When parents act badly.

• Position: Divorce

The children of divorcing or separating parents often are proverbially "caught in the middle." What is worse is when one parent tries to turn the child against the other parent through bad-mouthing, lying, or withholding contact. Sound familiar?--that behavior, deliberately trying to sabotage a child's relationship with the other parent, has a name: parental alienation. It is a topic familiar to most people but, in social, psychological, and legal realms, it is understudied and underdiscussed.

Social scientists Jill Harman and Zeynep Biringen of Colorado State University, Ft. Collins, are coauthors of Parents Acting Badly: How Institutions and Societies Promote the Alienation of Children from Their Loving Families. Harman, associate professor of psychology, Is a social psychologist who studies intimate relationships, while Biringen, professor of human development and family studies, is a developmental psychologist who studies parent-child relationships, attachment theory, and emotional availability.

"There is so much more to this than just two parents fighting," says Harman." It's a systemic, social problem."

Most of the people who have researched parental alienation have done so from a clinical perspective, by studying children in therapy who are traumatized by what is happening. Harman and Biringen wanted to reframe the problem through the lens of social psychology theory.

Alienation, emphasizes Harman, is different from estrangement. Estrangement is what happens when the parent actually is doing something bad or abusive, and the relationship with the child is justifiably strained or broken. Parental alienation, on the other hand, is when the child's emotional separation from the alienated parent is fueled by untruth or exaggeration from the other parent.

Throughout their research, Harman and Biringen found that both mothers and fathers alienate, but the custodial parent (who is more likely to be the mother) has more opportunity to do so. They also found that it is not just parents--grandparents are victims, too, as are stepparents.

The topic is not without...