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→Alienated children
Alienated children usually reject a parent without guilt or sadness, and do so without an objectively reasonable <span class="noglossary">cause</span> that stems from the rejected parent's behaviour and the child's interactions with the rejected parent. The children's views of the rejected parent are usually distorted and exaggerated.
Alienation is most easily defined as the breakdown of a child's relationship with a parent as a result of the other parent's efforts to turn the child against the rejected parent. Typically, alienation only becomes a problem when the parents are involved in extremely bitter and heated litigation about the children's parenting arrangements. Not every case of high conflict litigation involves alienation, of course, but alienation can and does happen. A 1991 study by the American Bar Association found indications of alienation in the majority of 700 high-conflict divorce cases it studied over 12 years.
The intentional alienation of a child from a parent is absolutely wrong and strikes me as virtually inexcusable and unforgivable. Some writers even say that alienation amounts to child abuse, a position I tend to agree with. As Dr. Michael Bone and Michael Walsh put it in their article "Parental Alienation Syndrome: How to detect it and what to do about it," published in 1999 in the ''Florida Bar Journal'', 73(3): 44–48: