The New Family

Thursday, July 21, 2016

Parental Alienation

DAD came across this article. It is a narrative of a child of divorce's experience with her own divorce. 

I was led to believe, all of my life, that my father wasn't interested in a relationship with me, that he had access to see me and chose not to. The truth was that he made regular attempts all through my childhood to send me packages and letters, to call, and to visit, and his efforts were ignored or refused. I was allowed to think that I was forgettable, inconsequential, and not worth his time. I was told all kinds of nasty things about him and encouraged to distrust him and to be grateful to my mother for shielding me from his influence. Meanwhile, he suffered the loss of his daughter who was coached to hate him. I couldn't be that monster who would raise my children with low self-esteem and the belief they were abandoned while robbing their father of his flesh and blood!
If there is a legitimate reason why a child should not be with his or her parents, such as substantiated abuse, then the police, children's services, and the courts should be left with the responsibility of sorting out those details. Otherwise, when a man and woman lay down together and make a child, it's a commitment of "for better or for worse" to that child, if not for a marriage. Even if the adult relationship doesn't last forever, the mother and the father are bound by blood and by eternity to the child. Perhaps we should be more careful of who we lay down with if we can't bear to parent with that person!
Not liking the other parent, embarrassment about the past relationship, or avoidance of the complications of visitation are simply not good enough reasons to erase a loved one from a child's life. I wish that I could go back in time and make different decisions for my life, but what's done is done.  Whether or not my marriage to my ex was a mistake, I can say that he gave me the greatest gift anyone could ever give me: my children. We don't agree on everything, but we can harmonize in our shared love and admiration for our children and our mutual desire to see them grow up healthy and well-adjusted.
http://divorcedmoms.com/blogs/divorce-warrior/why-i-wont-alienate-my-kids-from-their-father

Parental alienation also takes a softer form than the one exemplified above. A custodial parent need not actively undermine the relationship between the children and the former spouse. That parent can also naively alienate that relationship through simple passivity, undermining the parent child relationship by simply failing to facilitate a relationship between them.

The harm though, doesn't merely extend to the relationship between alienated parent and child. Alienated children are likely to blame the alienating parent for their behavior when they become aware of the alienation, thereby harming that relationship too. Children develop their own minds as they grow and mature and don't really care about why Mommy or Daddy prevented them from having a meaningful relationship with the other spouse.