NPO Resources on Parental Alienation
February 17, 2021 by Don Hubin, Ph.D., Chair, National Board of Directors
Using children as a weapon in divorce battles is horrible. Unfortunately, it’s more common than many people think. Many divorces and separations are accompanied by some stray negative comments from one parent about the other either overheard by the children or directed to them. In some cases, though, one parent engages in a systematic campaign of denigration against the other parent—a campaign aimed at alienating the children from the targeted parent.
Parental alienation is a form of family violence that is not fully recognized and often not handled well by courts or clinicians. But, as a result of some diligent researcher that is changing! And National Parents Organization is working to help parents, courts, and divorce and mental health professionals better recognize and respond to parental alienation.
NPO fields frequent pleas from parents who have been victimized, and whose children have been victimized, by persistent, and often successful, efforts to destroy the relationship between these parents and their children. We want to provide resources for these parents to help them educate their attorneys and the judges who are handling their cases.
NPO is working with the world’s leading parental alienation researchers to provide the best research on this topic. We have created a section of our Resources webpage ‘Research Articles’ with links to recent, peer-reviewed articles on parental alienation. Most of these articles are aimed at giving a fundamental understanding of the nature, symptoms, and treatments for parental alienation. One article, by Jennifer Harman and Demosthenes Lorandos, is different and merits special mention here.
Drs. Harman and Lorandos have undertaken a meticulous and rigorous study of a claim that was put forth by Joan Meier and her colleagues in a widely circulated paper. Meier, who is a well-known parental alienation denier, and her co-authors claimed that parental alienation legal defenses serve to nullify the abuse concerns of mothers even in the face of child abuse evaluations.
Harman and Lorandos identify at least 30 conceptual and methodological errors with the design and analysis of Meier’s research, completely eviscerating that flawed research. The Harman/Lorandos paper is not an article aimed at the general public but a serious research article aimed at scholars. It is important, though, that the general public be aware of this research because of how widely the erroneous Meier paper has been circulated.
Because of the serious adverse effects of parental alienation on the targeted parent and, especially, on the children, NPO is working to develop additional resources for families experiencing alienating behavior.
