What is parental alienation?

SABOTAGE: ACTIONS OF MOM OR DAD TO HURT RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN CHILD AND OTHER PARENT Negative outcomes of these behaviours are far-reaching.

Parental alienation – defined as when one parent’s relationship with his or her child is harmed by the other parent – can have devastating consequences.

Many legal professionals and psychologists have known about parental alienation for decades. But for political and personal reasons, there are others who deny its existence.

As a result many people do not have a word to describe or label their experience, or to understand what they see happening to others. That makes it challenging to find solutions.

It is time to look past the controversy over whether parental alienation exists and to instead understand what the actual behaviours are so that we don’t allow them to be used to hurt others anymore.

What is it?

First, let’s distinguish between the term “Parental Alienation Syndrome” and parental alienation. Parental alienation involves behaviours that a parent does to hurt or damage a relationship between a child and the other parent.

Parental Alienation Syndrome, on the other hand, was coined by Dr Richard Gardner in 1985 and describes the ultimate outcome or impact of those behaviours on a child. The focus in this article is on parental alienating behaviours rather than parental alienation as a syndrome.

The term “parental alienation” is not in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM). However, a “child affected by parental relationship distress (CAPRD)” is a term that has been added to the most recent edition of the DSM, the DSM-5.

CAPRD includes parental alienating behaviours such as badmouthing a parent to a child. And several of the manual’s authors have clarified CAPRD to include an entire range of parental alienating behaviours and outcomes.

What are alienating behaviours?

The alienating parent might badmouth the other parent in front of the child to gain his or her loyalty. Or the parent might reconstruct past events to make the child believe horrible and untrue things about the other parent, or prevent the other parent from spending time with the child.

A parent may also intrude excessively (eg. frequent texting) into the other parent’s parenting time with the children, or make false claims of abuse to limit their time with the children indefinitely. The result is the child can feel extremely negative toward the targeted parent for unjustified and often untrue reasons.

These behaviours often occur when the parents’ relationship ends and can be particularly acute if, upon separation, one parent can’t let the relationship go. The behaviours often escalate if one parent remarries.

He or she may want to start over and “erase” the other parent altogether. But parental alienation can also happen when the parents are still together.

Alienation isn’t the same thing as estrangement

Parental alienation is often confused with estrangement, but they are not the same thing.

Estrangement can occur if a parent is abusive or has shortcomings that damage or strain his or her relationship with the child. For example, a parent may have a mental illness or other problem that makes it challenging to communicate with the child in a healthy way.

As a result, the child may not want to have much contact with the estranged parent. In such cases, the child will express ambivalence toward the estranged parent.

Parental alienation, on the other hand, is when the actions of one parent intentionally harm the relationship the child has with the other parent. In these cases, the child feels little to no guilt about his negative feelings towards the alienated parent.

This difference is one reason why the clarification in the DSM-5 is important. Clinicians need to be better trained to identify when there is parental alienation, estrangement or both behaviours occurring.

Child may not want to have much contact with estranged parent

What is the effect on kids?

When I interviewed alienated parents about their children for my new book, I learned that some children are quite resistant to the behaviour of the alienating parent. In fact a child may even be critical of the alienating parent’s motivations.

However, this resistance places children in a difficult situation if they are also dependent on the alienating parent. Many children live “split” lives to cope with this situation. In other words, they behave in totally different ways depending on which parent they are with.

The limited research published on this suggests that alienated children and parents suffer many negative outcomes. These can include anxiety, depression, substance abuse and contemplation of or attempted suicide. Declines in academic performance among children and decreases in work productivity of parents can also occur.