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When A Child Refuses Contact · Inside The Consulting Room - Understanding the Child Behind the Behaviour

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_00: Hello and welcome back.
• 0:01
  SPEAKER_00: This is Kim Lee, child and adolescent psychotherapist.
• 0:04
  SPEAKER_00: First of all, I'd like to apologise for being invisible for a while.
• 0:08
  SPEAKER_00: I've been very busy working on the promotion of the book, The Life That Belongs to You, which I think may very well be relevant to listeners to this particular series about parental alienation or the concept of parental alienation.
• 0:30
  SPEAKER_00: In this episode, I want to I'm I'm naming it as when a child says no to contact.
• 0:36
  SPEAKER_00: In fact, the whole series is uh concerned with this.
• 0:40
  SPEAKER_00: And in the introductory episode, I talked about some of the concerns I have about the use of this term parental alienation, and particularly where a child's refusal to see a parent becomes the subject of a dispute in court.
• 0:57
  SPEAKER_00: And I wanted to make it clear that there are a number of possible reasons and explanations as to why a child might refuse contact, and that we have to understand those reasons before we decide what should happen next.
• 1:12
  SPEAKER_00: So today I want to spend some time looking at the term itself, where it came from, and why I think we need to be much more careful about the way we use it.
• 1:24
  SPEAKER_00: In some ways it's a name that explains too much, because my concern is that once we introduce this particular explanation, it can begin to influence how everything else is understood.
• 1:37
  SPEAKER_00: And that includes what the child says, how the parents are seen, and what professionals believe they're being asked to intervene in and in some way put right.
• 1:48
  SPEAKER_00: Now, I do appreciate that for a parent who's lost contact with their child, this can be an incredibly painful area.
• 1:56
  SPEAKER_00: But there may be a great deal of distress, bewilderment, and anger, and a feeling that nobody's listening.
• 2:03
  SPEAKER_00: And of course, there are circumstances in which one parent does undermine the child's relationship with the other parent.
• 2:13
  SPEAKER_00: I don't want to minimize that because you're drawing a child into an adult's grievances or making them feel that loving the other parent is somehow a betrayal is something we should all be concerned about.
• 2:26
  SPEAKER_00: But we have to be careful that our understanding of the parents distress doesn't lead us to decide before we've looked at the whole situation and why the relationship is broken down.
• 2:40
  SPEAKER_00: Interestingly, the expression parental alienation was first used in 1985 by an American psychiatrist called Richard Gardiner.
• 2:51
  SPEAKER_00: Now he used it to describe a proposed condition in which a child's unjustified rejection of a parent arose through a combination of the other parent's influence and the child's own contribution.
• 3:06
  SPEAKER_00: Now it's important to say that in his definition, rejection was justified by actual abuse or neglect, which may have been excluded.
• 3:18
  SPEAKER_00: So even within that description, there was a need to establish whether the child had reasons for feelings or feeling the way that they did.
• 3:28
  SPEAKER_00: But I think this is where the difficulty begins because saying that a child's rejection is unjustified is already a substantial conclusion.
• 3:39
  SPEAKER_00: It means that we believe we understand enough about the child's experiences to say that their response isn't explained by what's happened to them.
• 3:49
  SPEAKER_00: And I would want to know how we arrived at that understanding.
• 3:53
  SPEAKER_00: You know, how much of the history have we actually seen?
• 3:56
  SPEAKER_00: Have we had the opportunity to hear from the child in circumstances where they can speak freely?
• 4:03
  SPEAKER_00: And I know this is something I I have a good deal of experience of in the consulting room where children learn to speak freely, and uh what what they tell me is is an important truth, and it's their truth.
• 4:23
  SPEAKER_00: But also, what do we know about the relationship before contact became a matter of dispute?
• 4:30
  SPEAKER_00: Now, the word syndrome also carries a particular kind of authority and it sounds clinical, and it can give the impression that we're talking about an established sort of condition which can be identified and diagnosed.
• 4:45
  SPEAKER_00: But actually, that's not really the case.
• 4:48
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, a syndrome simply describes a selection of behaviours or symptoms, it doesn't necessarily conform to a diagnostic criteria.
• 4:59
  SPEAKER_00: And the World Health Organization doesn't include parental alienation as a healthcare term in what's known as ICD 11, and that's the international classification of diagnoses.
• 5:12
  SPEAKER_00: It explains that relevant relationship difficulties can be covered within a broader category concerning problems between a caregiver and a child.
• 5:22
  SPEAKER_00: It also removed parental alienation as an index term, having made clear that its use in an index did not amount to endorsement.
• 5:33
  SPEAKER_00: Now that may sound like a rather technical distinction, but it matters because a parent reading a report or listening to somebody who presents themselves as an expert may assume that a diagnosis has been made, and it hasn't.
• 5:48
  SPEAKER_00: Once that happens, the questions change.
• 5:52
  SPEAKER_00: We may find ourselves discussing how to treat or reverse something before we've properly established what it is that's actually occurred within the family.
• 6:03
  SPEAKER_00: Now in England and Wales, the Family Justice Council's guidance, which was published in December 2024, is very clear that parental alienation is not a syndrome capable of being diagnosed.
• 6:18
  SPEAKER_00: So, in a sense, what we're talking about is rather than pathologise this syndrome, we have to look at it from a very different point of view.
• 6:30
  SPEAKER_00: Now, that in its in its report, its approach stated that it requires the child's resistance to be established and other explanations have to be considered and evidence that the other parents' psychological manipulation caused the resistance.
• 6:46
  SPEAKER_00: Now, this is extremely important because it goes beneath the presented problem of a parent who is not able to see their child because the child is refusing into the broader picture.
• 7:00
  SPEAKER_00: And this for me is vital.
• 7:03
  SPEAKER_00: So those other explanations include the rejected parents' behavior and the child's attachment, the child's affinity or alignment.
• 7:14
  SPEAKER_00: And the refusal itself does not indicate manipulation.
• 7:20
  SPEAKER_00: That's an interpretation, and it doesn't necessarily bear any relevance to what is actually happening or has happened.
• 7:30
  SPEAKER_00: So we're being asked to look at particular behaviors and their effects.
• 7:34
  SPEAKER_00: And I think that's helpful, provided it leads to a careful examination of what's actually happened, because we can change the terminology and still carry on thinking in much the same way.
• 7:47
  SPEAKER_00: So if we replace the term parental alienation syndrome with alienating behaviors, but continue to assume that a child who refuses contact must have been influenced against the other parent, then we haven't really resolved the problem at all.
• 8:04
  SPEAKER_00: We haven't really understood the problem.
• 8:06
  SPEAKER_00: And for me, this has got a great deal to do with how we understand children's relationships.
• 8:12
  SPEAKER_00: Because children have experiences of their parents which may be quite different from the accounts the parents give of themselves.
• 8:21
  SPEAKER_00: And that doesn't necessarily mean that a parent is deliberately being misleading.
• 8:26
  SPEAKER_00: Sometimes there's a considerable gap between what an adult intended and what the child experienced.
• 8:32
  SPEAKER_00: Now, a parent may describe themselves as firm or as somebody who believes children need boundaries, but the question I would want to explore is what that firmness involves and what happens to the child when they get something wrong, or they become upset, or they disagree.
• 8:50
  SPEAKER_00: And of course, there are more serious possibilities where the child may have been frightened, humiliated, threatened, or exposed to the mistreatment of the other parent.
• 9:02
  SPEAKER_00: These are real experiences and I hear about them often.
• 9:05
  SPEAKER_00: Now in those circumstances, we need to understand what the child has been living with.
• 9:11
  SPEAKER_00: It would concern me very much if the child's attempt to describe that experience was immediately understood as something they must have been told to say.
• 9:22
  SPEAKER_00: I'm afraid I I I very, very rarely come into contact with those kinds of situations.
• 9:30
  SPEAKER_00: You may have heard of Kafka, and Kafka's, which works in England, recognizes a range of explanations for a child's resistance, including the fear of an abusive parent, anger about a parent leaving, and the pressures of family contacts.
• 9:47
  SPEAKER_00: Now, its guidance says that domestic abuse and harmful parenting should be considered at the beginning of the assessment.
• 9:55
  SPEAKER_00: It also acknowledges that children can reach their own conclusions about what has happened in their family.
• 10:02
  SPEAKER_00: And I think that last point deserves some attention because sometimes, in the way these disputes are discussed, it can sound as though the child has no psychological life of their own, as though their view must have come from one adult or the other.
• 10:18
  SPEAKER_00: It reminds me of a case in which I saw two children who were only able to say that they didn't want to see the other parent when they came into the consulting room.
• 10:38
  SPEAKER_00: And it wasn't as a consequence of me asking directly, it was a much more subtle inquiry about the way the children were living.
• 10:50
  SPEAKER_00: And they were quite young children, and what was fascinating was that both of them almost timidly, I think that's probably the best word, voiced that they didn't like how things they how things were, they didn't like it at the other uh parents' house, and they they didn't like the difference in the way that each parent behaved, and they didn't like the fact that one parent was so critical of the other.
• 11:20
  SPEAKER_00: And what happened was that they essentially voted with their feet, in as much as they they had less and less contact with the parent and who was a father, and the consequence of this was the cry of parental alienation.
• 11:42
  SPEAKER_00: Now the implication there is the children were expressing something through their behavior, although to me verbally, and they were regarded as having been manipulated into saying those things.
• 12:02
  SPEAKER_00: These children uh told me very real accounts of things, things that had happened, and it it was very clear to me that what they were both describing was what is called within safeguarding emotional harm.
• 12:19
  SPEAKER_00: And emotional harm is something which is notoriously hard to evidence, nonetheless, it is a very real safeguarding concern.
• 12:32
  SPEAKER_00: And so so we move immediately away from parental alienation into the cause of the child's refusal to have contact.
• 12:43
  SPEAKER_00: So these are matters for careful inquiry rather than repeated questioning of the child by the adults involved in the dispute.
• 12:56
  SPEAKER_00: I'm very concerned about the fact that this particular supposed syndrome often gets played out in legal situations through legal procedures.
• 13:11
  SPEAKER_00: And I have to say that it is very, very rare for a court to automatically work in the way or think in the way that I'm suggesting.
• 13:23
  SPEAKER_00: Solicitors, barristers will argue for and against, but it is highly unusual for the court to accept or inquire into the deeper levels of the situation.
• 13:43
  SPEAKER_00: It's not always the case, and when I work under court order, which means that I'm ordered by a judge to work with a family, it means that the court have, I suppose, realized that there is a need for a deeper investigation.
• 14:00
  SPEAKER_00: And this is this is quite forensic work because I'm charged with a responsibility to explain to the court my understanding and my clinical observations in respect of why this situation has arisen, and also make recommendations about how to address the situation.
• 14:26
  SPEAKER_00: So we need to stop and consider a very good deal of information, and that requires more inquiry.
• 14:37
  SPEAKER_00: Now, the Family Justice Council distinguishes between protective behaviour and traumatic responses from alienating behavior, and it also recognises that a child's refusal may remain unexplained, and that the absence of an explanation does not establish alienation.
• 14:59
  SPEAKER_00: And I think this is this is good, but I would I would also say that in practice I I well I think the word considers and recognises.
• 15:10
  SPEAKER_00: I mean the court may consider, the court may recognize, however, there is still an argument between counsel for and counsel against in terms of what is the objective truth.
• 15:23
  SPEAKER_00: Now when these people are not clinicians, they they don't look beneath the surface, it's not really their job.
• 15:31
  SPEAKER_00: They're legal people.
• 15:34
  SPEAKER_00: So although there is a shift developing, and that is helpful, but I think I think what matters here is that this this term and this architecture that's been built around the concept needs to be questioned.
• 15:58
  SPEAKER_00: And the qu what comes to my mind always is are we talking about alienation or are we talking about protection for the child?
• 16:08
  SPEAKER_00: I'm going to come back shortly with um the next episode.
• 16:13
  SPEAKER_00: And I suppose in some ways uh my my hope is that this this particular episode hasn't been too terminology heavy, and that it the message of why the circumstances behind such a situation need so much attention.
• 16:32
  SPEAKER_00: So I would also ask if you think that this series may be helpful for someone you know, someone who's going through this kind of situation, then please just point them towards this this podcast and this series.
• 16:46
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you for listening.