Alienation: The Evolution of a Controversial Construct

After judges in the 19th century spoke about seeing families in which there appeared to be an attempt to poison a child's mind in an effort to turn him or her against the other parent, Wilhelm Reich, in his book entitled “Character Analysis” (1949), spoke about how parents with certain personality types try to psychologically defend themselves from a sense of personal injury by preventing the other parent from having the pleasure of a relationship with their child, through the use of defamation. Five decades later Wallerstein & Blakeslee (1989), in their book “Second Chances: Men, Women, and Children a Decade After Divorce,” offered the term “Medea Syndrome” to capture situations where a parent engages in a campaign designed to destroy the other parent's relationship with their child out of a desire for revenge.

Richard Gardner and PAS

In 1985, Richard Gardner introduced the concept of parental alienation syndrome (PAS) in an article for the Academy Forum, an idea he explicated more thoroughly in subsequent years. For Dr. Gardner, PAS was a disorder manifested in the child that was present if most or all of the following factors existed in a case: 1) A campaign of denigration; 2) Absurd, frivolous or weak rationalizations for the deprecation; 3) A lack of ambivalence toward the rejected parent; 4) Claims by the child that the reason for rejection were his/her own (not originating from alienating parent); 5) Reflexive support for the alienating parent's side in parental conflict; 6) An absence of guilt about exploitation of, or cruelty to the rejected parent; 7) Scenarios and descriptions borrowed from the alienating parent; and 8) The spread of the rejection of a parent to extended relatives and friends.

Although Dr. Gardner noted that the PAS diagnosis should not be given when a rejected parent was either largely absent from the child's life or where there are reasons other than an alienating parent's influence for the rejection (e.g., abuse, family violence, etc), his PAS model came to be viewed by some scholars as underplaying these other possible causes. It led to the unfortunate assumption by the public and by legal and mental health practitioners that if a child was rejecting a parent, there must be an alienating influence in the favored home.

While Dr. Gardner was a pioneer about a difficult subject, his general model has been heavily criticized over time for a variety of other reasons. These include, but are not limited to the following issues: 1) The model failed to give adequate attention to the reality that some children reject a parent and there is no parent engaging in alienation; 2) It is tautological (containing its cause ' an alienating parent ' in his definition and rendering the theory difficult to falsify); 3) There is a paucity of research confirming that PAS can be reliably identified by practitioners; 4) As a syndrome it fails to meet Frye and Daubert standards of evidentiary analysis; and 5) Its “syndrome” approach increases the chance that a complex psychological and behavioral reality in families will be assessed in overly simplistic ways.

More Comprehensive Models

In 1991, a study published by the American Bar Association and titled “Children Held Hostage: Dealing with Programmed and Brainwashed Children,” summarized data gathered by S.S. Clawar and B.V. Rivlin (1991) that summarized the findings concerning 700 divorcing families over the course of several years. The authors reported on a percentage of these families in which persistent brainwashing or programing appeared to result in severe alienation from a parent.

Then, beginning in 2001, a kind of alienation “makeover” occurred. In their seminal Family Court Review article entitled “The Alienated Child: A Reformulation of Parental Alienation Syndrome,” Joan Kelly and Janet Johnston moved the field toward a more comprehensive and complex model for understanding circumstances where a parent is rejected by a child. They began by distinguishing between an alienated child and other postures a child can take with his or her parents: 1) Affinity for one parent (a gravitation toward, or preference for, one parent as the result of bonding history or developmental factors); 2) Alignment with one parent ( e.g. , taking sides, but not refusing to see a parent); or 3) Realistic estrangement (a child rejecting a parent for logical reasons, like abuse/neglect, domestic violence, etc). In the Kelly & Johnston model, children who are truly alienated from a parent express negative emotions or opinions about their mother or father, or explicitly resist seeing the parent. The child stridently rejects one parent, displaying intense hostility, avoidance or extreme emotional distancing to a degree that yields a pathologically extreme rupture in the parent-child relationship. While there may be a kernel of truth in the child's allegations about the rejected parent, the child's negative feelings are disproportionate to his or her actual experience with the rejected parent.

One of the most valuable aspects of this model was its insistence that, after abuse/neglect (and thus realistic estrangement) are ruled out, and a determination is made that a child is alienated, an analysis should be done on the nature and intensity of a list of potential contributors that pushed the child into their irrational rejection of their mother or father. These could include: 1) Systemic factors (e.g., child triangulated in the conflict between parents, high conflict between parents, litigation, etc.); 2) Contributions from extended family, partners, friends, and professionals; 3) Behavior of the rejected parent; 4) The child's developmental stage and vulnerabilities; and 5) The alienating behavior of the favored parent.

This watershed event represented by the Kelly & Johnston model was followed by several other important contributions. Amy J. L. Baker and Douglas Darnall, in a 2006 article in the Journal of Divorce & Remarriage, suggested the field shift away from focusing on the child's reactions as the diagnostic source and toward delineating in each case whether or not a parent appeared to be displaying alienating behavior. This was followed by an article by Marsha K. Pruett, Lauren Arthur and Rachel Ebling in 2007 in the Pace Law Review, wherein the literature on maternal gatekeeping (the actions of a parent that either facilitate or restrict the other parent's ability to care for, and raise a child) was applied to child alienation, with alienation representing an extreme form of restrictive gatekeeping.

In just the last five years, there has also been increased attention to hybrid cases (families, for example, whose children appear to simultaneously alienated and realistically estranged from a parent), an approach offered by Steven Friedlander and Marjorie Gans Walters in their 2010 Family Court Review article titled “When a child rejects a parent: Tailoring the intervention to fit the problem.” Finally, scholars have begun to construct decision trees to assist practitioners as they try and understand families through the new prism of multiple types of ruptured parent-child relationships and multiple causes. (One of the more comprehensive decision trees was published by Leslie M. Drozd and Nancy W. Olesen in their 2013 book titled Parenting Plan And Child Custody Evaluations (published by Professional Resources Press).)

Implications for Legal Advocacy

The evolution toward more complex models for understanding why children irrationally reject a parent has important implications for legal practice. It is critical to rule out the possibility that a child is resisting a parent based on real, logical reasons, such as abuse or neglect. Forcing a child to have contact with a parent whose traumatizing behavior is causing the resistance to contact can be a grave error, given the short- and long-term implication of inadequate protection and re-traumatization. Conversely, allowing months of no contact and no treatment to pass by in cases where the resistance has little to do with poor parenting by the rejected parent represents another grave error with worrisome implications, given the indications from the psychological literature that children who are irrationally alienated from a parent are at risk for a host of negative outcomes; and given the well established importance for children of having a healthy relationship with two, not just one, parent.

Interrupted contact with a parent who has been irrationally rejected often means negative stereotypes about that parent are at risk of hardening, with rejection intensifying, given the absence of corrective exposure. All of this means that assessment, judicial decisions and psychological interventions need to happen rapidly, so that sensible case-planning can be done.

Those representing favored parents, rejected parents, or alienated children will be in a position to best serve their clients after a comprehensive family assessment is completed that involves all key players and an individual assessment of the subject child in order to delineate which systemic, family, or child factors best explain the rejection of a mother or father. Without this information, it is impossible to craft either a legal or therapeutic approach that is effective.

It is also important as an advocate for a parent or a child to resist the gravitational pull of simplistic ways of labeling and understanding alienation dynamics. In the case of a serious rupture in a parent-child relationship, whether due to maltreatment, overt alienation by a vengeful parent or a combination of the factors outlined above, simplicity may mean poor care and planning for children needing a sensitive and comprehensive response to what can be a tragic family circumstance.

Jeffrey P. Wittmann, PH.D., a member of this newsletter's Board of Editors, is a licensed psychologist and trial consultant whose national practice concentrates on trial support for attorneys in custody and access matters, and on forensic work-product reviews. He is author of Evaluating Evaluations: An Attorney's Handbook for Analyzing Child Custody Reports (MatLaw, 2013). Additional information can be found at childcustodyforensics.com.