Parental alienation – defined as when one parent’s relationship with her child is harmed by the other parent – can have devastating consequences. Parental alienation — defined as when one parent’s relationship with his or her child is harmed by the other parent – can have devastating consequences. Legal professionals and psychologists have known about parental alienation for decades. But for political and personal reasons, there are others who deny that such a thing exists. Unfortunately, these legal and professional debates have led to misconceptions about what are parental alienating behaviors. 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 behaviors are so that we don’t allow them to be used to hurt others anymore. So what are these behaviors and what does the research that’s been done so far tell us about them? What is it? First, let’s distinguish between the term ‘Parental Alienation Syndrome’ and parental alienation. Parental alienation involves behaviors that a parent does to hurt or damage a relationship between a child and the other parent. Parental Alienation Syndrome (PAS), on the other hand, was coined by Dr. Richard Gardner in 1985 and describes the ultimate outcome or impact of those behaviors on a child. There is debate among clinicians and legal professionals as to whether PAS is an actual syndrome or not. The focus in this article is on parental alienating behaviors rather than parental alienation as a syndrome. The term ‘parental alienation’ is not in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), which is a manual that offers a common language and standard criteria that mental health providers use to classify mental disorders. However, “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 behaviors 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 behaviors and outcomes. What are alienating behaviors? The alienating parent might badmouth the other parent in front of the child to gain 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 (e.g, 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 behaviors often occur when the parents’ relationship ends and can be particularly acute if, after separation, one parent can’t let the relationship go. The…
