Children forced to take sides face emotional crisis

When one parent intentionally tries to destroy a child’s relationship with the other parent it impacts on many areas of the child’s life, both in the present and into the future. The child is isolated and often removed from their entire community of support and love and provided with no tools to cope with the loss. Targeted parents are misrepresented as bad or abusive parents and they spend most of their time defending themselves and being treated like criminals, often facing a presumption of guilt.

Next time you hear a parent denigrate or make claims of abuse against an ex-partner with whom they had children with and, at one time, a loving relationship, think again. Be careful not to always accept these kinds of stories at face value. We are continually finding emotionally abusive parents playing the victim; they’re often very believable and good at convincing others to side with them and to believe their lies, distortions and/or delusions. We all know how bad news or gossip spreads far and wide quickly and allegations, once made, tend to stick.

"In our effort to protect children from physical and sexual abuse, we cannot ignore the hidden suffering of children who are manipulated to take sides in their parent’s disputes." ~ Dr Richard A. Warshak, Psychologist & Author of "Divorce Poison"

These scenarios, known to many as “parental alienation”, have become an epidemic in the Family Court system and children are being used as weapons and leverage to emotionally, financially and physically destroy targeted parents. Children and parents are taking their own lives as a result of failures to intervene by the courts or authorities, yet no one appears to be measuring this. The Family Courts say they are acting in ‘the best interests of children’, but how can they claim this when they are not even evaluating the outcomes of their own decisions? There is no follow-up at all on outcomes of court judgments.

The Family Court process makes these cases significantly worse by drawing them out over many years, allowing a parent to isolate a child or children from the other parent without any intervention or penalties. The child is left in an emotional turmoil with no tools to cope and no support. Targeted parents spend their lives under the magnifying glass, having to defend and explain themselves in a legal system that has very little understanding of this insidious form of emotional abuse.

Family courts, child protection services and misused violence restraining orders allow an emotionally abusive parent to buy time to influence the child and their entire community. Interviewing, questioning and counselling techniques used with child witnesses are often so suggestive that they can substantially alter the child's recollections of events and thus compromise the reliability of the child's personal knowledge. By the time a case is heard, children have been deeply manipulated and the emotionally abusive parent has often developed a team (sometimes including school staff and other parents) who have sided with them. With the prolonged timescales of court procedures, children often get to an age where the courts want to hear “the voice of the child.” Children who have been brainwashed, coerced, intimidated and/or manipulated by a parent have no voice - because all you hear is a child rejecting a parent.

These days, children of all ages are being asked which parent they want to live with. There appear to be no age limits anymore. I am hearing of children as young as six being asked with whom do they want to live. Yet, international experts agree that this is harmful and, often, a form of abuse in its own right.

"Children in separating families should not be asked which parent they want to live with" ~ Professor Linda Elrod, World Congress of Family Law & Children’s Rights, Dublin 2017

Experts and researchers from around the world have found that parents who turn their children against other family members typically have a personality disorder or mental illness, experienced trauma in childhood, or simply want revenge on their former partner.

Parental Alienation causes emotional pain for children.

During this process, a child is often turned into a traitor, used to spy on the other parent, and subjected to many other alienating tactics. The targeted parent is portrayed as a bad or an abusive, "all bad" parent, everything they do or say is distorted into something bad while the alienating parent is seen as the protective, "all wonderful" parent. Over time the child is subtly manipulated and influenced to reject their other parent without legitimate justification. The parent-child relationship becomes severed and the child becomes angry, fearful and/or disrespectful towards the erased parent. The alienating parent uses the child as a human shield to hide their own actions and behaviours, while the child is used as a weapon to deeply hurt a parent that the child loves. Alienated children grieve for the parent they’ve lost and they carry immense guilt for being forced to choose one parent over another.

Many children are interrogated for information about the other parent after every visit. Some children are giving in to the pressure and confess to abuse that never happened just to appease the controlling parent. In cases where false allegations of abuse or sexual abuse arise, the child often ends up with false memories and suppressing positive memories of the targeted parent. We are starting to see more and more children being treated for physical or sexual abuse that has never actually happened.

Not only has the child lost their intact family because of the parental separation, but they are also then forced to live without the love, support and guidance of their other parent.

Childhood cannot be relived. Once it is over it is gone forever. That sense of history, intimacy, lost input of values and morals, self-awareness through knowing one’s beginnings, cannot be recaptured (Clawar & Rivlin, 2013). No more physical or emotional affection, special moments and fun times together, these special memories become suppressed and sometimes forgotten. Often the extended family of the “erased” parent is also removed from the child’s life, so no more traditional family celebrations or gatherings for Christmas, birthdays, and Father’s Day or Mother’s Day. No more visits with grandma and grandpa.

Many children never recover from this form of emotional abuse. Those children and teens that do eventually reunite with the erased parent often leave siblings behind and end up alienated from them in turn. The months and years that follow reunification need to be spent unpacking the damage caused by the emotional and psychological manipulation of parental alienation. Many alienated children who reunite with the targeted parent return suffering from depression, eating disorders, sleep problems, complex grief, poor body image, weight loss/gain, brain fog, physical fatigue, lack of friendships, substance abuse, social identity problems and loneliness. In the most extreme cases, various forms of self-harm even lead to suicide.

We need to keep most children as far away from courts as possible. But, where courts do become involved, they need to step in and compel parents to co-parent and penalise those who won't. They need to put protection orders in place so that children can reunify without the pressure and influences of the alienating parent or to transfer residency of children where required and make orders for therapy for those who need it.

"Where a child/children may be resisting or refusing contact with a parent in the context of parental alienation, a family approach in therapy with inclusion of all members, alongside legal interventions is recommended" Kate Templer, Mandy Matthewson, Janet Haines and Georgina Cox

We need to protect all children from abuse. Children desperately need judges to take the pressure off them by not forcing them to choose one parent, and by identifying when a protective separation from an alienating parent is necessary to end this emotional and psychological abuse. Children otherwise have to live with this burden for the rest of their lives.

PARENTAL ALIENATION is psychological and emotional abuse.

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Australia and New Zealand's PARENTAL ALIENATION AWARENESS DAY is the 12th October, which is during Mental Health Week. #PAADay. Please follow our page on Facebook and share our posts to help raise more awareness.

To read more about parental alienation please visit the Eeny Meeny Miney Mo Foundation website or follow us on Facebook.

For professionals and parents to understand how it can happen so easily please read my personal essays on my alienated childhood experience and my alienated parent experience with my own children. I have reunited with one of my children who now lives with me full time.

Clawar, S., & Rivlin, B. (2013). Children Held Hostage: Identifying Brainwashed Children, Presenting a Case, and Crafting Solutions. ABA Publishing, American Bar Association.