A handful of presentations at the International Conference on Shared Parenting 2017 were on parental alienation. This is a challenging area to study because (1) some kids hate one or both parents even in intact families, (2) some kids may hate a parent because the parent has done something to them, and (3) some kids may hate Parent B because Parent A says bad things about Parent B.
In the family law context, psychologists collect fees to determine if Case #3 is occurring and the standard seems to be “I know it when I see it.” The waters are inherently muddy due to the fact that a parent who files a divorce lawsuit is generally doing something harmful to his or her children (see the Litigation chapter: “It a mistake to think of divorce lawsuits as being Parent 1 v. Parent 2,” was how one lawyer explained the typical situation. “In the cases where anyone has enough money to hire me, the parties who are opposed are the plaintiff parent and the children.”). The waters are further muddied by the fact that many states give child support plaintiffs (winner parents) a financial incentive to engender hatred of the defendant (loser) parent. If the child refuses to spend time with the loser parent and the parenting time split goes from 70/30 to 100/0, for example, the cash profitability of the child increases under many states’ child support guidelines.
The stories of children who haven’t seen one of their parents, a person who actually does love them, for years or decades, are sad. We actually have one of these guys in our suburban neighborhood. He doesn’t know whether his adult daughter is dead or alive because, decades ago, his plaintiff “just made it too difficult to see her.” He’s super gentle, so he probably would have been an important resource for the girl (now woman). Certainly he seems like a good father to his elementary-school-age child (though, unless he moves out of Massachusetts into one of the states with 50/50 shared parenting as a default, he is at risk of a repeat!).
Nonetheless, as a numbers person it is tough to know what to do with sentiment. A common outcome of an American divorce or custody lawsuit is that the child hasn’t seen the loser parent within the previous year (see the Children, Mothers, and Fathers chapter for how it might be roughly 2/3rds of children of divorce falling into this category). But how much of that is due to parental alienation? Nobody cares enough to gather data and it might be challenging to gather even if anyone did care.
Americans at the conference, mostly lawyers and psychologists, confirmed what the litigators we’d interviewed for Real World Divorce told us: most states’ family courts make it easy for a motivated plaintiff to go from being winner parent to being 100-percent parent. Where the conference attendees differed from the veteran litigators was on plaintiff motivation. The attendees simply denied the possibility of a financial motive for fomenting parental alienation. It was a psychological phenomenon and therefore the only remedies were bringing more and better psychologists into lawsuits.
I cited Brinig and Allen (see Causes of Divorce), who found that the possibility of being the winner parent increased the probability of a divorce lawsuit being filed and then, in a later paper, that the profitability of child support also influenced the probability of a plaintiff seeking to be divorced in the first place. How could parental alienation work in Nevada? I asked. With a 50/50 shared parenting guideline and child support capped at $13,000 per year, how could it be done and, more importantly, why would someone bother trying? Nobody was persuaded that changing the incentives would be more effective than bringing more psychologists into the courtroom. This was true even with a guy who’d actually lost a child (attending the conference to find remedies and sources for his situation). He was a Massachusetts resident who had been the loser in a winner-take-all divorce. He believed that his child was currently alienated from him due to actions taken by the plaintiff/winner parent. I couldn’t sell him on the idea that he might not even have been sued in the first place if he’d lived in Nevada, Arizona, or Pennsylvania, and that as a 50/50 parent in those states his plaintiff would have had a tougher time embarking on a program of parental alienation. As with most Americans at the conference, he wanted to see better-funded family courts (but we already spend more on family court matters than any other society in the history of humanity!), better personnel, and better procedures so that there would be more accurate outcomes after litigation.
The one thing I learned is that parental alienation allegations may be most commonly made by winner parents. How is that possible when the children are with the loser parent only every other weekend? Here’s how the process was explained to me: Plaintiffs typically sue when children are young; the winner parent gets accustomed to a compliant 5-year-old; the winner parent loses the relocation fight so the kid is actually still in contact with the loser parent; the sweet 5-year-old turns into a questioning 13-year-old; the 13-year-old begins to question the winner parent’s motivations and veracity; the 13-year-old gets an earful on the greed and mendacity of the winner parent from the loser parent’s new partner (evil stepmother, just like in fairy tale!); the 13-year-old decides to switch allegiance and refuses to return “home” to the winner parent’s house, thus putting the continued child support cashflow at risk.
Readers: What do you think? If we know that a child hates one parent is there in fact a practical hope of figuring out why? Or will we just spend the remnants of what would have been this child’s college fund paying psychologists to guess?
Related:
- no blog entry is complete without a reference to Rachel Dolezal, who sued her husband (and father of one of her two children) and was subsequently accused by the defendant of parental alienation (New York Daily News)
It seems likely to be both: A psychological phenomena influenced by the financial incentives created by the legal environment. Fixing the incentives makes sense, but that wouldn’t necessarily mean there would never be a need for psychologists.
>> “Where the conference attendees differed from the veteran litigators was on plaintiff motivation. The attendees simply denied the possibility of a financial motive for fomenting parental alienation. It was a psychological phenomenon and therefore the only remedies were bringing more and better psychologists into lawsuits.”
Could it be that there is an incentive for the attendees to deny the possibility of a financial motive? Even the acknowledgement of the possibility of a financial motive can potentially put the entire divorce litigation system(in its current state) at risk, and it would certainly reduce(and maybe even eliminate) the need for psychologists. It would seem to be in the interests of some of the attendees to protect the current system and drive up demand for their services(needing “more and better” psychologists).
>> “Nobody was persuaded that changing the incentives would be more effective than bringing more psychologists into the courtroom. This was true even with a guy who’d actually lost a child (attending the conference to find remedies and sources for his situation).”
Could it be that with regard to this guy, he simply had difficulty accepting the possibility that he married the wrong person, and was exploited as a result? Maybe he was simply trying to rationalize the situation without having come to grips with the true cause of his predicament…
Why would a $50/hour psychologist prefer to to do $250/hour litigation work and kow-tow to the lawyers that hire him/her?
Lopsided custody that increases children’s distress may well generate more office hours for psychologists overall.
Smart article. The current system in the US is highly profitable to the lawyers, mental health specialists and “winner” parents. It encourages people to enter marriage with the fall back position of stealing. Interestingly the “winner” parent is often the parent who by objective standards is the loser parent, i.e, usually a lot less successful in terms of career or any objective accomplishments. The courts see the vague “best interests of the child” as an opportunity to redistribute wealth — or as one lawyer described a particular judge in NYC, that she is “generous” i.e with the loser parent’s money. And so much of what the courts do is based on the opinions of mental health “experts,” whose predictive powers are probably not all that different from common sense.
Unless someone has some very serious disorder, such as a child being suicidal, I don’t see any benefit to psychologists doing forensic interviews of children at all.
One of my best friends is in a situation where his only child became alienated from him in the course of a divorce. It was pretty clear that the mother manipulated the child into believing her father was a monster, perhaps in part for financial reasons but also because she was angry – her husband was the one that left (not because he had someone else but because he couldn’t stand her anymore – she was a shopaholic). Anyway, I always thought that as the girl reached maturity she would realize that she had been manipulated by her mother and that her father really loved her and had never done anything wrong to her, but no such luck. She recently graduated college (that he paid for) and he wrote her a very respectful note asking to attend graduation and she wrote back a very angry note that he should never contact her again, ever. The only thing that I can think of that would create that kind of anger is that the mother implanted in the girl some kind of false memory of being abused, which she wasn’t (although she didn’t mention anything like that in her reply. Anyway, it’s very distressing and at this point I don’t think it’s ever going to change – the girl thinks that her father is Hitler and that’s that.
Jack: That’s a sad story, of course, and the father’s reasons for wanting to be divorced are certainly sufficient under our no-fault system (indeed, he could have simply said “I just don’t want to be married anymore” and a court would have welcomed him). But in the old days, “shopaholic” or “someone I can’t stand”, might have resulted in a separation once the child went off to college. The daughter here might have felt that she had a right to continuous access to both parents in the same house, even if the two parents weren’t in love or best friends. That’s consistent with the research papers on what is best for children, though obviously it isn’t the best situation for at least one of the adults. It is also a right that society recognized for children until the 1970s. So the daughter is out of step with the modern family court system and modern social values that give priority to adult desires.
I think that the law changed for a good reason. Certainly kids would prefer to have two happily married parents – who wouldn’t? But living in a household where your parents hate each other’s guts (or at least one of them hates the other) but can’t get a divorce because the law doesn’t permit it doesn’t sound like a recipe for happiness.
Jackie: We cover this in http://www.realworlddivorce.com/History and http://www.realworlddivorce.com/ChildrenMothersFathers
As states adopted no-fault divorce, adults who were benefiting from divorce (e.g., the plaintiff who wanted to go off and have sex with new partners, the lawyers and expert witnesses being paid, the judges and court personnel) asserted that “happy mom = happy kids” and children would be happier without seeing two adults bicker in the primary household. But starting in the 1980s the research psychologists cast doubt on these cheerful (for the adults) assumptions. It seems that children, on average, do not vicariously benefit from the things that make divorce great for at least one adult. Unless the parents were physically violent toward each other, children, on average, do better in an intact family. (Let’s also look at the transaction costs. Due to the amount of money spent on litigation, the expense of running two households, etc., children of divorce have narrower and inferior educational options and attainment. Are the kids better off as college graduates whose parents bickered through high school? Or as high school graduates with a market-clearing wage of $11/hour in a world of $15/hour minimum wage?
Let’s also look at the idea of “one [parent] hates the other” as a constant. Is it reasonable to assume that the amount of hatred one person feels for another is fixed and won’t change?
Suppose that on-demand no-fault divorce is not available. Joe hates his shopaholic wife Debbie for filling the garage with Chinese-made plastic. If Joe is stuck with Debbie, absent her agreement to a 1950s-style divorce, he has an incentive to negotiate with her and make peace with her. In a world of no-fault divorce, however, he can afford to indulge in hating Debbie because she will soon be merely a defendant in a lawsuit that Joe is guaranteed to win (i.e., the court will grant him a divorce against Debbie’s wishes and, statistically, against the interest of their joint children).
I can hate a local restaurant for taking 45 minutes to deliver some food to a table full of restive children?
Sure. I never need to go back there again. Can I hate the Honda dealer because it took five visits to fix a stuck brake caliper and get a new state inspection sticker (epic multi-week hassle; fixing the caliper caused a leaking tire and fixing the leaking tire caused a tire pressure monitoring system failure (plus the state inspection was invoiced but not actually done!))? No. We are yoked together despite the fact that each of us probably won’t enjoy getting a phone call from the other. [not quite true because I’m near a big city and there are multiple Honda dealers, but imagine that we were in a less densely populated area]