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The alienation of children from parents in the course of high-conflict family law litigation was first noted by the mental health community in 1976. In 1987, Dr. Richard Gardner gave this problem the label "Parental Alienation Syndrome," which he used to describe a disorder in children that he said occurs in the course of disputes between separated parents about their children's parenting arrangements.
Gardner's take on this problem was not without controversy and the problem and Gardner's theory has continued to be studied, critiqued, and updated by the mental health community. In fact, I think it's fair to say that Parental Alienation Syndrome, as Gardner originally framed it, has largely been discredited. No one doubts that parental alienation can occur when parents separate; the questions raised by mental health researchers and other professionals largely concern whether Parental Alienation Syndrome is a diagnosable "syndrome" at all , and the fact that more current research shows that there are many, varied reasons why a child can come to resist seeing a parentother than alienation. The current thinking on alienation, and a related problem called estrangement, has become quite nuanced. The most recent significant work on parental alienation comes from Drs. Joan Kelly and Janet Johnston, but since Gardner came up with his formulation of Parental Alienation Syndrome first, that's where we'll start.
===Gardner's Parental Alienation Syndrome===
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 parenting 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 an often unwarranted 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; or, 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 the parent's bad negative feelings toward about the other parent.
Rand and Gardner identify five types of behaviour that they say are characteristic of Parental Alienation Syndrome:
====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 or 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.
<blockquote>"Any attempt at alienating the children from the other parent should be seen as a direct and willful violation of one of the prime duties of parenthood."</blockquote>
While the parent most likely to attempt to alienate a child from the other parent is the parent who has the child for most of the child's time, usually because of an interim order or some other sort of temporary arrangement, there are a small number of cases in which the parent with the least amount of time with the child 's time has attempted to alienate the child from the parent with the most time with of the child's time.
The sorts of behaviours that suggest an intention to alienate a child from the other parent include, among other things:
On the other hand, these claims put the parent accused of alienation in a difficult spot too. They can't say that they're even a tiny, little bit responsible for how the child feels about the other parent, for fear of damaging their legal position in the eyes of the judge. Instead, all these parents can reasonably say is that they had nothing at all to do with the child's feelings, and that the problem lies entirely in the poor parenting provided by the rejected parent.
And for their part, judges and lawyers are not mental health professionals. Law school doesn't teach ''anything'' about psychology, family breakdown and children's responses to the separation of their parents. Not a thing! We are ''not'' experts in psychology, let alone in complex issues about estranged children and alienating parents. So, where does the expertise we need come from? Often the only way to get objective information about a claim of alienation comes from a parenting assessment conducted by a psychologist, clinical counsellor or social worker, and these reports can be really, really expensive and take a lot of time to complete. As a result, when alienation claims come to court, quite a few of those claims are presented without the input of an expert, and you can imagine how challenging cases involving a child's resistance to seeing a parent can might be.
====Attachment disruption====
One way to crack the problem is to focus on the basic problem — a child's reluctance to spend time with a parent — rather than on labels concepts like "alienation" and digging into whose behaviour is responsible for what. One way of looking at the problem of children who resist seeing a parent after separation is from the perspective of ''attachment theory''. Attachment theory was first proposed by Dr. John Bowlby, a psychiatrist, in 1988, drawing on earlier research conducted by Dr. Mary Ainsworth in the 1960s and 1970s. It describes how children bond with their parents, and how the quality of this bond can have life-long implications for the wellbeing of children and wind up impacting their relationships with parents, friends and future partners down the road. Attachment theory has been widely researched and remains a cornerstone of how mental health professionals think about families and family relationships.
Looking at a child's reluctance to see a parent from an attachment point of view, the one thing that claims of estrangement and alienation have in common is the obvious breakdown in the attachment between the child and the rejected parent. The idea that there has been a disruption in the child's attachment to that parent is something that both the favoured parent and the rejected parent can agree on... perhaps the only thing they can agree on. If we get rid of labels about like "alienation" and "Parental Alienation Syndrome," neither of which tend to be well understood by lawyers or by litigating parents anyway, and focus on the problem of attachment disruption, we can start looking at the problem without having to worry about which parent did what and we can do that without the usual finger-pointing, rancour, blaming and anger that accompany claims about alienation.
Although the cause of the problem is still important, parents, lawyers and judges still have the same set of tools to deal with a child's resistance to seeing a parent as they do when the child's resistance is said to be caused by the malicious actions of the favoured parent or the incompetent parenting of the rejected parent. Plus, in my experience, I have never had a case of attachment disruption that resulted wholly from "alienation" or from "estrangement." In the cases I've dealt with, a child's reluctance to see a parent usually results from a combination of factors that suggest alienation and factors that suggest estrangement; these cases are rarely one or the other.
There's good news and bad news here. The bad news is that we continue to lack long-term, large-population, high-quality research about children who resist contact with a parent after separation. The research currently available uses only small numbers of people, and is often confined to the people that psychologists see in their normal, day-to-day practices. We still don't have a definition of "alienation" that is widely accepted, although to my mind the way that Kelly and Johnston talk about alienation and estrangement seems closest to the mark. We also don't have a lot of good research about the legal and therapeutic responses to children who resist seeing a parent that could tell us which responses work best. While most writers on the subject suggest that courts should assign judges to these cases early on, judges who continue to be involved in these cases as case managers, most courts don't have enough judges or enough court time to make case management a practical solution.
The good news is that there has been lots of research on different aspects of alienation and the problem of children who resist seeing a parent, although this research tends to rely on small numbers of people and tends not to be conducted over the lengthy periods of time necessary to really understand the impact on children and their wellbeing. There are also a lot of very good books, articles and essays about children who resist seeing a parent, some of which are listed below, and there are an increasing number of mental health professionals who have made working with families and children who resist contact their priority and are developing specialized programs to address the issue. We also have a lot of some good, creative ideas about the kinds of legal and therapeutic responses that do help, and those that might help, although we don't know nearly enough about how effective these responses are, especially over the long term.
The other bit of good news is that more and more judges and lawyers are familiar with the alienation and the problem of children who resist spending time with a parent, although many of these legal professionals don't have a deep understanding of the issues and may not know much more about them than the basics of what Gardner had to say about his Parental Alienation Syndrome.