factor, even when the petition labels some factors “inapplicable.”

This is the second recent warning from the Court of Appeals on the same problem. In re Mercury H. involved nearly the same error before the same juvenile court, yet DCS again treated eight of 20 best-interest factors as inapplicable through its pleading. When 40% of the statutory framework is omitted for the wrong reason, affirmed termination grounds will not save the judgment from remand.

Source: In re Bryison B. (Tennessee Court of Appeals, Eastern Section, September 6, 2026).

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