Family Law. Parental Alienation Is Real

• Author: Ashish Joshi
• Pages: 8-9

HEADNOTES

Published in Litigation, Volume 47, Number 3, Spring 2021. © 2021 by the American Bar Association. Reproduced with permission. All rights reserved. This information or any portion thereof may not be

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FAM ILY LA W

Parental

Alienation Is

Real: Exposing

the Myth of

the Woozle

ASHISH JOSHI

The author is a senior editor of Litigation and a

contributing author to the book Litigating Paren-

tal Alienation: Evaluating and Presenting an

Effective Case in Court (ABA 2021).

American family courts have exposed

the myth of the much-dreaded Woozles—

the honey-stealing villains living in cold,

snowy places that Winnie-the-Pooh has

long warned us about. The myth that

the phenomenon of parental alienation

doesn’t exist or has no underpinning in

science or is simply an ideology masquer-

ading as science in the gender war over

the children has so often been repeated

that people assume it to be true. No more.

A review of recent legal opinions from the

family courts around the country, together

with the professional, scientific literature,

debunks this myth. Family court judges

have held not only that “there is no doubt

that parental alienation exists” but also

that it is “not a new phenomenon” and that

“[a]nybody old enough to drink coffee

knows that embittered parties to divorce

can and do manipulate their children.” J.F.

v. D. F., 61 Misc. 3d 1226(A), 2018 N.Y. slip

op. 51829(U), at *8 (2018).

Hacking away at the cobwebs of need-

less psychobabble, family courts have

determined that “whether or not a psy-

chological ‘syndrome’ exists, parental

alienation clearly does.” Judges—the tri-

ers of fact in domestic relations litigation—

have found that it is far more important

and effective to focus on a parent’s behav-

ior rather than to go down the rabbit hole

chasing esoteric theories of a syndrome

that may or may not exist. The devil is in

the details and “there is no reasonable dis-

pute that high-conflict custody disputes

frequently involve acts by one parent de-

signed to obstruct or sabotage the oppos-

ing parent’s relationship with the child.”

Martin v. Martin, No. 349261, slip op. at 7

n.2 (Mich. Ct. App. Jan. 28, 2020).

Mental health experts have used dif-

ferent terms to describe parental alien-

ation. In their book, Children Held Hostage,

published by the ABA Section of Family

Law, Stanley Clawar, a sociologist, and

Brynne Rivlin, a social worker, used the

terms “programming,” “brainwashing,”

and “indoctrination” when describing

the behaviors that cause the children to

reject a parent without a legitimate jus-

tification. There are two key features of

the phenomenon of parental alienation.

First, it can be conceptualized as a men-

tal condition present in the child, i.e., the

child has a distorted or false belief that

the rejected or disfavored parent is “evil,”

“dangerous,” or somehow unworthy of love

or affection. Second, the child’s rejection

of the alienated or target parent is without

legitimate justification. And this is the key

distinction: If there is documented history

of the rejected parent being abusive or se-

verely neglectful, the child’s rejection of

that parent could be legitimate, and if so, it

would not be a case of parental alienation.

As to how parental alienation takes

place, the research conducted by Dr. Amy

Baker and her colleagues describing the 17

alienating strategies is widely used and ac-

cepted by the courts and the mental health

community. They include bad-mouthing,

limiting contact, confiding in the child,

asking the child to spy on the target par-

ent, referring to the target parent by first

Headnotes illustrations by Sean Kane