Sonja Plantz
Sartell
April 25th was Parental Alienation Awareness Day.
Parental alienation refers to the alienating behaviors of parents, while parental alienation syndrome refers to the child’s symptoms.
Alienating parents frequently engage in the following harmful parenting practices:
- General badmouthing
- Making the target parent appear dangerous or sick
- Sharing the child custody case or child support issues with the child
- Accusing the targeted parent of not loving the child
- Defaming the targeted parent in front of the authorities
- Restricting visitation or withholding contact information
- Sharing parental 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 away
- Parental alienation can have severe negative effects on children that last long into adulthood
- Lower self-esteem, self-hatred is prevelant
- major depressive disorder
- Lower self-sufficiency
- Insecure attachment style
- Drug/alcohol abuse
- Lack of trust- in themselves and others
- Alienation from own children
Please don’t use our children as weapons.
In 2001 Minnesota Judge Michael Haas penned the following short letter to parents involved in the family court:
“Your children have come into this world because of the two of you. Perhaps you two made lousy choices as to whom you decided to be the other parent. If so, that is your problem and your fault. No matter what you think of the other party – or what your family thinks of the other party – these children are one-half of each of you. Remember that, because every time you tell your child what an “idiot” his father is, or what a “fool” his mother is, or how bad the absent parent is, or what terrible things that person has done, you are telling the child half of him is bad. That is an unforgivable thing to do to a child. That is not love. That is possession. 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. I sincerely hope you do not do that to your children. Think more about your children and less about yourselves, and make yours a selfless kind of love, not foolish or selfish, or your children will suffer.”
