{"id":648,"date":"2007-06-28T20:17:03","date_gmt":"2007-06-29T00:17:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.law.harvard.edu\/shlep\/2007\/06\/28\/parental-alienation-syndrome\/"},"modified":"2007-06-28T20:18:15","modified_gmt":"2007-06-29T00:18:15","slug":"parental-alienation-syndrome","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/shlep\/2007\/06\/28\/parental-alienation-syndrome\/","title":{"rendered":"Parental Alienation Syndrome"},"content":{"rendered":"

An interesting issue arising in some custody battles in recent years is something called Parental Alienation Syndrome.\u00a0 As described in this article<\/a>, PAS is a not-yet-officially recognized “ailment,” inflicted upon children by custodial parents during and\/or after divorce.\u00a0 Basically, PAS occurs when the parent who has greater access to the child uses that access to negatively influence that child’s feelings about the other parent.<\/p>\n

Although doctors and psychiatrists are in dispute about the validity of PAS, it is arising in custody cases more and more often.\u00a0 Still, it can be difficult to prove PAS because the lack of official recognition makes it difficult or impossible to secure expert testimony on the subject.\u00a0<\/p>\n

This is one of those areas where the law seems, to me, hopelessly out of touch with people’s day to day lives.\u00a0\u00a0 In order to get evidence of PAS admitted into court,\u00a0it\u00a0must be a scientific syndrome, described and analyzed in technical language and supported by\u00a0empirical studies.\u00a0\u00a0Yet ordinary people know that, whether or not it rises to the level of a syndrome,\u00a0the concept of parental alienation exists.<\/p>\n

Unfortunately for children of divorce, many parents are unable to control their anger at one another when their marriage\u00a0fails.\u00a0 Even more unfortunately,\u00a0one parent may\u00a0take out this anger by manipulating the child into\u00a0blaming or disliking the other parent.\u00a0\u00a0Does the court really need to see studies showing that this type of behavior is harmful to the parent-child relationship?\u00a0 \u00a0<\/p>\n

At any rate, I thought this was a useful issue for shlep discussion because I suspect that pro se patrons who are dealing with child custody issues often worry about the influence the other parent is having on the child’s feelings.\u00a0 It might be helpful to these people to learn more about PAS and its effects, even if they aren’t ultimately able to get everything into the courtroom.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

An interesting issue arising in some custody battles in recent years is something called Parental Alienation Syndrome.\u00a0 As described in this article, PAS is a not-yet-officially recognized “ailment,” inflicted upon children by custodial parents during and\/or after divorce.\u00a0 Basically, PAS occurs when the parent who has greater access to the child uses that access to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1410,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[900],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-648","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-viewpoint"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/shlep\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/648","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/shlep\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/shlep\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/shlep\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1410"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/shlep\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=648"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/shlep\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/648\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/shlep\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=648"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/shlep\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=648"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/shlep\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=648"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}