The authors advance three hypotheses: (1) Maternal noncompliance with court-ordered assessment is associated with loss of child custody. (2) Noncompliance is related to court clinic custody recommendations. and (3) Noncompliance is stable across child protection and court clinic settings. Based on a sample of 56 court-referred child maltreatment cases, all hypotheses were confirmed. Results are discussed in terms of: (1) maternal noncompliance as a marker for high-risk child care; (2) the limited understanding of the phenomenal meaning of noncompliance; and (3) the dearth of empirically derived intervention methods. Parental noncompliance appears to be a marker variable that identifies a particularly high-risk group of maltreating parents. In addition, there is a substantial body of evidence that noncompliance in children and adolescents is a keystone behavior predicting the development of behavioral disturbances. When co-occurring with other individual, familial, and social risk factors, this behavior is related to the development of serious antisocial behavior in adolescence. The authors recommend further research of parental noncompliance in maltreating parents in the hope that it may help illuminate the relationship between earlier forms of maladjustment and serious parenting problems in adult life. Tables, references