Leave No Child Behind: Parental Alienation in Family Courts

• Author: Ashish Joshi
• Pages: 33-36

Published in Litigation, Volume 47, Number 4, Summer 2021. © 2021 by the American Bar Association. Reproduced with permission. All rights reserved. This information or any portion thereof may not

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Leave No Child Behind

Parental Alienation in Family Courts

ASHISH JOSHI

On the chessboard of divorce, children can be pawns, played by

one parent to align against the other.

It’s called parental alienation. PA has been written about in

the Anglo-American jurisprudence for at least 200 years. Well

recognized today within the psychological and pediatric profes-

sional communities, PA is a form of child abuse that does not

discriminate based on gender. Both mothers and fathers engage

in alienating behaviors. American family courts have acknowl-

edged the phenomenon; categorized it as emotional child abuse;

and provided appropriate legal and mental-health interventions,

including changes of custody, specialized reunification programs,

financial sanctions, and in some severe cases, incarceration of

the guilty parent.

Late last year, we met to discuss the handling of PA by

American family courts. Dr. Richard Warshak, an internationally

renowned expert and a past clinical professor of psychiatry at the

University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, is the author

of Divorce Poison: How to Protect Your Family from Bad-Mouthing

and Brainwashing (HarperCollins 2010). Judge Elizabeth

Gleicher, a recipient of the State Bar of Michigan Champion of

Justice Award, sits on the Michigan Court of Appeals. Judge

Kristina Karle, a former prosecutor with experience in domestic

violence and child abuse cases at the Monroe County, New York,

District Attorney’s Office, presides in the Ontario County, New

York, court. This transcript has been edited for length and clarity.

Mr. Joshi: How do we define PA?

Dr. Warshak: We should distinguish between what we call

parental alienation and the alienating behaviors themselves. PA

is the state of the child’s relationship with a parent whom the

child unreasonably rejects. Alienating behaviors refer to the ac-

tivities that can damage a child’s relationship with a parent and

contribute to the child’s rejection of that parent.

Mr. Joshi: And how do the courts view PA?

Judge Karle: When I first started handling these cases, I felt

that judges were reluctant to believe that parental alienation re-

ally occurs. We’ve made significant progress, but there’s always

more work to be done. As judges, we must approach each case

open and willing to learn, to be educated by lawyers who present

evidence and ideas with which we may be unfamiliar.

Judge Gleicher: I came to the appellate bench with no back-

ground in family law. I began my service as a skeptic of new,

untested, or unvetted science or pseudoscience. I sort of reflex-

ively put the thought of PA as a syndrome into that bucket. What

I learned from reading the actual evidence and the records in

cases is that there are families in crisis because of the conduct

of one parent that, unfortunately, has a huge and terrible impact

on the relationship of the child or children with the other parent.

Whatever we choose to call it, judges are the front line to save

those parent-child relationships.

The author is a senior editor of Litigation and the author of Litigating Parental Alienation—

Evaluating and Presenting an Effective Case in Court (ABA 2021).