Sonja Plantz
Sartell
April 25 is “Parental Alienation Awareness Day.”
Parental alienation refers to the alienating behaviors of parents; parental-alienation syndrome refers to the child’s symptoms.
Alienating parents frequently engage in harmful practices, such as:
Badmouthing.
Making the target parent appear dangerous or sick.
Accusing the targeted parent of not loving the child.
Restricting visitation or withholding contact information.
Sharing conflict and marriage issues with the child.
Making negative remarks about the targeted parent’s extended or new family.
Intercepting calls and messages from the targeted parent.
Hiding the child or moving.
Those severe effects on children can last long into adulthood. They include low self-esteem, self-hatred, major depression, drug-alcohol abuse and lack of trust.
Don’t use children as weapons!
The following are excerpts from a letter written in 2001 by Minnesota Judge Michael Haas to parents in family court:
“Your children have come into this world because of the two of you . . .These children are each half of you. Every time you tell your child what an “idiot” his father is, or what a “fool” his mother is . . . you are telling the child half of him or her is bad . . .
“If you do that to your children, you will destroy them as surely as if you had cut them into pieces, because that is what you are doing to their emotions. Think more about your children, less about yourselves. Make yours a selfless kind of love or your children will suffer.”
