Unfortunately, some parents try to alienate their child from the other parent. This is especially common in fathers trying to alienate mothers from their children. Here are 5 telltale signs of parental alienation.
Related: How to Prove Parental Alienation in California
1. Manipulation of Imitative Learning
Parental alienation is often misconstrued as behaviors exhibited by a child with the intention to alienate their parent. However, children learn behaviors from their parents, meaning that children will alienate a parent as a learned behavior. Children especially are highly susceptible to manipulation by an abusive or psychologically imbalanced parent. In cases where fathers attempt to alienate their mothers from their children, those fathers can take stressful events in their child’s life as an opportunity to change their child’s behaviors. The father will use their child’s reliance on them to instill attitudes of disrespect or disdain towards the mother.
2. Developed Co-Dependence with Alienating Parent
Fathers hoping to alienate their child from their mother will often have emotional fragility and a need to control their child. This will usually cause their child to develop a very sensitive responsiveness and awareness to the father’s needs or wishes. The child will consider the needs and wishes of their father above the needs and wishes of anyone else, including siblings or their mother. They will act very protective of their father – defending him and speaking very carefully around him. The child will also adopt their father’s attitudes and ideological patterns pertaining to their mother.
3. Assumption of Responsibility and Guilt
Typical warning signs that the child has given into their father’s pressures to alienate the mother is if those pressures manifest into guilt over the divorce itself. The child will often take responsibility for the complex dynamic between their parents, while maintaining a fierce loyalty to their father. The child’s language patterns will also transition into first-person plural, indicating a much stronger bond between the child and their father than the bond the child holds with their mother. The child will adopt any emotional grievances that the father has with the mother. This is usually encouraged by the father as part of the abusive, codependent manipulation occurring.
4. Stark Moral Dynamic
Once a child has given into this abuse and manipulation by their father, they will display a rigid moral attitude. They will often see their father as pure or incapable of any wrongdoing, and in turn, blame all issues in the divorce or parental relationships on their mother. The child will never view their mother as kind, nurturing, correct, capable, or loving. Over time, the child will associate any and all behaviors exhibited by the father as positive, which will severely impact all of their future relationships. They are also more likely to imitate those behaviors as adults or seek to recreate such unhealthy dynamics with a future partner.
5. Isolation from Outside Support
One of the most common indications of emotional abuse and manipulation that fathers attempting to alienate mothers from their children often display is isolation of the child. The father will teach their child to associate anything related to their mother as undesirable, including siblings and extended family. The child then claims that it is their desire to cut ties with their mother, as they learned such negative and isolating behaviors from their father, who they often idolize. This isolation only increases the emotional abuse that the child experiences from their father.
Related: How to Protect Your Child from a Narcissistic Parent
Contact Us
If you spot any of the 5 telltale signs of parental alienation from your spouse and co-parent, contact us. Get your free consultation with one of our family law attorneys in California today!