"Is It Alienating Parenting, Role Reversal or Child Abuse? A Study of children’s Rejection of a Parent in Child Custody Disputes"

PAS research summarized on Family Justice Council site There is an interesting PAS research sumarised on the Family Justice Council website.

http://www.family-justice-council.org.uk/docs/rd_06_issue1.pdf

'''Is It Alienating Parenting, Role Reversal or Child Abuse? A Study of children’s Rejection of a Parent in Child Custody Disputes'''

Johnston J, Walters M and Olesen N (2005)

Summary

Aim of study: To test competing theories about children’s refusal to have contact with the non-resident parent Methodology:

The files of 125 child disputing families in the San Francisco Bay area were evaluated by 6 clinicians.

Findings

• Just under a fifth of children were negative towards one parent and 6% were extremely rejecting. 11% showed signs of rejecting their father and 7% their mother. Fathers were more strongly rejected than mothers.

• Almost half of the parents showed some evidence of behaviour that could have sabotaged the child’s relationship with the other parent. This sabotaging behaviour was likely to put the children at risk for emotional, behavioural and learning difficulties.

• The overall findings of the study supported a multi-factorial explanation for the children’s rejecting behaviour. On their own, explanations relating to parental alienation and child abuse did not account for the variation in the incidence of children’s rejection of a parent

• Alienating parents also tended to be parents who had poor boundaries and engaged in role reversal with their children. Their emotional neediness may go some was way to account for the child’s alignment

• Substantiated child abuse had occurred in a quarter of cases

• Domestic violence occurred in two fifth of cases but did not predict children’s rejection of a parent

• Children’s rejection of a father is associated with: mother’s role reversal and warm-involvement with the child, mother’s alienating behaviour, child’s separation anxieties, father’s lack of warmth and father’s previous abuse of the child

• Children’s rejection of a mother is associated with father’s alienating behaviour, role reversal by the father, separation anxiety in relation to the father and mother’s history of child abuse

• Warm involved parenting and alienating behaviour are negatively correlated but where they occur together they powerfully affect a child’s attachments

• There was no evidence that female victims of domestic violence tended to alienate their children

Limitations: The measures used to assess child and parent