The term “Parental Alienation Syndrome” was invented by a US child psychiatrist and psychoanalyst called Richard A Gardner (Gardner 1998) to describe an extraordinary psychological phenomenon which is seen in a relatively small number of children whose parents have undergone a bitter and hostile separation. The phenomenon, which Gardner clarified and attempted to explain, had been known for many years and is that some of these children develop an extraordinary fear and loathing of one parent and a simultaneous total loyalty to the other.  Unfortunately Gardner’s explanation for this phenomenon, his use of medical and psychodynamic terminology and, most of all, the advice he gave on the management of the problem caused enormous controversy.  Prior to his death in 2003 he had written extensively on the subject and frequently appeared in US Courts to give evidence. 

Case example

W was 8.7; the younger of 2 boys born to his parents’ marriage. He was a year old when his parents separated. He and his brother remained with their mother and there was regular contact until he was 5 when all contact ceased at the mother’s insistence, on the basis that her sons disliked visits and no longer wished to see their father. There had been no visits since. The father applied to the Court and Proceedings commenced. Reports were obtained from CAFCASS Reporters and experts but no progress was made. At interview W was openly disparaging of his father, made implausible allegations against him and was resistant to the idea of a contact visit. A visit was arranged and W was taken to his father’s home. Shortly after meeting his father he made rude comments about him and punched him hard on the chest. W refused his father’s efforts to engage him and kept asking to go home. Of his own accord W talked to the father’s wife and her mother, later saying that he liked them. On the way home to his mother W protested when told that there were to be 2 further visits. Those visits went well. Visiting contact was Ordered and 4 years later W enjoyed regular unsupervised staying contact with his father.

This case is typical of scores that I have assessed over the years and shows features which will be recognisable to most professionals who are frequently involved in dealing with children who are the subject of prolonged high conflict contact disputes.  The vast majority of these children are pleasant, well adjusted and doing well socially and academically.  It is only within the confined and restricted context of their relationship with one of their parents (usually, but not always, the non resident parent - NRP) that the child expresses feelings, statements and behaviour which are extreme and out of character. 

The Causes of Children’s Resistance to Contact

A more recent and more acceptable attempt to explain the origins of this type of behaviour was made by Joan Kelly and Janet Johnson in their paper “The Alienated Child: a reformulation of parental alienation syndrome” (2001).  Kelly and Johnson are US academics who have both written extensively on the topic of children whose parents have separated or divorced (e.g. Kelly 2007).

Kelly and Johnson’s 2001 paper contains a reasoned critique of the main objections to Gardner’s PAS theory.  Gardner’s theory proposed that children with PAS had been indoctrinated against one parent by the other.  Kelly and Johnson pointed out that in high conflict contact disputes many children are exposed to denigration of the NRP but very few develop “alienation”.  Similarly clinical research suggested that some children who developed “alienation” had not been exposed to indoctrination or denigration of the NRP.  Thus they concluded that “alienating behaviour by a parent is neither a sufficient nor a necessary condition for a child to become alienated”. 

Secondly they criticised Gardner’s use of the term “syndrome” as needlessly adding to the controversy because it suggested that it was a medical “condition” with a known cause, and giving it the spurious authority of medical acceptance (when in fact it was not recognised in existing medical classification schemes).  Although this latter is a reasonable argument in the sense that this aspect of Gardner’s theory has created considerable controversy it is of note that a similar use of the term syndrome to describe a psychological set of symptoms, “The Child S.exual Abuse Accommodation Syndrome” (Summitt 1983) was accepted without controversy in the legal/psychological/academic world. 

Their third main criticism of PAS was the lack of corroborative scientific research.  Gardner wrote and published prodigiously, but very little of his work appears to have been the subject of peer review so that his claims were largely unsubstantiated.  Kelly and Johnson stated that Gardner’s theory “generated both enthusiastic acceptance and strong negative response”, the latter being somewhat of an understatement given the degree of vilification and personal abuse to which Gardner has been subjected. 

Kelly and Johnson suggest that there are a number of explanations for the varying ways in which children’s relationships with their parents can be affected following parental separation.  They suggest that those relationships can be considered to be spread along a continuum of adjustment with at one end the healthiest outcome, children who are able to maintain “a positive relationship with both parents”, and at the other end the most pathological outcome “alienation” in which one parent is idealised and the other denigrated and rejected. 

Between these two extremes were children who showed varying degrees of difficulties in their relationship with one parent. They suggested that these other contact resistant children can be placed in three broad groupings of children who show “affinity”, “alliance” and “estrangement” from one parent. They emphasised that whilst it is easy to characterise each group it should be recognised that children themselves may not fall neatly into one group and may share characteristics of more than one group. 

My own clinical experience suggests that their groupings are useful but would add that they have to be viewed as flexible.  For example, within a single family different child members may be showing quite different reactions to the separation of their parents, so that one can see a child who maintains “a positive relationship with both parents” and a child who is “alienated” within the same sibling group.  In addition any individual child can change the way in which they relate to their separated parents from time to time and although some of these changes are understandable (e.g. a reduction of separation anxiety with age; a reduction of moral condemnation with maturity; changes as a consequence of changes to the parents’ relationships), others seem quite unpredictable.  With these provisos the five proposed groupings, in order along the spectrum are as follows:

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