Challenging Parental Alienation

New Directions for Professionals and Parents

Jean Mercer, Margaret Drew, Jean Mercer, Margaret Drew

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000485837
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Sozialwissenschaften
• Subtopic: Soziologie

This book addresses the concept of parental alienation – the belief that when a child of divorced parents avoids one parent, it may be because the preferred parent has persuaded the child to do this. It argues against the unquestioning use of parental alienation concepts in child custody conflicts.

Increasing use of this concept in family courts has led at times to placement of children with abusive or violent parents, damage to the lives of preferred parents, and the use of treatments that have not been shown to be safe or effective. The 13 chapters cover the history and theory of "parental alienation" principles and practices. Methodological and research issues are considered, and diagnostic and treatment methods associated with "parental alienation" beliefs as well as those recommended by research and ethical evidence are analyzed. The connections of "parental alienation" with gender and domestic violence issues are discussed as are the experiences of individuals who have experienced "parental alienation" treatments. The book argues that "parental alienation" principles and practices should be avoided by family courts, in the best interests of children in custody disputes.

This book will be useful reading for lawyers, judges, children's services workers including social workers, child protection court workers, and mental health professionals involved in child custody decisions.

Chapter 1 Introduction to parental alienation concepts and practices

Jean Mercer and Margaret Drew

DOI: 10.4324/9781003095927-1

Allie was 17 and Merle 14 when they stated their strong preferences for living with their father and limiting their contacts with their mother and her boyfriend. The parents had been divorced for years and had managed to parent the girls successfully. But the presence of the boyfriend was a problem for the two girls, and when they stated this, their mother accused their father of having “alienated” them from her by manipulating their beliefs and emotions. After some litigation, a family court judge agreed that this must have happened and ordered Allie and Merle to be taken to another state to receive treatment for their attitudes. The girls were taken in handcuffs from the courtroom. Subsequently, Allie petitioned for emancipation and received it. Merle now lives in a different state with her mother and the boyfriend and does not see her father or Allie.

Elise’s parents divorced before she entered her teens. They lived in the same town and Elise alternated living weeks with her mother and her father. When she was 17, she became tired of the weekly transfer routine and proposed that she should have a home at her mother’s house and visit her father frequently. Her father did not accept this idea and declared that Elise’s mother must have caused her to become alienated from him. He went to court and obtained a court order for Elise to be taken to a treatment program and prevented her from seeing her mother. Elise eventually managed to get back to her mother’s house, but she was in her twenties before she saw her younger brother again, because he had been ordered to stay at the father’s house.

Rob was in his early teens when his divorced father decided that Rob’s reluctance to spend time with him was caused by his mother’s persuasion. Rob’s father went to court without notifying the mother and obtained custody of Rob on an “emergency” basis. A family court failed to investigate or listen to Rob’s explanation that he was afraid of his father because of the domestic violence he had seen in their household. Instead, the court ordered that Rob enter a treatment program and prohibited him from having contact with his mother. As Rob got closer to his 18th birthday, he thought he might be able to see his mother again, but his father had him declared incompetent and placed under the father’s guardianship, despite Rob’s successful school career and other abilities.

Siobhan was a high-functioning autistic girl in her mid-teens and living with her divorced mother when her father decided that she had developed negative attitudes toward him. In fact, Siobhan, who attended a special school, asked for time with her father, but he averred that if he saw her alone, she would claim he had molested her. Siobhan’s father asked the family court for full custody of his daughter, on the grounds that her mother had harmed her by alienating her. He also said he would send her to boarding school when he had custody. The parents settled out of court after some negotiation about child support.

These anecdotes describe several different factors at work in child custody conflicts between separated parents. Boys, girls, mothers, fathers, and teenagers with different abilities and personalities, all are represented in these narratives. But the stories share a focus on a single idea, that children who reject contact with one parent are likely to have developed a negative attitude toward that parent because of the other parent’s intentional or unconscious actions. The term frequently used for this concept is parental alienation, often abbreviated as “PA”. The idea of parental alienation has been used with increasing and alarming frequency in child custody decisions since its introduction in the 1990s, despite a lack of evidence showing that the basic concept applies in more than a few cases. International and national psychological associations have refused to accept the proposal that a child’s rejection of a parent is evidence of a psychological disorder. In this book, authors from various disciplines discuss principles, practices, and problems associated with the alienation concept and what happens when those with the power to determine custody accept the premises about parental alienation as reflections of frequent real events.

Terminology

Awkwardly and confusingly, ever since Richard Gardner (1985) introduced the idea of parental alienation, proponents of these concepts have used the term parental alienation to mean at least three different things: (1) the belief system that claims the preferred parent is the cause of a child’s avoidance or rejection of the nonpreferred parent; (2) the avoidance or rejection itself; and (3) the posited behavior of the preferred parent that is said to cause the child’s avoidance or rejection. Not only do these multiple uses of the term obscure what is being talked about, but the ambiguity of the language makes it too easy to imply that when one of these phenomena is referenced, one or more of the others must be present. This is especially a problem when a child is said to show avoidance of one parent, and this statement is also taken to suggest, without further evidence, that a parent’s encouragement of the child’s avoidance is present.

We are far from the first authors to note the ambiguities of the parental alienation terminology. As interested professionals and affected parents have struggled with creating a meaningful vocabulary, they have used terms like contact refusal, resist/refuse dynamic, parent–child relationship problems, contact problems, and alienating behaviors to try to discriminate between child avoidance of a parent and possible actions of the preferred parent that encourage such avoidance. People have often come back to “parental alienation” or “PA” as quick (though confusing) ways to speak of these phenomena. Nevertheless, readers of this book need to be aware of the various terminological efforts in order both to be able to follow what is said here and to compare it to previous published material.

In addition to confusing child behavior and parent behavior, “parental alienation” terminology tends to conflate behavior designed to inappropriately influence a child against the other parent with behaviors occurring for other reasons, as well as with various behaviors that do not necessarily involve a child’s rejection of a parent. For example, using broad terms like “parental alienation” may equate this issue with rejection problems that are completely different. For example, a child’s apparent rejection of a parent could be based on preference for contact with a parent away from the parent’s house, or unhappiness with the location of a parent’s house, or distancing from a stepparent or stepsiblings, in which cases, the issue is not the child’s attitude toward the parent, but the child’s feelings about other people or circumstances.

As there is now extensive literature arguing both for and against the parental alienation concept and its related terminology, we, the editors, and authors of this book, find ourselves in a difficult situation. We cannot abandon the term parental alienation, or we risk having no one understand the context of our discussion. A brand new vocabulary suggests that we are discussing a novel set of ideas—and we are not. But if we adopt the ambiguous multiple usages of past work by parental alienation proponents, we risk simply adding to the confusion and failing to make our own points. We can, however, decline to use “PA”, however handy it might be, as the use of abbreviations tends to encourage reification of a concept, and this helps authors and readers to forget about the observable nature of the events under discussion. At this point, we are still without most of the needed empirical information about children’s avoidance of a divorced or separated parent, and it would be counterproductive to yield to the temptation to think of children’s behavior in terms of an abstraction that has yet to be derived from reliable data.

Therefore, we propose and will use a terminology that clearly disambiguates the three different phenomena that have in the past all been called parental alienation. For the system of ideas that relates a preferred parent’s actions to a child’s avoidance or rejection of the other parent, we will use the term parental alienation belief system. Supporters of this system’s principles and practices will be called parental alienation proponents or advocates or authors.

Second, a child’s avoidance of or rejection of one parent will be called child avoidant behavior, or child avoidance. This observable behavior can range from eye-rolling and muttering in resistance to everyday matters, to refusal to speak to or go near a parent, to emotional and physical collapse when forced to go near the parent. (It would not, however, include requests from the child to alter parenting time for the child’s convenience, or to have a voice in decision-making.)

Third, observed events in which the preferred parent persuades, forces, or encourages the child to avoid the other parent will be called parent encouragement of child avoidant behavior, or parent encouragement. It should be noted that this third usage refers to an event that is often asserted but rarely proved by parental alienation proponents, who tend to infer the existence of parent encouragement when they observe child avoidance.

There are a few other terms commonly used by parental alienation proponents that also need to be replaced. When a child rejects contact with one of the separated parents and strongly prefers to live with the other parent, parental alienation proponents refer to the rejected parent as the targeted parent, implying that someone has intentionally caused the child’s negative attitude toward that person. In this book, we will use the neutral term nonpreferred parent. Parental alienation proponents also refer to the parent favored by the child as the alienating parent, implying some certainty about the causal role of that parent’s behavior in creating the child’s resistance. Instead, we will use the neutral term preferred parent.

Some terminology used by parental alienation proponents involves psychological treatments proposed for correction of child avoidant behavior. These treatments may be referred to by their proprietary names (e.g., Family Bridges™) or in a general way as reunification therapies. The term reunification therapy is somewhat deceptive, as this term originally referenced treatment methods intended to help children who had been in foster care and needed to reunite successfully with their biological families. Treatments directed at changing children’s attitudes toward a rejected separated parent are not necessarily comparable to those used to help children move out of the foster system. We will use the term parental alienation treatments to describe specific parental alienation-related methods intended to persuade a child to accept rather than reject a parent.

Finally, in our discussion of issues related to the parental alienation belief system, we need to choose a term to identify the parents who are involved in child custody conflicts. Many, but not all, have been legally married and divorced, while others are married but separated, and some were never married and may not even have lived together. For simplicity, we will refer to all these parents as divorced parents or separated parents.

Readers should note that the terminology associated with the parental alienation belief system changes frequently. Some interventions for children who avoid a parent have been called reunification therapies, although this term has historically referred to treatments for children returning from foster care to their biological families. Some authors now use the term reintegration therapies instead of reunification. The term enmeshment, descriptive of situations where family members are overly dependent on each other, is sometimes substituted for the phrase parental alienating behaviors in discussions of custody decisions. We expect that further terminological changes will occur and caution readers to be aware of the actual meaning of terms used in the discussion of children’s avoidance of one parent and preference for the other.

About this book and its authors

This book is directed to an audience of psychologists, social workers, lawyers, judges, and others who may find themselves embroiled in child custody cases where one parent alleges that the other has alienated the children and encouraged them to reject the first parent, and thus caused the first parent to be rejected by a child and display child avoidant behavior. (Parents who are alleged to have alienated their children may also be interested in the material presented here.) Although most of these cases will begin with some evidence that a child has avoided contact with one parent, this will not necessarily be true of all of them.

Cases where parent encouragement of child avoidant behavior is alleged are often difficult and confusing for professionals as well as for the parents involved. The level of disagreement in these cases is stark, and there may be a history or even current events of domestic violence and child abuse. Both parents are likely to be angry or agitated and may be intransigent with respect to any compromises or negotiations. Financial issues are an important factor in parental alienation-related cases, not only with respect to property division and child support but also in terms of the expense to one or the other parent as payment for psychological treatments that may be ordered by a family court.

Professional journals in the fields of psychology, social work, and law have published many articles on issues of parent encouragement of child avoidant behavior, some written by parental alienation supporters, and others by authors who strongly oppose the parental alienation belief system. Several books present highly positive views of parental alienation-related thinking, but the present volume is the first book to bring together material that opposes the unquestioning use of parental alienation concepts in child custody cases. This book is intended to provide information that can be used in challenging unfounded allegations that a parent has encouraged a child’s avoidance of the other parent. The authors and editors believe that the material offered here will counter misinformation that may be brought into the courtroom by proponents of the parental alienation belief system.

Discussion of parental alienation allegations can include an unusually wide range of topics, and no single discipline provides the training for addressing all factors. As the table of contents shows, this book examines the historical and theoretical background of parental alienation concepts, considers the scientific evidence that has been put forward to support parental alienation-related thinking and practice, and explores the roles of gender issues including domestic violence and other abuse in child avoidance cases. Two chapters examine issues of child custody evaluations and the related question of identification of children who avoid contact with a parent for reasons claimed to be a result of the other parent’s encouragement or persuasion. The authors who have contributed chapters are professionals who have been engaged for years with child custody cases in which parent encouragement of child avoidant behavior is alleged; many have published important work on this topic in professional journals. Their chapters directed not only toward people in each author’s own discipline, but toward other professionals who may benefit from understanding the roles played by professionals outside their fields in child custody proceedings where parent encouragement of child avoidance is claimed. For the benefit of all readers, Chapter 4 also includes material provided by people who have personally experienced parental alienation treatments.

The problems associated with the wide use of parental alienation concepts are interdisciplinary ones, and the solutions to these problems lie in interdisciplinary work combining the efforts of legal, mental health, and other professionals who are trained to work with families.

The authors of this book’s chapters primarily live in the United States, Britain, Australia, and Canada but are in contact with concerned professionals and affected parents in many other countries. Although the origins of the parental alienation perspective appear to be in the United States, related ideas have spread through much of the world. A case in point is the situation in Brazil, where legislation some years ago criminalized conduct that was interpreted as parent encouragement of child avoidant behavior.

The problem of allegations against preferred parents

Why is the parental alienation perspective worth extended discussion? As human beings do many ill-considered and even despicable things, it appears more than possible that a few preferred parents do persuade their children that the other parent is dangerous or disgusting. Negative influencing of this kind could be expected to have deleterious effects on children and is certainly not fair to the maligned parent. Is it then inappropriate to include parental alienation views in child custody decisions? Or is the problem the fact that parent encour...