Alienated Children As Cat’s Paws

In The Monkey and the Cat, an Aesop fable put into verse by 17^th century poet Jean de La Fontaine, Betrand the monkey induces Raton the cat to pull roasting chestnuts from the fire, by promising him a share. The cat scoops them from the burning embers one by one, burning his paw in the process, as the monkey gobbles them up. A maid entering the room ends the activity and the cat gets nothing for its pains.

The fable provides the French idiom, “Tirer les marrons du feu” (literally: pulling chestnuts out of fire), meaning to act as someone’s dupe. The English idiom, “a cat’s paw,” is defined as one used unwittingly by another as a tool to accomplish the other’s purposes.

The U.S. Supreme Court, in March 2011, upheld the validity of the cat’s paw concept in the discrimination case, Staub v. Proctor Hospital (131 S.Ct. 1186) in March 2011. The Court ruled that “if a supervisor performs an act motivated by . . . animus that is intended by the supervisor to cause an adverse employment action, and if that act is a proximate cause of the ultimate employment action, then the employer is liable.”

This decision may be relevant to family law and civil cases in which it is alleged that one parent’s animus poisoned the children’s affections for the other parent and caused the children to reject the target of the parent’s animus.

The parallel is not only that the child is used as a tool by the parent. Staub v. Proctor Hospital concerns the psychology of discrimination, and discrimination is one conceptual handle for understanding the dynamics of a child’s one-sided negative and biased perceptions and selective mistreatment of a parent. It is not just that a parent manipulates the child for the parent’s own ends; the specific aim of the parent is to inculcate in the child discriminatory attitudes and behavior toward the other parent.

With this case, the U.S. Supreme Court recognizes the validity of holding the behavior of the person with animus as the proximate cause of a behavior by a person who has been influenced by the animus. It should not take too many steps to go from this ruling to holding an alienating parent responsible for the child’s animus toward the target of divorce poison.

To read La Fontaine’s verse, The Monkey and The Cat, click here and scan to the last fable on the page (4th down). The Kindle version of this fable is available for free on Amazon.com.