High-Conflict Parenting Post-Separation

The Making and Breaking of Family Ties

Eia Asen, Emma Morris

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780429889301
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Law
• Subtopic: Family Law
• Index: Law

High-Conflict Parenting Post-Separation: The Making and Breaking of Family Ties describes an innovative approach for families where children are caught up in their parents' acrimonious relationship - before, during and after formal legal proceedings have been initiated and concluded.

This first book in a brand-new series by researchers and clinicians at the Anna Freud National Centre for Children and Families (AFNCCF) outlines a model of therapeutic work which involves children, their parents and the wider family and social network. The aim is to protect children from conflict between their parents and thus enable them to have healthy relationships across both 'sides' of their family network.

High-Conflict Parenting Post-Separation is written for professionals who work with high-conflict families – be that psychologists, psychiatrists, child and adult psychotherapists, family therapists, social workers, children's guardians and legal professionals including solicitors and mediators, as well as students and trainees in all these different disciplines. The book should also be of considerable interest for parents who struggle with post-separation issues that involve their children.

Chapter 1

High-conflict parenting

The family context

Case example

When Mrs B and Mr B met some 15 years ago, it was what they still refer to now as ‘love at first sight’. Things went well for the first five years until baby Rahul arrived. Pregnancy and birth were both very difficult and Rahul turned out to be a rather demanding infant. Mr B had a high-pressure job and worked long hours. Mrs B, who had previously worked full time as a pharmacist, stayed at home with the baby. Both parents were stressed and exhausted and major arguments started about childcare, different expectations and cultural practices, the role of the in-laws, and more. By the time their second child, Marina, arrived two years later the parents’ relationship was at an all-time low. Mrs B felt that Mr B was not the ‘hands on’ father he promised he would be. He was rarely at home and when he was, he was usually stressed and behaved in controlling ways towards her and the children. He showed her little affection or recognition for all the work she did in the family home. She suspected him of having an affair which he vehemently denied. Mr B, on the other hand, felt that the household was dominated by his mother-in-law who had moved close to the family home, and visited almost daily. Mrs B and her mother often criticized him and rarely consulted him about important decisions. He felt marginalized, as if his role as the father to the children was being undermined, that his views and opinions went unheard and that the children only ever wanted their mother. The atmosphere in the family home became very tense with daily arguments, initially only when the children were not present or asleep, but increasingly also in front of the children. Soon Rahul presented with frequent temper tantrums and Marina had difficulty with feeding and sleeping. Matters between the parents deteriorated further; Rahul was three years of age and Marina barely one when Mr B decided to move out of the family home. He felt that his wife no longer respected him and that he was ‘not allowed’ to be the father he wanted to be. Mrs B, on the other hand, felt abandoned by Mr B and took his decision to leave the family home as evidence that he was not truly committed to their family. Both agreed that Mr B could have the children stay with him every other weekend and that he could also have them stay midweek for one night. Mrs B said that she wanted to preserve the children’s relationship with their father, but worried about his lack of experience caring for the children. Each time the children returned from staying with their father, the mother experienced them as not settling down and being more difficult to manage over subsequent days. After two months, Mrs B said that Marina could not continue the overnight stays with her father who protested but to no avail. Rahul now came on his own to stay with his father, but he said that he was missing his sister and his mum. Three months later, Rahul refused to spend a weekend with his father. He did not want to get ready to leave and he behaved in a clingy way towards his mother. He told her ‘daddy is grumpy and he shouts’. Mrs B called Mr B and said she had tried ‘literally everything’ to persuade Rahul to see his father but that he was refusing to do so. For the following four months Mr B saw neither child even though every other weekend he and Mrs B spoke on the phone to plan the handover and every time it was the same: ‘I have tried everything but Rahul does not want to see you – he is too old for me to force him to come and see you’. Mr B became increasingly frustrated that the children’s mother was not doing more to support his relationship with their children. He shared his concerns with family friends who confronted Mrs B, accusing her of using the children to punish Mr B for leaving the family home. There were heated arguments between the parents in the street which were witnessed by the children and which, on one occasion, led to a neighbour calling the police. Mrs B said she experienced Mr B as angry and controlling – ‘a bully’ – and that he didn’t really care about the children. Mr B, on the other hand, stated that she was ‘deliberately alienating the children from me’. He instructed a solicitor and increasingly hostile letters were exchanged between the solicitors. The case went to court a few months later and independent social workers and other professionals became involved. By the time Rahul was eight years of age, some ten court hearings had taken place, with various orders being made for both children to spend time with their father – but these seemed unenforceable. At the point of referral to the clinic, neither child had seen nor spoken to their father for four years. Rahul said he ‘hated’ his father ‘who shouted at me and Mummy’ and Marina appeared to show no interest in her father.

Parental acrimony and resulting family dynamics

The family is often referred to as a safe haven. Yet, it can also be, or become, a major battleground. It is estimated that in the USA and UK more than 40% of marriages end in divorce and the situation does not appear to be all that different in many other European countries (OECD 2018). Almost one in three children will experience a parental divorce before the age of 16 and in about 10% of all divorce cases there are very high levels of conflict (Bream & Buchanan 2003). High-conflict parenting post-separation frequently leads to contact and residence disputes: serious disagreements about who should have the main custody of the children, where and with whom they should live and how much direct and indirect contact they should have with each parent. These disagreements are often not limited to the two parents but also involve extended family, friends and professional networks. In such scenarios, children are at risk of suffering emotional harm as the result of being exposed to and involved in their parents’ problematic conflict management and lack of resolution.

Most parents who separate are able to put their children first and try to protect them from exposure to parental acrimony. Post-separation, they support their children’s important need to have relationships with both their parents and their respective extended family and friendship networks. However, there are also those parents who find it impossible to set aside their conflicts and, as in the example above, bit by bit, their children get drawn in, often eventually taking sides. As intense feelings and even more intense responses fuel the conflicts further, friends and wider family begin to gather and support one or the other side and it is only a matter of time before the widening conflict involves lawyers and other professionals. The adversarial nature of the legal system can then contribute to a further polarization. As the main adult attention becomes focused on winning the case, the main losers are almost inevitably the children whose complex emotions and loyalty issues are no longer properly considered, obscured by the highly emotive war that is raging between the parents and members of the wider system, be that extended family, friends and even professionals.

When parental couples divorce or separate, some will already have a long history of partnership difficulties, usually also involving members of their respective families of origin prior to the divorce. Disputes can go on for many years with the adults’ narratives becoming increasingly more rigid or frozen over time, often as the result of prolonged legal battles (Blow & Daniel 2002; Gorell Barnes 2005). Children are generally acutely aware of their parents’ long-standing acrimony and disputes, even if their parents claim that they are protecting them from being exposed to these. As they become caught up in their parents’ fights – whether directly or indirectly – children may experience conflicts of loyalty, leading to feeling the need to take a firm position, such as siding with one parent against the other. When separated parents live in different homes, children frequently begin to idealize the parent they live with and sometimes the parent they spend less time with. However, more often than not, the non-resident parent runs the risk of being side-lined, and sometimes being actively denigrated or even demonized. When such positions are not challenged or when they are deliberately or inadvertently reinforced and encouraged, they can become exaggerated. Occasionally, children may make allegations of past maltreatment by the distanced or absent parent, alleging incidents of neglect or abuse which then serve as the trigger for the resident parent to reduce or terminate contact with the non-resident parent, or insist that contact be supervised.

Parental separation can be a challenging transition which demands re-structuring and adjustment within the family and parents not infrequently enter into legal proceedings as a way of maintaining identity when former roles or position within the family are threatened (Gorell Barnes 2017), with an expectation that these will mediate the complex emotions between the former partners (Trinder et al. 2008). If in addition new partners have joined one or both parents, further complex dynamics are likely to emerge which can adversely affect the relationships children have – or have had – with one or both their parents. How children cope with their parents’ separation, both in the short and long term, very much depends on their parents’ ability and willingness to co-parent competently.

Parental separation and its effects on children

Parental separation normally causes strong feelings for children, ranging from distress to anxiety, sadness and anger (Kelly & Emery 2003b). More often than not, children are poorly informed by their parents about an impending separation or divorce and the reasons for it, and little is said about the long-term implications with regard to the future family structure and contact and residence issues – usually because the parents themselves are unsure of these. When one parent moves out of the family home, the remaining parent may frame the departure of the non-resident parent differently to how the latter does. As a result, children are confused as to what the ‘real story’ is. In the immediate aftermath of a physical separation, children are likely to see the non-residential parent less frequently and sometimes not for weeks.

It is well documented that parental tensions and acrimonious conflicts do generally have negative effects on children and their psychosocial development (Barletta & O’Mara 2006; Holmes 2013; Bernet et al. 2016; Harold & Sellers 2018), so much so that more recently DSM-5 (2013) introduced the diagnostic condition of ‘child affected by parental relationship distress’ (CAPRD). It is not the separation itself, but the destructive inter-parental conflict that is found to be associated with poor adjustment for children in the years that follow (Emery 1982; Kline et al. 1991), depending also on the extent to which children are drawn into the parental conflicts (Davies & Cummings 1994; Buchanan & Heiges 2001; McIntosh 2003), and whether they feel at fault for, or threatened by, their parents’ acrimonious relationship (Harold et al. 2007). Whilst the emotional security of some children will be more affected than that of others, repeated and prolonged direct exposure to inter-parental conflicts and arguments carries considerable mental health risks for all children. These include anxiety and depression, as well as behavioural difficulties including aggressive and hostile behaviours (Johnston et al. 1987; Buchanan & Heiges 2001; Grych & Fincham 2001; Cummings & Davies 2002; McIntosh 2003; Harold & Murch 2005; Jenkins et al. 2005; Holt et al. 2008; Pinnell & Harold 2008), difficulties in interpersonal relationships (Bolgar et al. 1995), loyalty conflicts and cognitive dissonance (Amato & Afifi 2006) and poorer adjustment (Kline et al. 1991). Affected children are also more likely to experience future difficulties in forming and sustaining trusting relationships. When parents battle with each other, their emotional availability to their children can become significantly reduced as many of their actions and responses are organized around the ongoing conflicts rather than their children’s needs. Each parent may well claim that they only want to do their best for their children, blaming the other parent and finding it difficult, if not impossible, to see the role they themselves play in feeding acrimonious family relationships. Domestic abuse not infrequently continues following parental separation, with children’s contact levels with the non-resident parent becoming a central focus for abusive interactions between parents (Morrison 2015). In this scenario, children’s relationships with both their parents are usually adversely affected even though the primary focus may be on the relationship with the ‘alienated’ parent.

The parental alienation debate

The term ‘parental alienation’ (Gardner 1985) refers to the unwarranted rejection of an ‘alienated’ parent by the child, whose alliance with the ‘alienating’ parent is characterized by extreme negativity towards the other parent, as the result of a ‘conscious action’ of one parent to oust the other parent from the love and respect of their child (Lowenstein 2007). The child is said to form a strong coalition with the resident or ‘preferred’ parent and to reject a relationship with the other ‘rejected’ parent with ‘no legitimate justification’ (Gardner 1998). The diagnosis of ‘Parental Alienation Syndrome’ (PAS) (Gardner 1985) remains controversial as it suggests that the child develops a ‘disorder’ as a result of the deliberate or unconscious indoctrination by an ‘alienating’ parent, often accompanied by what may appear to be trivial, false or unsubstantiated allegations made by children against the alienated parent. Support for the notion that children can seemingly believe the false allegations that they make against the rejected parent comes from a significant body of research demonstrating that memory can easily be distorted and that ‘false memories’ can be implanted (Loftus 1997; Bruck & Ceci 1999; Schacter 2001; Tavris & Aronson 2007; Lilienfeld et al. 2010).

Specific parental behaviours have been found to be typically associated with parent-rejecting children of high-conflict separated parents (Baker & Darnall 2006; Baker 2007; Baker & Chambers 2011; Ben-Ami & Baker 2012). Darnall (1998) has summarized three categories of ‘alienating parents’: (1) ‘Naïve alienators’ who are passive about the relationship with the other parent and occasionally say or do something that may contribute to what can develop into alienating processes. (2) ‘Active alienators’, who know what they are doing is wrong but, in an effort to cope with personal hurt and anger, ‘alienate’ as a result of emotional vulnerability or poor impulse control. (3) ‘Obsessed alienators’, who feel justified in hurting the target parent and destroying the child’s relationship with that parent, rarely showing self-control or insight (Darnall 1998). Further overlapping terms and categorizations have been introduced by other practitioners in order to explain why children may seemingly side with one parent and reject the other. The term ‘justifiable estrangement’ (see Bala & Hebert 2016; Whitcombe 2017) has been coined to describe a child’s ‘understandable rejection’ of an abusive or neglectful parent. ‘Hybrid cases’ are said to combine both ‘alienation’ and ‘justifiable estrangement’ to account for the rejection of one parent (Friedlander & Walters 2010). Other terms and concepts such as ‘family member marginalization’ (Scharp & Dorrance 2017) and ‘counterproductive protective parenting’ (Drozd & Williams Olesen 2004) or ‘unfair disparagement of one parent by another’ have also been used to describe the process of why a child may not see a parent. Kelly and Johnston (2001) have attempted to reformulate PAS and focus instead on the ‘alienated child’, detailing why and how children’s relationships with their parents can be affected post-separation. The concept of ‘implacable hostility’ (Sturge & Glaser 2000) represents another attempt to describe the intense and unchanging level of hostility which is often two-way between the resident and non-resident parents. This latter concept has its limitations in that it may be taken to imply that the situation cannot be improved, possibly discouraging practitioners from attempting change-promoting interventions.

There has been much debate on whether or not parental alienation actually exists as a syndrome or not (see, for example, Andre 2004; Bernet et al. 2010; Rand 2011; Gottlieb 2012; Baker et al. 2016; Cantwell 2018). In our view the concept of ‘alienation’ has some merits, but it also has its limitations in that it postulates a one-directional linear and causal process rather than taking full account of the complex processes that can lead to children becoming drawn into their parents’ acrimonious relationships and result in the rejection of one of their parents. Whilst we recognize that in very extreme cases one parent may be the major driving force responsible for undermining a child’s relationship with the other parent, in most cases there are broader and more complex dynamics – ‘misaligned child triangulation’ and ‘alienating processes’ – at play, requiring a more nuanced understanding and formulation.

Fidler and Bala (2010) cite numerous studies indicating the possible negative effects of alienating processes on children. These may include

• Poor reality testing
• Illogical cognitive operations
• Simplistic and rigid information processing
• Inaccurate or distorted interpersonal perceptions
• Disturbed and compromised interpersonal functioning
• Self-hatred
• Low or inflated self-esteem or even omnipotence
• Pseudo-maturity
• Gender-identity problems
• Poor differentiation of self (enmeshment)
• Aggression and conduct disorders
• Disregard for social norms and authority
• Poor impulse control
• Emotional constriction, passivity or dependency
• Lack of remorse or guilt (Fidler & Bala 2010).

Retrospective qualitative studies of adults who were subjected to alienating processes in childhood are in line with these findings (Baker 2007; Verrocchio et al. 2018). Most of the affected adults reported that, while they distinctly recalled claiming during childhood that they hated or feared the rejected parent and often had negative feelings towards them, they did not want that parent to walk away from them and had secretly hoped someone would realize that they did not mean what they said. These are by no means new findings as, almost three decades ago, Clawar and Rivlin (1991) reported that 80% of their sample of children conveyed that they wanted alienating processes to be detected and stopped.

Family Ties and child triangulation processes

The Family Ties model postulates that it is the process of children becoming drawn – ‘triangulated’ – into persisting parental conflicts that accounts for the particular relationships one finds in high-conflict families post-separation. Different from the psychoanalytic concept of ‘early triangulation’ (Abelin 1975), in the systemic field triangulation processes usually refer to children becoming involved in adult disputes and forming problematic alliances with one of their parents against the other. Bowen (1966), for example, introduced the term ‘pathological triangu...