HELPING ALIENATED CHILDREN WITH FAMILY BRIDGES: PRACTICE, RESEARCH, AND THE PURSUIT OF “HUMBITION”

• Author: Mark R. Otis,Richard A. Warshak
• Date: 01 January 2010
• Published date: 01 January 2010
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/j.1744-1617.2009.01290.x

HELPING ALIENATED CHILDRENWITH FAMILY BRIDGES:

PRACTICE, RESEARCH,AND THE PURSUIT OF “HUMBITION”

Richard A. Warshak and Mark R. Otis

This article briefly summarizes and responds to feedback offered by Joan Kelly regarding Family Bridges: A

Workshop for Troubled and Alienated Parent–Child Relationships™. We emphasize principles that promote an

educational atmosphere, as opposed to a therapeutic one, and the court’s role in contributing to successful

interventions with severely alienated children. Among the considerations discussed are: working with favored

parents, economic comparisons of Family Bridges with counseling approaches, modifying the programfor use in

prevention and with milder cases of alienation, and issues related to training additional team leaders and

conducting outcome research.fcre_129091..97

Keywords: alienated children,alienation,child custody,divorce,estrangement,Family Bridges,parental

alienation,pathological alienation,reintegration,reunification

Working in an emerging area of practice requires a delicate balance of courage and

caution—courage to pursue new paths, caution to ensure the well-being of those we serve.

This balance is expressed through the virtue of “humbition:” a fusion of humility and

ambition (Warshak, 2002, 2007).Applied to the field of healing disrupted parent-child

relationships, humbition allows social scientists and practitioners to balance an ambitious

application, extrapolation, and expansion of available knowledge, experience, materials,

and procedures with an acceptance of realistic limits to our ability to help parents and

children manage the dynamics of alienation.

In the field of divorce and custody research, Joan Kelly is a model of humbition. She

offers a balanced perspective on her own original empirical contributions (Kelly & Emery,

2003) and assertively drawson the literature and her experience as a clinician and mediator,

both to inform current practice and to advocate long-term research that, while ambitious,

is feasible and would enhance the quality of services to families undergoing divorce (Kelly

& Johnston, 2005).

In her commentary to Warshak (2010a), Kelly has done it again. She accurately captures

the essence of the principles, goals, structure, and content of Family Bridges: AWorkshop

for Troubled andAlienated Parent-Child Relationships™ (Family Bridges); she articulates

several essential concerns; and she provides the outline of a blueprint for an ambitious

project that would respond to such concerns to the benefit of the families with alienated

children. This article briefly summarizes and replies to Kelly’s concerns, all of which we

have spent many hours pondering as Family Bridges evolved.

Correspondence: warshak@att.net

FAMILY COURT REVIEW,Vol. 48 No. 1, January 2010 91–97

© 2010 Association of Familyand Conciliation Cour ts