Parental Alienation Syndrome, or abbreviated PAS, is a disorder in which child disobeys, rejects and affronts one of the parents on the regular basis, without obvious reason. This happens because of different factors, one of them being persuasion and brainwashing of the other parent. This term was created by Richard A. Gardner in the early 80’s and Parental Alienation Syndrome is still not recognized as a disorder by the medical communities and Gardner’s research was strongly disapproved and denounced for the lack of scientific accuracy. However, this syndrome has similar diagnostic category regarding the parent-child relationship.
Parental Alienation Syndrome
Parental Alienation Syndrome is divided into three levels: mild, moderate and severe. With each level the number and intensity of symptoms increase. In mild cases the child confronts the targeting parent, but does not refuse to visit him. In moderate cases the confrontation of the child in increased and so he also starts to refuse visitation, when in the severe cases that refusal becomes extreme and the child threatens with running away, hurting himself, end even killing himself.
PAS Child Custody Proceedings
The syndrome often occurs in families that suffered a divorce and child-custody proceedings, especially in those cases when one parent consciously or unconsciously tries to separate the child from another parent. He does that using false accusations, often week and unreasonable, for example that the targeting parent’s visits are not good for the child, that his judgments are questionable. The targeting parent is presented to a child as a person that it has to see at times, and not as a part of immediate family. He or she is often accused of neglecting the child and even sexual abuse.
Accusations for Physical Abuse
It has been determined though, that this syndrome happens only where there are no traces of actual abuse of any kind or carelessness whatsoever. Accusations for physical abuse and similar kinds of violence are less made, probably because they leave physical marks that are easy to discover inexistent. The other parent might sign up the child for the activity the targeted parent might not support or some other thing that seems trivial, but creates an image of one superior and one inferior parent for the child. Normally, the child reflexively supports the favored parent and disapproves of the other one. The child feels like he has to please the other parent and he will try to do it for the price of completely alienating from the other one. He was possibly often told that if he did not like something he can go and live with the targeted parent, which strengthened the need to humor the favored parent. Environment of parental alienation syndrome is environment of fear: the targeted parent dears from estranging the child, the child fears from displeasing the favored parent.
All this factor does not necessarily mean that this syndrome is actually happening, as well as attempts for alienation don’t mean that the child was successfully alienated. And before assuming that PAS is the actual problem abuse, neglect and any kind of violence should be ruled out.