When children refuse to visit: Alienation and estrangement in family law disputes.

Posted By: John-Paul Boyd

Separation is a difficult time for parents, even those who "consciously uncouple" like Gwyneth Paltrow and Chris Martin. The emotional trauma of separation becomes significantly more challenging, however, when the legal consequences of separation steer parents toward conflict in court rather than compromise out of court.

In this three-part article, I'm going to talk about how a child's relationship with a parent can break down when parents separate, and the theory of parental alienation syndrome that tries to explain the breakdown of the parent-child relationship. In Part Two, I'll talk about what happens to allegations of parental alienation in court and how cases of parental alienation can be distinguished from situations in which children are justifiably estranged from a parent. In the last part, I'll talk about the legal and therapeutic options that are available when allegations of alienation are proven.

Parental alienation "syndrome"

Our court system is adversarial. Although processes are in place to promote settlement, if separated parents can't agree on how they'll care for the children, they'll wind up fighting each other to get the result they each think best. This sort of competition encourages parents to take extreme positions, and makes extreme positions difficult to back down from for fear of looking weak or losing face. The stakes, of course, are astronomically high when what a couple is arguing about is their children. With emotions running high, it's easy to forget how important it is that the children maintain a positive, loving relationship with each parent and that children's exposure to their parents' conflict is limited.

In the early 1980s, psychologists began to notice that some children of separated parents developed an alignment with one parent, and a rejection of the other, that was so strong it resulted in the child refusing to visit the rejected parent and became a factor in the litigation. In Surviving the Breakup, prominent American psychologists Judith Wallerstein and Joan Kelly wrote about certain self-absorbed parents and vulnerable older children who "waged battle" together in an "unholy alliance" to hurt the other parent. Five years later, in an article called "Recent Trends in Divorce and Custody Litigation," psychologist Richard Gardner used the term "parental alienation syndrome" to describe cases of alignment in which children not only engaged in a "campaign of denigration"...