Parental Alienation and Family Reunification

Controversial Issues, Current Research, Approaches and Programs

Pearl S. Berman, Ethan M. Weisinger

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2024
• Print ISBN: 9781032641157
• eBook ISBN: 9781003846604
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Developmental Psychology
• Index: Psychology

This book on parental alienation and family reunification provides family court professionals with critical background in child development, dynamics present in violent families, and how to evaluate the testimony of experts to ensure it values children's views, best interests of the children, and follows evidence-based practice.

As laid out in the Child Welfare Information Gateway report, 2020, Family court judges should make decisions per the best interests of the child standard. High conflict custody cases make this complicated, especially when reunification services are requested. In the middle of contentious proceedings, judges oftentimes receive conflicting information from parents. Judges and family law professionals can be lead astray, relying on unproven constructs and instruments not meeting the criteria of reliability and validity. Mandating victimized children into reunification programs that are neither evidence-based nor trauma informed can cause further harm to the children.

This book will be of interest to those working in the family courts, particularly expert witnesses, clinical psychologists, therapists, children's services workers including social workers, child protection court workers, mental health professionals involved in child custody decisions, and researchers with an interest in parental alienation. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of Journal of Family Trauma, Child Custody & Child Development.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• Preface—Alienation and reunification issues in family courts: Theory, research, and programs in child custody cases
• Introduction—Parental alienation vs coercive control: Controversial issues and current research
• 1 Coercion in families and child resistance to contact with a parent after family separation
• 2 “He was the king of the house” children’s perspectives on the men who abused their mothers
• 3 Examining associations between psychological control and proactive and reactive aggression among middle school age youth
• 4 Perpetration of intimate partner violence and guilt: The role of parenting status
• 5 The Trouble with Harman and Lorandos’ Parental Alienation Allegations in Family Court Study (2020)
• 6 Attachment issues and reunification of parents and children
• 7 Parental sobriety and parent-child reunification in dependency court: Does the 15-month Adoption and Safe Families Act (ASFA) rule support parent-child reunification?
• 8 Reunification, alienation, or re-traumatization? Let’s start listening to the child
• 9 Reunification therapies for parental alienation: Tenets, empirical evidence, commonalities, and differences
• 10 How efficacious is Building Family Bridges? What the legal and mental health fields should know about Building Family Bridges and “parental alienation”
• 11 The “solution” to parental alienation: A critique of the turning points and overcoming barriers reunification programs
• Index