GEORGE NEWS - April 25 is Parent Alienation Awareness Day - a day that aims to highlight the plight of many parents (mostly divorced) who are subjected to Parental Alienation Syndrome (PAS). George Herald asked local PAS expert Christie Els to shed some light on the subject.
South Africa’s new Children’s Act inscribed the principle of co-parenting by awarding shared guardianship to both biological parents. Regardless of the good therein, it proved to cause situation-specific challenges during separation and divorce.
Mental health and legal professionals are becoming more aware of cases where children are caught in the parental battlefield by being used as a weapon against the other parent. It is called parental alienation syndrome (PAS) when a child’s rejection of a parent is regarded as greatly disproportionate to the parent’s alleged misdeeds.
PAS leaves no space for children to love both parents because they are faced with the gradual annihilation of the rejected parent’s dignity and significance in their day-to-day life. Poisoning the child to believe the other parent is all bad may eventually result in the calculated destruction of a once meaningful relationship between parent and child.
A child’s aversion towards the rejected parent is often misunderstood. Alienating parents are well-referenced in professional literature as using their child in a campaign of denigration against the other parent. Their observable behaviour patterns are characterised by over exaggerating real but insignificant past annoyances such as daily conflicts, loss of temper and even quirks of character to rationalise the child’s cruel rejection.
The alienator interferes with the other parent’s access to the child, often using manipulating manoeuvres to out-smart courts for many years by recruiting miss-informed law practitioners, therapists, doctors and school personnel in the relentless pursuit of their alienating agenda.
Collaborators in this extremely damaging parenting regime often claim that the child's voice must be heard. By not resisting to believe the child’s irrational justification for rejecting the other parent, even well-intending friends may end up condoning what is scientifically regarded as psychological abuse.
Without intervention, PAS can have an irreversible, harmful effect once the child reaches maturity, especially in cases where the alienator also suffers from an underlying mental condition. Severe cases may eventually result in the rejected parent’s loss of the child, which is described by parents in this unfortunate situation as possibly worse than losing a child to death.
If you believe that your child’s negative behaviour towards you might be due to PAS, act before things get worse.
The following tips can be useful:
• Obtain good legal representation and ensure that your lawyer is educated about PAS
• Act with integrity - you may not have control over the other parent’s actions but there are ways to handle the situation with your children
• Maintain contact and be consistent with your children
• Give clear messages to your children, such as "children should not have to choose one parent over the other"
• Don’t blame your children for the rejection - it’s not their fault
• Don’t give up on your children - it may take years before you see change
Always remember that you do matter to your child - deep down children yearn for both parents to be in their lives.
Article by Christie Els, a counselling psychologist in private practice in George. Christie is the first South African to be included in the international Parental Alienation Study Group, a selected group of mental health and law professionals from 32 countries contributing to research and the scientific foundation of PAS.
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