How Adversarial Divorce Contributes to Increased Parental Estrangement in the United States
August 19, 2021
As National Parents Organization focuses on shared parenting awareness and advocacy nationwide, we want to highlight another issue that is plaguing American families. Parental estrangement is a complex topic which has recently gained traction due to several articles and essays that were published over the past year. These impactful pieces in the New York Times, the Atlantic, and Aeon share information about parental estrangement and its link to alienation, divorce, and mental health. We, as a shared parenting support organization, believe that it’s important to shed light on how adversarial and high-conflict divorce can unfortunately contribute to estrangement – especially when child custody and contentious court battles are involved in the divorce process.
What Causes Parental Estrangement
Let’s begin with the essay published in December 2020 by Dr. Joshua Coleman, a psychologist in private practice and senior fellow with the Council on Contemporary Families. Coleman has published several books on marriage and family topics including The Marriage Makeover, The Lazy Husband, When Parents Hurt, and Rules of Estrangement. In the Aeon essay titled Estranged, Coleman explains that while some parental estrangements result from abuse, neglect, or rejection, other cases aren’t as straightforward. Estrangement can stem from an argument that wasn’t resolved or a a child’s belief that their parent is unsupportive, controlling, or toxic. And, as Coleman points out, a parent’s high-conflict divorce can be the cause of estrangement.
“I believe that the strain in relationships between parents and their adult children in the US results partly from the profound social inequality that puts an enormous burden on American families, one that sometimes causes them to break,” writes Coleman. “In a highly individualistic culture such as ours, divorce can also cause the child to see the parents more as individuals, with their own strengths and weaknesses, and less as a family unit of which they’re a part.”
He cites the book, The Marriage-Go-Round: The State of Marriage and the Family in America Today, written by Andrew J. Cherlin. This book explores how marriage in America is a social and political battlefield in a way that it isn’t in other developed countries. In fact, Coleman goes on to reference a 2010 international study that found parents in the United States have nearly twice as much conflict with their adult children compared to parents in Germany, England, Spain, and Israel.
Preventing Parental Estrangement and Alienation
As professionals in the shared parenting advocacy space, this doesn’t surprise us; however, it does disappoint us. NPO focuses heavily on parental alienation. While parental alienation is different from parental estrangement, the way that we handle parental separation plays a role in both maladies.
Parental Alienation: Parental alienation is a situation in which one parent uses behaviors and/or strategies in an unjustified effort to damage a child’s relationship with the other parent.
Parental Estrangement: Parental estrangement is a situation in which a child chooses to end a relationship and/or cut off contact with one or both parents for justified or unjustified reasons.
Through the alienating behaviors, the offending parent seeks to gain the exclusive loyalty of the child, often resulting in long term harm to the other parent and, especially, the child. A study found that 13.4% of parents and their children have been victims of parental alienation behavior. Of those cases, nearly half were considered severe. The researchers of this study found that alienation is not only harmful to children, but can also be dangerous to their wellbeing while negatively impacting them into their adulthood. In addition to a decrease in productivity at school, other concerns involve the development of psychological disorders affecting mental health. This includes anxiety, depression, substance abuse, and risk of suicide.
Negative Impacts of Adversarial Divorce
These issues are further discussed in Coleman’s January 2021 piece published in the Atlantic titled A Shift in American Family Values Is Fueling Estrangement. In this article, he explains that estrangement caused by divorce heightens the risk for both parents, but especially fathers.
“Fathers are also at greater risk of being estranged from their kids if they were never married to the mother, and might have more distant relationships with their children if they remarry later in life,” writes Coleman.
In Coleman’s 2021 book, Rules of Engagement: Why Adult Children Cut Ties and How to Heal the Conflict, he shares the results from a survey of more than 1,600 estranged parents. More than 70 percent of those respondents were divorced from the estranged child’s other biological parent. This concept is also supported in the Atlantic article where Coleman goes on to say, “in my clinical work I have seen how divorce can create a radical realignment of long-held bonds of loyalty, gratitude, and obligation in a family. It can tempt one parent to poison the child against the other. It can cause children to reexamine their lives prior to divorce and shift their perspective so they now support one parent and oppose the other.”
Unfortunately, this is the harsh reality of parental alienation as a result of high-conflict divorce. This topic was also extensively examined in the documentary Erasing Family, directed by NPO communications advisor, Ginger Gentile. In the film, which premiered in 2019, Gentile exposes the trauma that children suffer when a loving parent is erased from their lives after divorce. Research points to the approximately 25 million families in North America that are affected by parental alienation.
While the alienation is typically caused by the other parent tainting the view of their co-parent, it can lead to other separations later in life. This could include estrangement if a child chooses to end relationships and cut off communication with one or both parents. Sometimes, when a child experiences the alienation or sidelining of a parent during their youth, they may later choose to estrange both parents when they reach adulthood. The adult child of divorce may fault their parents for their high-conflict tendencies and adversarial divorce that rocked their childhood.
Emotional Effects of Parental Estrangement
It's a similar topic discussed in a July 2021 New York Times op-ed published by David Brooks. The piece entitled, What’s Ripping American Families Apart?, generates additional support for Coleman’s research and other studies about parental estrangement and its prevalence in the United States. Brooks begins the opinion piece with hard data, pointing out that “at least 27 percent of Americans are estranged from a member of their own family, and research suggests about 40 percent of Americans have experienced estrangement at some point.”
Brooks, a columnist with The Times and author of The Road to Character and The Second Mountain, also quotes Coleman’s work and research. While Brooks admits that he doesn’t have an answer to what’s causing parental estrangement, he makes a correlation to what estrangement could be causing. He points to statistics that speak loudly about the emotional and mental health of Americans.
“I write about this phenomenon here because it feels like a piece of what seems to be the psychological unraveling of America, which has become an emerging theme of this column,” explained Brooks. “Terrible trends are everywhere. Major depression rates among youths aged 12 to 17 rose by almost 63 percent between 2013 and 2016. American suicide rates increased by 33 percent between 1999 and 2019. The percentage of Americans who say they have no close friends has quadrupled since 1990, according to the Survey Center on American Life. Fifty-four percent of Americans report sometimes or always feeling that no one knows them well, according to a 2018 Ipsos survey.”
Addressing the negative impacts of parental alienation for children of divorce can reduce the possibility of parental estrangement later in life. If we can raise awareness about these harmful trends and find ways to prevent them, then we can keep America’s children safer and healthier throughout their lives.
Importance of Reducing Conflict in Divorce
These research pieces written by Coleman, Brooks, and others bring to light the mission of NPO and how we raise awareness about the issues of estrangement caused by parental alienation. We believe that by encouraging lawmakers to standardize 50/50 equal parenting, parents will begin to prioritize and normalize it as well. In addition, we hope that more divorcing spouses across America will consider using alternative dispute resolution proceedings rather than litigation in a court room. These out-of-court proceedings often include mediation, settlement, negotiation, and collaborative family law.
In these types of processes, the custody of children isn’t treated like a prize to be won during divorce. Rather, the divorce is seen as a win-win for both spouses as they create a parenting agreement that is typically a 50/50 equal parenting arrangement. When parents choose these types of divorce methods, rather than litigation, parents are able to keep their children out of a contentious courtroom setting. By doing so, they can help reduce potential trauma and lessen a child’s exposure to conflict. When children experience healthier conflict management methods and positive communication techniques, they will be better positioned to live a life that involves both parents. Through these approaches during childhood, we believe that a child of divorce could be less impacted by future parental estrangement.
You can learn more about the issues of parental alienation on our website by clicking here. You can also join us in our effort to raise awareness about the important of shared parenting laws, healthy co-parenting techniques, and 50/50 equal parenting standards by clicking here. NPO is always looking for passionate voices to serve as volunteers, fundraisers, and advocates for shared parenting movements nationwide. Together, we can create a nation and society where:
Shared parenting after separation or divorce is the norm
Children’s natural right to be nurtured and guided by both parents is fully honored
Society treats fathers and mothers as equally important to the well-being of their children
Children are happier and more successful because their loving bonds to their parents are protected after parental separation or divorce
We invite you to visit NPO’s website learn more about how you can help by donating, fundraising, volunteering, and advocating.
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The overarching goal of National Parents Organization (NPO) is to promote shared parenting by educating parents, divorce professionals, and legislators and by reforming family courts and laws in every state. NPO focuses on advocacy and research leading to systemic reform of the family courts. The organization does not provide legal aid or advice on individual cases.