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→Attachment disruption
====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 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 "alienation" and "Parental Alienation Syndrome," neither of which tend to 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.