What Qualifies as Parental Alienation?
First, the psychological diagnosis of parental alienation syndrome goes far beyond one parent simply disparaging or hurling insults directed at the other parent through the children. Some have even suggested that it’s the family-unfriendly version of Stockholm Syndrome — an infamous diagnosis forever linked to the defense of newspaper heiress Patricia Hearst in the 1970s. How is PAS supposed to affect children? Parental alienation syndrome is usually raised in cases where domestic violence and allegations of domestic violence are a part of the story — the idea being that children, after living with a domestic abuser for a long enough period of time, begin to identify and sympathize not with the more protective parent but with the abuser instead. That said — PAS is also known to have occurred in cases where no abuse took place but where one parent had unusually hostile feelings toward the other. In any case, it is important to remember that one of the major factors courts look at in dec
