Rethinking Parental Alienation

When conflict flares after separation, it’s tempting to grab the nearest label and call it an answer. We take you inside the messy reality behind “parental alienation,” unpacking why children resist contact, how loyalty binds and dysregulation show up, and what a child-first approach looks like when the adults are at war. Drawing on clinical practice with children and families, we explain why labels without careful formulation can mislead courts, inflame parents, and silence the child’s experience.

We explore a family systems perspective: behavior emerges in a relational field, not from one person alone. You’ll hear how kids align with the emotionally safer parent, reject the emotional cost of contact, and adopt rigid stories to manage inner conflict. We trace the difference between a legal strategy and sound psychology, and show how adversarial arguments can override safeguarding. Yes, there are times when alienation is real—persistent undermining, pressure to reject, rehearsed falsehoods—but those findings must come after thorough, developmentally informed assessment and evidence of pattern, not before.

We also clarify “rights.” Parents may hold decision-making rights, but contact is the child’s right, conditional on safety and welfare. Rights come with responsibility, and courts test them against the child’s best interests. If you’re navigating allegations, confusion, or ongoing proceedings, slowing down and widening the lens can prevent harm. Keep the child’s emotional reality central, seek specialist clinical input, and resist quick narratives that feel neat but miss the truth. If this conversation resonates, subscribe, share with someone who needs it, and leave a review to help others find a child-first path through conflict.

Chapters

• 0:00 Setting The Stage: Child First
• 1:29 Bias, Duty, And Safeguarding
• 2:46 False Memory Battles And Legal Tactics
• 4:31 Parental Alienation As A Legal Tool
• 6:33 Labels Versus Clinical Formulation
• 7:44 Family Systems And Child Adaptations
• 9:11 Why Children Resist Contact
• 10:36 Law’s Limits And Safeguarding Risks
• 12:11 When Alienation Is Genuine
• 13:12 Centering The Child’s Emotional Reality
• 13:39 Parents’ Rights Versus Child’s Rights
• 15:43 Support, Signposting, And Next Steps

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:00

Hello, this is Kim Lee, child and adolescent psychotherapist, and welcome to another Children's Consultancy podcast. This is a continuation of the previous podcasts where the experience of children and young people who are between separated or divorced parents is concerned. Now, in this episode I want to talk about the misconception of rights as parents may view them, and also this notion of parental alienation. There's a lot of mythology in both. First of all, I want to say that quite often when these sorts of situations blow up and I'm involved because my abiding responsibility is to children, it means that I may have to intervene in ways that normally one of the two parents doesn't like. I did have a bias, and it was a bias that was underpinned by the welfare and safeguarding of the child. Of course, that's a very important distinction because my bias, so to speak, is actually a duty of care. It's an ethical and legal responsibility, and of course it's not negotiable. Now, some years ago, when I was working quite a lot with patients who were disclosing, perhaps for the first time, their experiences of childhood sexual abuse. These tended to be women who were now mothers. At about that time, in America, something emerged within the judicial system, and it was a well-used defense that was intended to bolster the case for those who were the alleged perpetrators, and it was called false memory syndrome. Some years ago, when I I appeared in a court case in California where the attorney for the defense asked me when I had first told my patient, my adult patient, that she had been sexually abused as a child. And I politely responded with, We don't do that in the UK. We wait for our patients to tell us. But it was very clearly a strategic attempt to discredit the evidence and to discredit me as a professional witness. Now I can't help but refer back to that because that is about a very different set of principles to those that I work by. That has to do with winning and losing cases and using whatever strategic measures to accomplish an outcome. Now I see in this country, and of course it's not new, this term parental alienation. And what strikes me about that is it is a legal tool that is used to discredit the testimony of the other party, the other parent. And what I find incredibly hard to tolerate is the ease with which this term is used. It's not a descriptive term, it's an accusation. One party saying the other party won't let me see my children, therefore I am the victim of parental alienation. And it doesn't take too much looking around to listen to people who will state this with great great sincerity, and you won't have to look too hard to find solicitors who will run with that in court. Now, interestingly, if you look at CAFCAS guidelines, they are very clear about what this term does mean and doesn't mean. So I want to talk about this not as a slogan or allegation, but as a complex relational phenomenon that cannot be understood outside of a family systems framework. Now, why the term has become so powerful is because it's appealing as a concept, because it offers a clear narrative, an identifiable cause, and an often implied perpetrator. In high conflict cases, it can feel like the missing explanation. My child has changed, doesn't want to see me, therefore something must have been done to them. But children don't operate in isolation, and their behavior rarely has a single cause. So when this term is applied without careful formulation, it risks oversimplifying complex family dynamics and misrepresenting a child's psychological adaptations. Now, there's a real problem of using labels without intelligent formulation. From a clinical perspective, a label without formulation is completely meaningless because a formulation asks, what has this child been exposed to? What relational pressures are they under? What are they trying to manage or survive emotionally? Legal arguments often move quickly towards categorization, but clinical work isn't like that. We move carefully towards understanding and change. So when parental alienation is alleged without a full systemic assessment, it can only obscure rather than clarify what is actually happening. So when we talk about a family systems perspective, and what that means is a family system is made up of different relationships, and collectively the quality of those relationships influences the effectiveness of the family system. So we try not to talk about dysfunctional families, but if we know that the relationships function badly, there is likely to be a consequence and a symptomatic expression of that in some of the family members. So what we see is that the behaviors emerge within a relational field rather than in response to one individual alone. So children may align with one parent because that parent appears more emotionally vulnerable. They might distance themselves from another parent because contact is dysregulating. They might adopt a rigid narrative as a way of reducing internal conflict. They might withdraw as a response to prolonged exposure to adult hostility. But none of these responses require some kind of programming or indoctrination from the other parent. They're often adaptive responses to relational stress. So when children reject contact, what might actually be happening is the question we have to ask. Now, my clinical experience, when a child resists or rejects contact, the underlying drivers often include chronic exposure to parental conflict, fear of emotional fallout, loyalty binds, unresolved trauma, or a sense that they must protect someone. So sometimes the parent, the child rather is not rejecting a parent, they're rejecting the emotional cost of contact. And to label this prematurely as parental alienation really risks misreading what's happening in the child's internal world, escalating adversarial positions and in potentially increasing harm. Now, I believe that this term is used sometimes far too easily in legal settings. Why? Well, legal representatives are under pressure to advocate strongly, construct clear arguments, and work within adversarial systems. But psychological development and harm doesn't conform neatly to legal binaries. So when the term parental alienation is used as the strategic allegation rather than a clinically grounded conclusion, it can shut down safeguarding inquiry, dismiss a child's express distress, or pathologize a parent without adequate evidence. This is not good law or good psychology. One of my deepest concerns is how quickly allegations of parental alienation can sometimes override legitimate safeguarding concerns. So a child's avoidance or distress should always prompt the question: what is the child communicating through their behaviour? Particularly when we see very young children who maybe don't have the words. And having worked with so many children in this kind of situation, I will almost always find that the child is stuck in a frightening conflict position which causes them to withdraw to the primary caregiver. So we have to look at all relational dynamics, and we also have to look at power imbalances and patterns of behaviour between the adults over time, as well as the child's emotional functioning. And without this, we simply risk confusing cause with consequence. So there are times, of course, when parental alienation might be a valid concern, and there are a few times when I have seen this demonstrated in from a contact point of view, but there are cases where it is something that happens in a different kind of way. So, for example, you know, a parent persistently undermines the child's relationship with the other parent. A child is pressured to reject, or false narratives are reinforced. But these conclusions must come after careful, multi-layered assessment, not before it. They require a developmentally informed evaluation, what's called a systemic formulation and evidence of pattern, not assumption. Anything less is professionally unsound. So children in high conflict separations are already navigating loyalty conflicts, emotional overload, and profound insecurity. So when adults rush to label, children often become reduced to evidence, interpreted through adult agendas, or silenced when their experience doesn't fit a narrative. An informed approach insists that we slow down, widen the lens, and keep the child's emotional reality central. A parental alienation is not a diagnosis and it's not a shortcut, and it's not a substitute for intelligent formulation. Used carefully, it may describe a genuine relational harm, but used carelessly, it becomes a lazy and ill-informed allegation that risks doing further damage. And children deserve more than labels, they deserve understanding. Before I close, I want to mention something about the notion of the rights of parents. And I want to say this very clearly, and there may very well be some people who disagree, in which case I would point them towards the government website where the definition of rights and contact make very clear that separated or divorced does not mean that you have an automatic right to spend time with your child. What it means is that if you are the parent, the biological parent, and your name is on the birth certificate, then yes, you do have a right in terms of the decision making that takes place and is necessary where that child's development is concerned and that children's activities. That is in law. However, under certain circumstances, that right can be removed. Now, the where where we have to really focus our attention on is the rights of the child. And the right of the child is to have contact with either parent, provided no harm comes as a consequence of that contact. So for those of you who may be listening to this and thinking, but I'm told the other person is saying, but I have rights, I have rights. Well, actually, yeah, rights come with responsibility. And in law, the assumption that a parent, a separated parent, has a right is something that can be tested in court. I do appreciate that this is quite a hard-hitting podcast, and its intention is to reassure and to in some ways say, look, you you may be being told all manner of things. You may be seeing all kinds of things where the other party is concerned, and also you're the one looking after the child and raising this child. And this is very, very difficult. But if you're involved in proceedings where the notion of parental alienation has been raised, or you're concerned about how conflict is affecting your child, then specialist clinical input can help clarify what's actually happening beneath the service surface. And further resources and information about my work with children and families can be found at the children's consultancy. Now, what I would say is that one of the other things we do is we where we can, we signpost people to legal representatives who specialise in this area of work and we work very closely with them, and we look at other allied services. It doesn't automatically follow that the children's consultancy can can can necessarily take have full involvement, but we are able to sign posts and we're able to inform. And we're very happy to do that. We get a number of referrals from solicitors where cases are ongoing. But understand this our focus and ideally everybody's focus should be on the well being of the child who needs protecting from whatever is going on with the adults. Thank you very much for listening, and I'll be back with something more soon.