What is Parental Alienation?
What is Parental Alienation?
Most children want strong, loving relationships with both parents. When a child begins rejecting a parent without legitimate cause, the consequences can be profound. This guide draws on Dr. Warshak’s research and experience to clarify what parental alienation is, how it develops, and how families and professionals can intervene.
At a Glance
- Parental alienation refers to a child’s rejection of a parent without good cause
- Severe alienation has behavioral, emotional, and cognitive dimensions
- Most children of divorce want meaningful relationships with both parents
- Children’s alienation falls on a continuum from rational and justified estrangement to irrational rejection
- Multiple factors contribute to alienation, including the aligned parent’s negative influence, family dynamics, the child’s personality, and the rejected parent’s behavior
- Early intervention can help prevent entrenchment of alienation
Overview
Most children whose parents live apart want meaningful relationships with both parents. In my studies, and those of other researchers, children say the worst part of divorce is not having enough time with their parents.
The parent they spend the most time with during the week usually has less time for the children after divorce because of work and household demands. At the same time, children are frequently dissatisfied when contact with a parent occurs only on weekends.
The majority of children prefer regular, ongoing contact with both parents. When asked about ideal arrangements, children—and adults looking back on their parents’ divorce—most commonly favor parenting plans that more evenly balance time between homes.
Some children, however, do not want more time with an absent parent. Instead, they demean and reject the parent, and may resist or refuse contact, or show intense reluctance to be with that parent. These children are alienated. Distinguishing between reasonable rejection of a deficient parent and irrational alienation is an important step in deciding how best to help alienated children.
What Is Parental Alienation?
Parental alienation is a disturbance in which a child rejects a parent without good cause. Most irrationally alienated children enjoyed a prior good relationship with the rejected parent but now adopt the other parent’s negative attitudes about the rejected parent.
This disturbance must be distinguished from ruptures in a parent–child relationship that are justified by the rejected parent’s behavior. Some children have good reasons to distance themselves from a parent whose behavior has been harmful, frightening, or unsafe. A critical distinction lies in whether the child’s aversion is rationally proportionate to the rejected parent’s conduct or reflects an irrational response, usually fostered or supported by other influences.
Characteristics of Severely Alienated Children
Severe parental alienation differs from mild or moderate cases in both the depth of the child’s rejection and the intensity of negativity toward the rejected parent. Severely alienated children express extremely polarized views of their parents. They have little, if anything, positive to say about the rejected parent and often rewrite their relationship history to erase positive experiences.
These children may seem content to avoid all contact with the rejected parent. They may extend their rejection to an entire side of the family and threaten to defy court orders for contact. Impairments are seen in three domains: behavior, emotions, and thoughts.
Behavioral Impairments
Severely alienated children treat the rejected parent with extreme hostility, defiance, and withdrawal. They may resist or refuse contact, vandalize and steal property, threaten or perpetrate violence.
In one case described by Dr. Warshak, a boy told a custody evaluator that he would like to give his father a hard kick between the legs, kill him in his sleep, and have him die a horrible death. This level of venom is characteristic of children at the most severe end of the alienation continuum.
Severely alienated children usually behave appropriately with other adults (except those, such as judges and therapists, who expect them to work on overcoming their alienation). They direct their extreme negative behavior almost exclusively toward the rejected parent and those associated with that parent.
This pattern contrasts sharply with physically abused children. Abused children typically fear the abusive parent and behave in an obsequious, respectful, and compliant manner to avoid provoking anger. They rarely display open defiance or contempt toward the abusive parent and often resist separation from that parent and seek reunification.
Emotional Impairments
When not treating the rejected parent with open contempt, severely alienated children remain emotionally distant. They show no genuine love, affection, or appreciation. They may refuse to acknowledge occasions such as Mother’s Day or Father’s Day.
Despite conduct that far exceeds normal bounds of decency, these children show no apparent shame, guilt, or remorse for mistreating the rejected parent. Their emotional stance is not simply a matter of loving one parent more than the other. Instead, they experience a strong and irrational aversion toward a previously loved parent.
This aversion may take the form of fear, hatred, or both. Normal ambivalence and mixed feelings are replaced by rigid, negative emotion directed toward the rejected parent.
Cognitive Impairments
Negative behaviors and emotions, such as avoiding contact, are not necessarily the most troubling aspects of a child’s irrational alienation. At least of equal concern are the child’s distorted thoughts and memories about the rejected parent.
Severely alienated children believe (or claim to believe) the worst about the parent they reject. They revile and demonize the parent as dangerous, worthless, unloving, unlovable, or all of these.
The child’s thoughts and statements about the rejected parent often reflect minor, shallow, and inauthentic complaints, often expressed in language that echoes the favored parent, even when the child insists that the views are entirely their own. When trivial complaints fail to achieve the goal of cutting off contact, some children and the parent with whom they are aligned escalate to allegations of abuse.
Alienated children’s thoughts about their parents become highly skewed and polarized. Positive memories of the rejected parent are suppressed, while negative perceptions of the aligned parent are minimized or ignored.
Children may rewrite their history with the rejected parent to erase pleasant experiences. This pattern is the opposite of what is often seen in physically abused children, who tend to cling to positive memories of the abusive parent and maintain a positive image despite mistreatment.
Critical thinking is absent in these situations. The child reflexively supports the favored parent’s perspective in any disagreement between the parents. Some children ask to testify against the rejected parent or speak directly with the judge to advocate for their favored parent’s position in the litigation.
One particularly damaging pattern is what I have termed “hatred by association.” The child’s anger extends to people and even objects associated with the rejected parent, including extended family members, therapists, and pets. Children may learn that they gain approval by echoing the favored parent’s criticisms of the other parent. They recognize that displaying affection toward the rejected parent displeases the favored parent.
In some cases, children refer to the rejected parent by first name or with terms of derision rather than “Mom” or “Dad.” Although outside observers can often see that the child’s negative attitude developed in the shadow of the aligned parent’s hostility, the child typically denies any such influence and blames the rejected parent for provoking the hatred, often with vague or disproportionate explanations.
Terminology and Clarifications
Alienation and estrangement are sometimes used interchangeably, but dictionary definitions distinguish them on the basis of contact. Alienated children show contempt and withdraw affection while still in contact with the parent, often not by choice. Estranged children are physically apart from the parent in addition to being emotionally distant.
Neither term, by itself, indicates whether the distance is rational, realistic, or reasonable. Within both categories, children vary in the degree to which their rejection is justified by the parent’s behavior.
It is important to locate each child on a continuum from rational to irrational rejection and to understand the relative contributions of each parent’s behavior. A child who feels closer to one parent, but still maintains a relationship with the other, differs markedly from a child who actively, harshly, and consistently rejects one parent. Detailed criteria for evaluating whether a child’s negative behaviors constitute irrational alienation are described in The Psychology of Alienated Children.
Confusion also arises because alienation and estrangement can refer either to a state (noun) or a process (verb). Social alienation can describe a person feeling alienated from a group or the process by which that person’s behavior alienates the group. Similarly, parental alienation can refer to the child’s state of being alienated from a parent or to a parent’s alienating behavior—the actions that foster the child’s alienation. Context clarifies the intended meaning.
Ontario Justice Quinn adopted a straightforward dictionary-based approach:
“I point out that I am not concerned with ‘parental alienation’ as a psychological or a psychiatric term. My reference to parental alienation is merely factual and reflects the ordinary dictionary meaning of the words: ‘parental’ – ‘of, pertaining to, or in the nature of a parent’; ‘alienation’ – ‘the act of estranging or state of estrangement in feeling or affection.’”
Most of Dr. Warshak’s work—on this website, in Divorce Poison, and in Welcome Back, Pluto—addresses the category of children whose alienation is not reasonably justified by the rejected parent’s behavior and is not proportional to the child’s actual experience. In such cases, courts often determine that it is in the child’s best interests to spend time with the rejected parent and to repair the damaged relationship.
What Causes a Child to Become Alienated?
Childhood emotional and behavioral problems are rarely caused by a single factor, and parent–child conflicts are no exception. In cases of unreasonable rejection, the favored parent’s negative influence is usually the most visible ingredient. Other factors include features of the current and past family situation, the child’s personality, and the rejected parent’s response to the rejection.
In some families, children may be especially inclined to align with a parent who has been historically less available or whose love seems more tenuous and dependent on “loyalty,” defined as adopting that parent’s negative views of the other parent.
With few exceptions, when children relate well to one parent but irrationally reject the other, they have absorbed the favored parent’s negative perspective. Without the favored parent’s cooperation with, approval of, or encouragement of the rejection, the conflict typically would not develop into severe and persistent alienation.
The Role of the Favored Parent
Most parents feel hurt and anger when a relationship ends. Some parents do a good job of harnessing the emotions unleashed by divorce and honor their responsibility to protect their children from adult conflict. Some do not.
Some parents become so blinded by their pain, anger, or wish to punish a former partner that they lose sight of their children’s need for healthy relationships with both parents. Some believe they are the clearly superior parent and that the children can do without the other parent altogether.
Whether driven by vindictive or narcissistic dynamics, alienating parents enlist children as allies against the other parent. Through persistent bad-mouthing, lies, exaggerations, selective attention to negatives, and ignoring positives, they teach children to share their hostility. The process resembles how a politician paints an unfavorable picture to alienate voters from the opponent. Over time, this process can effectively erase the other parent from the child’s life and leave the child feeling safe giving and receiving love with only one parent.
Children who absorb the lessons of hatred often develop the behavioral, emotional, and cognitive difficulties described earlier. They pull away from a formerly loved parent—and often an entire extended family—leaving rejected relatives puzzled about what they could possibly have done to warrant a complete rupture.
When such patterns are deliberate and result in—or have the potential to cause—significant psychological harm, mental health professionals regard this as a form of child psychological abuse.
The Role of the Rejected Parent
Some rejected parents lose their temper with a child who refuses communication or interacts only with contempt. It is important to distinguish between a longstanding pattern of mistreatment and isolated lapses of judgment, and between behavior that helps cause alienation and behavior that reflects a desperate, inadequate response to it.
It is also important to avoid assuming that all children who shun a once-loved parent do so primarily due to the influence of the favored parent. Some children reject a parent whose conduct genuinely warrants caution or distance—although, as Dr. Warshak notes, many abused children cling tightly to their abusers rather than reject them.
Complexities and Misidentification
Not every child exposed to alienating behavior becomes alienated. Some, with considerable diplomacy, manage to maintain warm feelings toward both parents despite pressure to choose sides. Some children reject the parent who pressures them to align, rather than the targeted parent. Welcome Back, Pluto introduced the term “blowback” to describe this effect.
Many strands form the tapestry of parent–child relationships such as remarriage, stepfamily dynamics, developmental stages, past parental availability, personality and temperament, and early responses to conflict and alienation. To avoid simplistic explanations, these factors must be considered. At the same time, we should not overlook or excuse the cruelty of teaching children to hate those who love them.
Alienation can become entrenched when children are given undue power to dictate the terms of contact with a parent. Conversely, problems can sometimes be nipped in the bud or contained when courts make clear that irrational avoidance of a parent, supported by the other parent, will not be accepted.
Prevention and Intervention
When a child’s alienation is not reasonably justified by the rejected parent’s behavior and is disproportionate to the child’s actual experience, early intervention can alleviate the problem and prevent its entrenchment. The longer severe alienation persists, the more difficult it becomes to repair the relationship. Education and consultations for children and parents can help prevent and overcome ruptured relationships.
Children can learn how to manage difficult feelings and resist pressures to align with one parent against the other. The educational film Welcome Back, Pluto is a widely used resource that therapists and parents use to teach children about parental alienation and how to maintain good relationships with both parents.
Parents engaged in alienating behavior need to learn how they are harming their children and develop healthier ways to cope with their hurt and anger toward the other parent. Their children may resent their bad-mouthing the other parent and want to avoid being around them—blowback. In some cases, severe alienating behavior can result in restricted, supervised, or temporary loss of contact with the children.
Parents whose children are becoming alienated need to learn how to respond effectively and avoid common mistakes. They should maintain contact with their children, except when this raises concerns about the safety of the parent or child. To interrupt and reverse the decline of the parent–child relationship, it may be necessary to seek legal remedies, such as enforcing parenting time orders or requiring participation in divorce education programs or therapy.
The Role of the Court
Parents involved in family court proceedings, including high-conflict divorce and child custody litigation, sometimes learn about parental alienation through court-ordered educational programs. Some judges recommend or order parents to read Divorce Poison and to watch Welcome Back, Pluto.
Structured, time-limited parental counseling and psychoeducational programs for the entire family may help prevent parental alienation or decrease mild levels of alienating behaviors. Structured counseling teaches coping and conflict-reducing skills to parents and children.
The family court may appoint a parenting coordinator to help parents engaged in high-conflict co-parenting manage disputes, understand their children’s needs, and protect healthy parent–child relationships. In some cases, the court appoints a mental health professional to evaluate the family and make recommendations.
Court orders about parenting time and court-ordered interventions should be detailed and enforced.
Overcoming more severe alienation usually requires legal intervention. In some cases, courts place children in the custody of the rejected parent and temporarily suspend their contact with the alienating parent. Sometimes called a period of protective separation and restorative contact, this protects the children from further exposure to negative influences that may interfere with healing the relationship with their other parent.
Losing a parent is a tragedy in a child’s life. Preventing parental alienation, helping children recover from it, and avoiding lasting psychological harm are essential responsibilities—and the family court can help.
Tips for Parents and Stepparents
Below are television segments featuring Dr. Warshak. On this site you will also find resources that discuss true and false identifications of parental alienation, distinguishing between reasonable and irrational rejection of a parent, and tips for attorneys and judges in managing case issues related to parental alienation.
Holidays in Divorced Families
When Divorced Parents Move
Summer Visits with Other Parent
Step Families Part 1
Step Families Part 2
Resources and Further Reading
For more detailed information on parental alienation:
Divorce Poison is the classic comprehensive guide for parents and professionals to recognize, understand, prevent, and respond to alienating behavior and alienated children. Welcome Back, Pluto is a widely used educational film for children and families facing alienation.
Parents and professionals seeking consultation or forensic services from Dr. Warshak can learn more about available options.