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→Gardner's Parental Alienation Syndrome
*'''Teenagers:''' Children's alignments often continue into their mid-teens. Many teens are able to take a more mature and independent, and sometimes critical, view of their parents' fight, but a significant number of teens maintain their alignment and continue to reject one parent in favour of the other.
According to Rand and Gardner, children are about twice as likely to form alignments with their mothers than they are with their fathers, meaning that mothers are twice as likely to engage in alienating behaviour. In fact, in his original writing about Parental Alienation Syndrome, Gardner claimed to see evidence of alienation in 90 percent of the children he saw in his clinical practice, and that, for these children, their mothers were the alienating parent 90 percent of the time.!
Rand says that Parental Alienation Syndrome is a risk whenever parents must litigate a custody dispute. This risk increases when one or both parents make claims that attack the integrity, moral fitness, or character of the other parent. (Claims like these are typically hard to defend, and put one parent on the defensive while giving the other parent a sense of moral superiority.) She notes that the statistical risk of Parental Alienation Syndrome increases when: the parent perceived to be responsible for the breakdown of the relationship becomes involved in a new relationship shortly afterwards; and, a parent leaves the relationship suddenly. In my view, a third risk factor occurs when a parent's immediate family members vigorously support the parent's cause and encourage bad feelings toward the other parent.