Psychologists have known for decades that children’s thoughts and feelings can be manipulated by adults, including their parents. See Divorce Poison for two classic studies.
But those who oppose the concept of parental alienation argue it is one thing to plant false ideas and memories in a child’s mind: it is quite another to convince a child that a parent, whom the child already knows, does not deserve the child’s affection and respect. It can’t be done, the deniers claim. The child knows the parent too well to fall for this ploy. If the parent is a decent parent, no amount of teaching the child to hate will take root. Thus, they argue, if your child claims to hate you, you must have done something to deserve it.
We could consult the entire body of scholarship on parental alienation to show the fallacy of this argument. My colleagues and I did just that in a review published by the American Psychological Association.
But one dramatic example of a child who fell victim to a parent’s toxic influence is enough to show how naïve it is to think a parent’s alienating behavior cannot succeed in turning a child against a good parent. I’ve got plenty of examples. Here’s one.
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The detectives found three pools of blood on the bathroom floor. Blood covered the walls and carpet. Blood soaked through the mattress and pillowcase.
The woman ran from her attacker, locked herself in the bathroom, and called 911. Her assailant busted down the bathroom door, and the baseball bat cracked down upon her skull and body. She managed to escape from the house. When the police arrived, they found her running down the street of her suburban neighborhood, clad only in her underwear, her assailant in pursuit with the bat.
The twist in this case is that it was not a stranger or her ex-husband whom the police found chasing this woman. It was the woman’s 15-year-old son.
Three days earlier the court-appointed custody evaluator had issued his report, recommending that the boy’s 12-year-old sister continue to live primarily with her mother. Old country tunes played in the background of the restaurant where, over hamburgers and cokes, the father told his daughter she would be better off if her mother were dead. Then he outlined the plan.
The girl would let her brother into the house in the middle of the night. The two children would attack their mother and then pretend she had attacked them, and they killed her in self-defense.
When the initial blows did not kill her and the mother locked herself in the bathroom, the daughter called her father who came right over. In the background of the 911 recording the father can be heard encouraging his son to beat the victim “harder, harder, harder.”
The district attorney charged the father with having “coerced, persuaded and enticed his children to commit this atrocious crime upon their mother.” The father was found guilty of attempted first-degree murder, aggravated kidnapping and contributing to a child’s misconduct. His son pled to a to a reduced charge of aggravated battery. This father so poisoned his children’s view of their mother that he convinced them she deserved to die at their hands. You can read about the case here.
How would those who devalue the concept of parental alienation explain what happened in this family? Would they say this mother deserved her children’s hatred? That they attempted to murder her because of how she treated them? Would they exonerate the father of any role in causing his children’s criminal behavior? Would they argue the D. A. should not have assumed that the dad’s influence contributed to his children’s violent behavior because there is insufficient scientific evidence to demonstrate such a link?
We will leave it for another time to evaluate the science behind the idea that a parent’s toxic influence can cause a child to reject the other parent. For now, I will simply point out that arguments about the lack of experimental data showing a causal link between parents’ alienating behavior and their children’s alienation would apply equally to assertions about the harmful impact of the physical and sexual abuse of children. Since scientists cannot ethically set up an experiment that randomly assigns children to a group that is abused versus not abused, some amount of inference is necessary to understand the causal link. Yet no one would deny that abuse harms children.
Inference is part of science. It is the process by which a custody evaluator and a judge reach conclusions based on evidence and reasoning. Those who deny the validity of the concept of parental alienation ignore extensive evidence in academic and professional journals and ignore common sense. Common sense of the type that lets us connect these dots:
- A child used to love both parents.
- After the parents separate, Parent A repeatedly tells the child that everything associated with Parent B is bad, deserving of hatred, and the child does not have to spend time with Parent B if she does not want to.
- The child begins to say she hates and does not want to see Parent B or anyone in Parent B’s family, and when asked why, the child cannot give any reasonable justification.
- Parent B has done nothing to deserve the child’s rejection.
When all this is true, common sense lets us reason that Parent A’s behavior caused the child to turn against Parent B. Just as common sense helps us understand why two Kansas children whose dad instructed them to kill their mom attempted to do his bidding.
Not possible to turn a child against a parent? Tell that to the mom who ran down the street in her underwear to escape her baseball bat-wielding teenage son.
Divorce poison is real, and so is its toxic impact on children and parents. Let’s stop debating the validity of parental alienation and focus efforts on reducing casualties by helping families, the courts, and the public better understand, prevent, and overcome the problem.