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A Child Refuses Contact, what might that mean? · Inside The Consulting Room - Understanding the Child Behind the Behaviour

• 0:01
  SPEAKER_00: Hello and welcome back.
• 0:02
  SPEAKER_00: This is Kim Lee, Child and Adolescent Psychotherapist.
• 0:05
  SPEAKER_00: And this is episode three of the series when a child says no to contact.
• 0:12
  SPEAKER_00: And I want to focus specifically on when a child says no, in whatever form that happens.
• 0:21
  SPEAKER_00: In the last episode, I talked about the term parental alienation, where it comes from, and some of the difficulties that arise when we use it to explain a child's behavior, really before we've properly understood their circumstances.
• 0:37
  SPEAKER_00: So today I want to turn more directly to the child.
• 0:41
  SPEAKER_00: Because although these situations are often discussed in terms of disagreement between the parents, there is something else in the middle of that disagreement whose experiences may be rather different from either of the accounts that we're hearing.
• 1:03
  SPEAKER_00: And the thing in the middle, of course, is the child, and they're saying they don't want to go.
• 1:09
  SPEAKER_00: Now, those words can produce a considerable reaction.
• 1:15
  SPEAKER_00: A parent may feel rejected, frightened, angry, or just bewildered.
• 1:21
  SPEAKER_00: And the other parent might be feeling anxious about what to do next.
• 1:27
  SPEAKER_00: And professionals may become involved because arrangements which previously seemed to work have begun to break down.
• 1:36
  SPEAKER_00: But before we think about how to respond, I think we need to spend some time considering what the child's refusal might mean.
• 1:45
  SPEAKER_00: Now, many people will know by now that I'm interested in what behavior signifies and see it as the headline, but not the story.
• 1:55
  SPEAKER_00: And I want to make clear that what follows isn't a kind of checklist through which you can decide what is happening in your own family.
• 2:03
  SPEAKER_00: These are possibilities that need to be understood in context, and sometimes more than one possible explanation might be present.
• 2:14
  SPEAKER_00: A child might be frightened of the parent they're being asked to see.
• 2:18
  SPEAKER_00: And they might be angry with them, they might be struggling with leaving the parent they live with, or they may be trying to avoid the tension that surrounds moving between the two.
• 2:29
  SPEAKER_00: It could also be, of course, that they're caught between two opposing parenting styles.
• 2:35
  SPEAKER_00: They might be trying to manage the internal split that they have that they have internalized.
• 2:43
  SPEAKER_00: The split between parents is internalized by children.
• 2:47
  SPEAKER_00: Now, those situations can look quite similar at the behavioral point when the child refuses to get in the car, but they may actually require very different responses.
• 3:00
  SPEAKER_00: Now, some of you will have heard of Kafkas, a court-appointed body, and Kafkas recognizes that there's a range of possible explanations for resistance to contact.
• 3:11
  SPEAKER_00: That includes fear arising from abuse, anger, anger about a parent leaving, difficulties with apparent circumstances, and the pressure of family conflict.
• 3:25
  SPEAKER_00: It says that domestic abuse and harmful parenting should be considered at the beginning of the assessment, and that's their guidance.
• 3:34
  SPEAKER_00: Now I think this is really important because when there is abuse within the family system, children internalize it.
• 3:45
  SPEAKER_00: And just because a family are no longer together does not automatically mean that the abuse has stopped.
• 3:53
  SPEAKER_00: And sometimes the child is used as the vehicle for that abuse.
• 3:59
  SPEAKER_00: That's for another podcast.
• 4:02
  SPEAKER_00: So I want to begin with fear because where there is a possibility that a child is unsafe or feels unsafe, that needs our attention.
• 4:12
  SPEAKER_00: Sometimes a child can tell us clearly what they're frightened of.
• 4:17
  SPEAKER_00: And they may describe something that's happened, something that was said, or what they believe will happen if they disagree with the parent.
• 4:26
  SPEAKER_00: And at other times the explanation may be much less clear.
• 4:29
  SPEAKER_00: They might say, I just don't like it there, or he or she gets angry with me, or doesn't listen.
• 4:36
  SPEAKER_00: And I think we need to be careful about dismissing those descriptions because just because they don't sound sufficiently serious to an adult.
• 4:44
  SPEAKER_00: The question is what the words refer to.
• 4:48
  SPEAKER_00: When a child says that a parent gets angry, are they describing an occasional disagreement in which the parent remains able to listen and help things settle?
• 4:59
  SPEAKER_00: Or are they describing an experience in which they feel intimidated, humiliated, or unable to get away?
• 5:07
  SPEAKER_00: Are we talking about episodes or patterns?
• 5:10
  SPEAKER_00: And I'd want to understand that difference before deciding what the child's response might mean.
• 5:18
  SPEAKER_00: And I would also want to understand what happens afterwards.
• 5:22
  SPEAKER_00: Can the parent recognize that the child was frightened?
• 5:25
  SPEAKER_00: Can they acknowledge their own behavior?
• 5:28
  SPEAKER_00: Is there an opportunity for something to be explained and repaired?
• 5:32
  SPEAKER_00: Or does the child find that raising the difficulty produces another difficult experience?
• 5:39
  SPEAKER_00: Because if the child expects to be criticized for saying that they were frightened or minimized, then asking them to explain themselves may be a much more complicated task than we appreciate.
• 5:53
  SPEAKER_00: They may be thinking about what will happen when the incident is over.
• 5:59
  SPEAKER_00: Now there's another possibility which I think is important, and that is that the child's concern is not principally about what happens to them.
• 6:09
  SPEAKER_00: They may be worried about what happens to somebody else.
• 6:13
  SPEAKER_00: A child who has seen one parent frightened or distressed may become concerned about leaving that parent alone.
• 6:22
  SPEAKER_00: Now, in assessment, I want to explore whether the child feels responsible for that parent's well-being.
• 6:28
  SPEAKER_00: And very often they do, and where that responsibility or that sense of responsibility has come from and how do we address it.
• 6:36
  SPEAKER_00: We shouldn't assume that the parent has asked for it.
• 6:40
  SPEAKER_00: It may be something the child has arrived at through their own interpretation of events.
• 6:46
  SPEAKER_00: And equally, there may be things the parent is saying or doing which reinforce it.
• 7:00
  SPEAKER_00: Because they always do.
• 7:03
  SPEAKER_00: From the outside, we might see a child who clings to one parent and who refuses to go with the other.
• 7:09
  SPEAKER_00: But the question inside that child may be something like, who will look after mum if I'm not here?
• 7:18
  SPEAKER_00: Or what if dad becomes upset when I leave?
• 7:21
  SPEAKER_00: Now these aren't fanciful ideas, these are real experiences that I see in the consulting room.
• 7:28
  SPEAKER_00: And of course, children can't voice that to parents, but to me, they can.
• 7:34
  SPEAKER_00: Why?
• 7:34
  SPEAKER_00: Because I'm not going to get angry, I'm not going to get cross and cry or criticize them.
• 7:41
  SPEAKER_00: I'm going to listen because I think what they're telling me is important, because it's about the child's perception, the child's experience.
• 7:49
  SPEAKER_00: That for me is our starting point.
• 7:52
  SPEAKER_00: Now, they are illustrative possibilities, not conclusions that we can necessarily come to, but nonetheless, they are very powerfully challenged quite often.
• 8:04
  SPEAKER_00: And they also remind us that the person that the child is moving away from may be just as relevant to the person they're being asked to visit.
• 8:15
  SPEAKER_00: And helping with that situation would involve more than telling the child that there's nothing to worry about.
• 8:22
  SPEAKER_00: We would need to understand whether the worry has a basis and what supports the adult's need and how the child can be relieved of that sense of responsibility which shouldn't belong to them.
• 8:36
  SPEAKER_00: Sometimes, however, what we are hearing is anger.
• 8:39
  SPEAKER_00: A child may feel that a parent left them.
• 8:42
  SPEAKER_00: Even when the parent understands the separation as leaving the adult relationship, the child's account of what happened may be organized around their own sense of loss.
• 8:53
  SPEAKER_00: And this is particularly so when the parent who leaves enters another relationship and has maybe another child.
• 9:01
  SPEAKER_00: That can be absolutely devastating.
• 9:05
  SPEAKER_00: They may be trying to understand why the parent no longer comes home, why familiar routines have disappeared, or why there is now another person, you know, in that parent's life.
• 9:16
  SPEAKER_00: And if that person, another person is a baby and it happens, it can be utterly devastating.
• 9:24
  SPEAKER_00: And a parent might reasonably say, Well, I've explained that.
• 9:28
  SPEAKER_00: I explained that I haven't left you.
• 9:30
  SPEAKER_00: And that's that's true.
• 9:32
  SPEAKER_00: But the difficulty is that explaining something doesn't necessarily resolve how it feels.
• 9:39
  SPEAKER_00: And here we're into the territory of objective and objective, sorry, objective and subjective, the thought sense and the felt sense.
• 9:48
  SPEAKER_00: And children rely a lot on felt sense.
• 9:51
  SPEAKER_00: Adults don't always do that.
• 9:53
  SPEAKER_00: So I'd want to make room for the child's anger without assuming that the anger tells us everything about the relationship.
• 10:01
  SPEAKER_00: There may be a wish for contact alongside resentment, disappointment, or a need for the parent to recognize what's changed.
• 10:11
  SPEAKER_00: For a parent on the receiving end, that can be difficult.
• 10:14
  SPEAKER_00: It can be difficult to tolerate.
• 10:16
  SPEAKER_00: But if the response is immediately to insist that the child has no reason to be angry, an opportunity to understand the difficulty may be lost, and a lock is created, which the child cannot undo.
• 10:32
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, now not every refusal is about abuse, and not every refusal represents a complete rejection of the parent.
• 10:43
  SPEAKER_00: Sometimes we need to be more precise about what the child is refusing.
• 10:49
  SPEAKER_00: Do they want to see the parent at all?
• 10:52
  SPEAKER_00: Or do they want to or not want to stay overnight?
• 10:56
  SPEAKER_00: Is there a difficulty with another person in the household?
• 11:01
  SPEAKER_00: Is the journey exhausting?
• 11:04
  SPEAKER_00: Are they missing something important in their lives?
• 11:07
  SPEAKER_00: And we certainly see, you know, with older children, we have to consider their friendship, school commitment, privacy, and their developing wish to have some influence over how they spend their time.
• 11:18
  SPEAKER_00: That doesn't make the parent unimportant, but it does mean that arrangements need to be understood from the child's position as well as the adult's positions.
• 11:28
  SPEAKER_00: Now the Family Justice Council's guidance recognizes that a child's reluctance can arise from practical arrangements, feelings about a parent's new relationships or attachments and alignment without psychological manipulation having occurred.
• 11:47
  SPEAKER_00: That is directly from the Family Justice Council guidance.
• 11:51
  SPEAKER_00: And I think this is one of the most important, albeit broad statements, which starts to really demonstrate that the term the child refuses contact is completely insufficient and, in my view, lazy.
• 12:07
  SPEAKER_00: It tells us that something is difficult.
• 12:09
  SPEAKER_00: It doesn't tell us which part is difficult.
• 12:12
  SPEAKER_00: I would want to explore whether there are circumstances in which the child does feel comfortable with the parent while being careful not to turn that exploration into pressure to agree to something.
• 12:27
  SPEAKER_00: And there's a difference between trying to understand the limits of the difficulty and to trying to negotiate the child out of having it.
• 12:36
  SPEAKER_00: Because to me, you know, that will really you can paper over the cracks, but I promise you that they they will come to light again.
• 12:45
  SPEAKER_00: Another area I'd want to consider is what it feels like to move between the parents.
• 12:49
  SPEAKER_00: Now, quite often I I am staggered by how people think that 50-50 arrangements, for example, are a good idea.
• 13:00
  SPEAKER_00: But actually, when I talk to children who are in those sorts of situations, they're seldom happy with it.
• 13:07
  SPEAKER_00: I must admit, it depends on the age of the child and the context.
• 13:14
  SPEAKER_00: But it also has to do with, well, what I I asked the question, was this arrangement in the best interest for the child?
• 13:23
  SPEAKER_00: People might say yes, and I say, okay, can you evidence that for me?
• 13:27
  SPEAKER_00: And that's not because I wish to be critical, it's because I think sometimes these arrangements have nothing to do with the child, they have to do with the needs of the parent.
• 13:37
  SPEAKER_00: And I don't, I mean, that the way I said that may have sounded critical, but actually I want to make the distinction because two sets of need or three sets of needs exist, either parent and the child or children.
• 13:50
  SPEAKER_00: And we have to think about it from the point of view of whose needs come first, how do we understand them?
• 13:57
  SPEAKER_00: And needs evolve and change.
• 14:00
  SPEAKER_00: So it may very well be that a 50-50 starts out as being okay, but as a child gets older and with various other factors coming to life, maybe maybe not, because you've got two homes, and you've got your your peer group, and as a you know, a growing child, and what what is you know, what what is it what is that like?
• 14:25
  SPEAKER_00: Think about it as an adult, what would that be like for you?
• 14:28
  SPEAKER_00: Two homes, uh belongings in one home, different belongings in another home, your social and working life someplace else, but half the week you're in one home, the other half you're in another home.
• 14:45
  SPEAKER_00: Now, we all need a sense of a primary a primary environment.
• 14:54
  SPEAKER_00: We we we need to have a center that we can return to.
• 14:59
  SPEAKER_00: If that center is divided in two, there is gonna come a point where it's unsatisfactory.
• 15:06
  SPEAKER_00: So we tend to think about contact as the time spent in one household or the other.
• 15:13
  SPEAKER_00: But the changeover and the conversations before and afterwards may be very significant.
• 15:21
  SPEAKER_00: I want to know whether the child can talk kind.