American Professional Society on the Abuse of Children (APSAC)

The APSAC 2017 Practice Guidelines for the Investigation and Determination of Suspected Child Psychological Maltreatment of Children and Adolescents now includes parental alienation. The exact words "parental alienation" are not used, but the text below is clearly parental alienation:

• • "belittling, degrading and other forms of hostile or rejecting treatment of those in significant relationships with the child such as parents, siblings, extended kin"

  • "modeling, permitting, or encouraging antisocial behavior"

  • "modeling, permitting, or encouraging betraying the trust or being cruel to another person

  • "restricting or interfering with or directly undermining the child's important relationships (e.g restricting a child's communication with his/her other parent and telling the child the lack of communication is due to the other parent's lack of love for the child"

  • "parentification"

  • "coercing the child's submission through extreme over-involvement, intrusiveness, or dominance, allowing little or not opportunity or support for child's views, feelings, and wishes; micromanaging child's life, and/or manipulation (e.g. inducing guilt, fostering anxiety, threatening withdrawal of love"

  • "disorienting the child by stating something is true (or false when it patently is not)"

  • "placing the child in a loyalty conflict by making the child unnecessarily choose to have a relationship with one parent or the other"

  • "placing unreasonable limitations or restrictions on social interactions with family members, peers or adults in the communication"

And if the alienator interferes with or sabotages relevant therapy for child psychological abuse, then they may run afoul of:

• • MENTAL HEALTH, MEDICAL, AND EDUCATIONAL NEGLECT embodies caregiver acts that ignore, refuse to allow, or fail to provide the necessary treatment for the mental health, medical, and educational problems or needs for the child. This includes ..... ignoring the need for, failing, or refusing to allow or provide treatment for serious emotional/behavioral problems or needs of the child ...

And the guide documents risk factors for caregivers:

"Caregiver factors. Caregivers are more likely to perpetrate violence/maltreatment, including PM, against children, if they have one or more, and especially many, of the following features: .... psychological disorders .... low-impulse control .... low empathy, poor coping skills .... childhood experiences of maltreatment (particularly when combined with genetic vulnerability), including witnessing family violence (e.g., sibling maltreatment, marital/partner violence); [e.g. trans generational transmission of parental alieantion] beliefs and attitudes that depersonalize children, that consider them property [e.g. use them as weapons against the ex] ... limited reflective capacity for dealing with their own experiences of victimization; inadequate knowledge about child development and parenting ...."

The practice of not using the exact words "parental alienation" is becoming quite common. For example, the authors of DSM-5 explain that parental alienation is indeed in DSM-5, although they did not use the exact words. This is fine, because pathogenic parenting does not use the words "parental alienation," though it sometimes goes under the name "attachment-based parental alienation."