It can take serious restraint to hold your tongue, but saying anything negative about a co-parent is a losing prospect for you, them and especially your children.
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It’s devastating, especially for the children.
A couple divorce. Conflict is extreme. One parent tries to gain control of the children by turning them against the former wife, husband or partner.
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It’s not just an occasional denigration of the ex in front of the kids, which is questionable enough. It’s an obsessive war to kill the child’s bond to the former spouse.
Unfortunately, these campaigns of distortion, fuelled by North America’s adversarial divorce system, are common. Jennifer Harman, at Colorado State University, found in 2019 that 35 per cent of American parents and 32 per cent of Canadian parents feel they’re being alienated from their offspring.