Leyfi til að elska - Feb 2023, Page 14

https://doi.org/10.1177/0963721419827271
Current Directions in Psychological
Science
2019, Vol. 28(2) 212 –217
© The Author(s) 2019
Article reuse guidelines:
sagepub.com/journals-permissions
DOI: 10 1177/09637214198272 1
www.psychologicalscience.org/CDPS
ASSOCIATION FOR
PSYCHOLOGICAL SCIENCE
Since the early 1800s, courts in the United States and
England have documented volumes of family law cases
involving one parent vilifying the other parent and
poisoning the minds of their children against the
rejected parent. By the mid-1940s, clinicians working
with divorced families started publishing their observa-
tions about parents who tried to break down the child’s
love for the other parent and to enlist their children as
“allies” against the rejected parent (Rand, 2013). It was
not until the 1980s that a label was coined for this
phenomenon: parental alienation syndrome (Gardner,
1985). For a variety of reasons (e.g., whether it consti-
tutes a valid syndrome; Warshak, 2001), the term most
commonly used today is simply parental alienation
(Lorandos, Bernet, & Sauber, 2013). Research on this
topic has increased substantially over recent decades;
today, there are over 1,000 books, book chapters, and
articles in professional journals on the topic across 35
countries and six continents (Bernet, 2013).
Despite extensive historical documentation of paren-
tal alienation across legal and clinical arenas, accumu-
lated data on this topic have been largely descriptive
in nature. However, there has been extensive research
on processes that constitute parental alienating behav-
iors (e.g., gatekeeping behaviors; Austin & Rappaport,
2018). We argue that our understanding of parental
alienation has moved from a “greening,” or what is
considered a growth, stage of development into a “blos-
soming” stage, which is characterized by greater devel-
opment and integration of theories and hypothesis
testing (Simpson & Campbell, 2013).
What Parental Alienation Is
Parental alienation refers to a psychological condition
in which a child allies himself or herself strongly with
an alienating (or preferred) parent and rejects a rela-
tionship with the alienated (or targeted) parent without
legitimate justification (Lorandos et al., 2013). Parental
alienation often occurs in families in which a more
powerful parental figure (the alienating parent) engages
in abusive behaviors intended to damage and destroy
the relationship between the other, less powerful parent
(the targeted parent) and the child (Harman, Kruk, &
Hines, 2018). Parental alienation is not typically an
outcome that arises when both parents contribute to
827271 CDPXXX10.1177/0963721419827271Harman et al.Parental Alienation
research-article2019
Corresponding Author:
Jennifer J. Harman, Colorado State University, Department of
Psychology, 410 W. Pitkin Ave., Fort Collins, CO, 80523-1876
E-mail: jjharman@colostate.edu
Parental Alienation: The Blossoming
of a Field of Study
Jennifer J. Harman1, William Bernet2, and Joseph Harman3
1Department of Psychology, Colorado State University; 2Department of Psychiatry, Vanderbilt University;
and 3University of Sydney
Abstract
Parental alienation has been an unacknowledged and poorly understood form of family violence. Research on parental
alienation and the behaviors that cause it has evolved out of decades of legal and clinical work documenting this
phenomenon, leading to what could be considered a “greening,” or growth, of the field. Today, there is consensus
among researchers as to what parental alienating behaviors are and how they affect children and the family system. We
review the literature to detail what parental alienation is, how it is different from other parent–child problems such as
estrangement and loyalty conflicts, and how it is perpetuated within and across different social systems. We conclude
by highlighting research areas that need further investigation to develop and test effective solutions for ameliorating
the devastating effects of parental alienation that, we posit, should be considered and understood not only as abusive
to the child but also as a form of family violence directed toward both the child and the alienated parent.
Keywords
parental alienation, divorce, separation, family violence, child abuse