Customer Reviews

Parental Alienation Syndrome in Court Referred Custody Cases

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This book provides the reader with thought provoking ideas regarding parental alienation, its causes, symptomology, and remedies. It is useful for family law attornies, mental health professionals, and families involved in custody cases. Parents whose children have turned away from them and refuse visitation will find this book insightful and with a possible answer to their children's refusal or reluctance to visit them.

The biggest problem that the author seems to have is that, as an avid proponent for a certain idea, she has allowed that fervor to blind her to other very legitimate causes of why a child might not want to visit or live with an abusive parent.

One of the basic necessities for a non-biased evaluation of anything, whether it is a clinical trial for a new drug, a child custody evaluation, or a winetasting event, is that the evaluator must identify and screen out co-causes of the outcome. In a court case in which someone sued for negligence due to a slip and fall, were they looking ahead or were they distracted? Were they carrying anything? What were their shoes like? In those shoes, do they also fall easily on other surfaces? There are dozens of co-causes, and it is the sometimes subjective role of the jury or judge to rule them out or to decide how much they contributed to the outcome. In medical and clinical trials, contributing factors are explicitly listed as "co-causes" or "co-morbidity," and are statistically weighted.

This author, however, throws common sense out the window by failing to note other possible co-causes for alienation or to give them any weight in her evaluation. Is the alienated parent also explosive in temper? Have they frightened the child in the past? Are they overly critical, or do they bully the child, or the other parent? Have they been abusive to the other parent in front of the child? To fail to give weight to other factors, and to assign all the blame to the non-alienated parent, is shoddy clinical work.

For a more balanced counterpoint, and one helpful in recognizing the other dynamics at work in problematic family situations, I would suggest Lundy Bancroft's "The Batterer as Parent: Addressing the Impact of Domestic Violence on Family Dynamics."