Leave the kids out of it

Rabbi Shmuley, author of Parenting With Fire: Lighting up the Family With Passion and Inspiration and seasoned counsellor knows what it feels like when parents use children or a child as pawns in a quarrel. In a recent article, he said, “I’ve written a great deal about my parent’s divorce and its effect on me and my siblings. I was recently approached by two women, Robin Denison and Sarvy Emo, who started an organization called The Parental Alienation Syndrome Awareness Campaign. They told me that they started an organization to alert the public to show how prevalent it is becoming for one parent to and turn the children against the other in a divorce. They told me that there are many clinicians who would diagnose this as an actual syndrome, meaning that the child is being conditioned, slowly, by one parent to dislike the other and internalize feelings of real hostility and negativity towards his mother or father.”

In every situation, stable or not, a child needs to be brought up in the love, care and warmth of parents whether they live together or apart. Raising a child in an otherwise confusing atmosphere somewhat alienates him which could affect him right into adulthood.

Although this scenario is regarded as diagnosable and requiring medical treatment, Shmuley disagrees but agrees with the two women who have approached him of the catastrophic consequences to a child when he or she is turned on one parent by the other, when he or she is forced to take sides in a divorce, and when he or she is made into an enemy of his father or his mother.

For kids who cannot take decision on their own, such situation could be very disastrous, for it is possible that children in such circumstances could grow with the wrong impression of the family institution.

“From the many counselling sessions I have done involving parents who are divorcing, I have come to believe that this is almost the norm, that one parent will seek to either punish the other, or to find solace and comfort by drawing the children closer to them at the expense of the other parent.”

Although this is issue is famous with parents going through divorce or who are already divorced. It is also evident in homes where parents are supposedly happy but have quarrels from time to time as Miriam Dambo explains. “Usually when my parents quarrel, one of them (usually the first to win us over) narrates how badly the other person treats them. As younger children we ended going with my mum because she would openly tell us things that made us go with her at the expense of almost being rude to our dad or outrightly disregarding him. It used to hurt him and make them quarrel more. But our thrill then was to go with the one appeased us more with biscuits, chocolates or permission to misbehave; and mummy was that. It took us time as teenagers and then young adults to correct our ways. But even at that I don’t think we relate with him as good as we ought to. This is what brainwashing children at such a young age do to them.” This is an example of alienating a child and Shmuley explains the implications.

“This alienation takes place especially in families where either the mother or the father feels that they are the aggrieved party in the divorce. Say for example, a man who decides to leave his wife. The wife will often seek to punish her ex-husband for the stress he has brought on his family, by using the children as weapons in her arsenal against him.

“Likewise, she might fail to differentiate what was done to her personally, however unjust, versus what was done to his children. Meaning, even if the father leaves her, he doesn’t necessarily have to leave his children. (That doesn’t mean that I would ever condone a man abandoning his wife to be with another woman.) But even if he has been a terrible husband does not mean he has to likewise be a terrible father.

“Conversely, if a woman decides to leave her husband, often because she does not wish to stay in a lonely and loveless marriage, her husband might decide to tell the kids that his wife left us – “us”, not “me” – making it thereby impossible for the children to ever enjoy a warm relationship with their own mother. Surely, this could never be healthy for them. I was very moved that these two women, both of whom have been affected by parental alienation syndrome and hence are devoted to the cause. And let’s face it, as a child of divorce I personally know the harmful and life-long consequences of divorce on children. Let’s not make it worse by using kids as pawns in a parental game of chess.”