Examining Parental Alienation Treatments: Problems of Principles and Practices
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Examining Parental Alienation Treatments: Problems of Principles and Practices Jean Mercer1 Published online: 3 June 2019 © Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2019
Abstract When children of high-conflict divorced parents prefer one parent and resist or refuse visitation with the other parent, some authors have spoken of this situation as parental alienation (PA). PA refers to cases of avoidance of a parent in which the preferred parent is alleged to have manipulated the child’s thinking and created antagonism toward the non-preferred parent, and in which neither abuse nor neglect has been substantiated. Advocates of the PA concept have offered treatment methods that entail court-ordered separation of the child from the preferred parent, followed by intensive treatment and aftercare through specialized counseling, with separation and treatment sometimes lasting years. This paper examines the published evidence and other material related to the safety and effectiveness of PA treatments, and concludes that the treatments have not been shown to be effective, but are in fact potentially harmful. Suggestions are made for research approaches that could help to explain avoidance of a parent and that could yield effective treatment for such avoidance. Keywords Parental alienation · Divorce · High-conflict families · Visitation, reunification Because many social workers are interested in and trained in family systems approaches, they may do important work toward family reunification following various kinds of separations of parents and children. The term reunification has for years involved the re-establishment through therapy of parent–child relationships after children have been in foster care because of substantiated abuse or neglect by parents (Miller, Fisher, Fetrow, & Jordan, 2006). In the last decade or two, the term reunification therapy has also come to be used for work with high-conflict divorcing families whose children show reluctance or refusal for visitation with one of the parents (VRR; see Garber, 2007). Reunification therapies for VRR in high-conflict divorce cases are often court-ordered and involve all the challenges characteristic of treatment of reluctant clients. Generally, these treatments have used counseling methods and talk therapies. However, some authors have conceptualized severe cases of VRR as matters of “parental alienation”, a child’s or adolescent’s intransigent rejection of one parent caused by the intentional or unintentional persuasion of the
* Jean Mercer [email protected] 1
Stockton University, Galloway, NJ, USA
other, preferred parent (see, e.g., Warshak, 2010). Proponents of the parental alienation (PA) concept recommend special forms of treatment, parental alienation treatments (PATs), that purport to change an alienated child’s views of and behavior toward a rejected parent (see, e.g., Childress, 2015). These treatments, which are generally proprietary and court-ordered, separate children from the preferred parent for some period of time and
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