New study finds little misuse of parental alienation arguments in child custody cases medicalxpress.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from medicalxpress.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
14 Dec, 2020
Family separations in which child custody is in question can get complicated, painful, and contentious. But some of these families also deal with an additional challenge: parental alienation, in which one parental figure has waged a psychological campaign to, baselessly, turn a child against the other parent.
Jennifer Harman, CSU associate professor of psychology
Colorado State University Associate Professor of Psychology Jennifer Harman and others, have researched parental alienation and its effects for years, and explain that it is different from estrangement. An alienated child will, in moderate to severe cases, unequivocally and unjustifiably reject the targeted parent without true cause. The scientifically determined phenomenon has very real consequences not just to the other parent (more than 40% of parents currently being moderately or severely alienated have considered suicide in the past year), but also to the children, who frequently have long-term psyc