Parental Alienation is a term that family law professionals use to describe what happens when one parent attempts to sabotage the relationship between the children and the other parent. Wikipedia describes it as follows: “a group of behaviors that are damaging to children’s mental and emotional well-being, and can interfere with a relationship of a child and either parent. These behaviors most often accompany high conflict marriages, separation or divorce. These behaviors whether verbal or non-verbal, cause a child to be mentally manipulated or bullied into believing a loving parent is the cause of all their problems, and/or the enemy, to be feared, hated, disrespected and/or avoided.”
The problem of parental alienation has been weighing heavily on the minds of lawyers and judges in Michigan this past week when an Oakland County Family Court Judge – the Honorable Lisa Gorcyca – imposed a controversial remedy in a case where the parental alienation from the father by the mother had spun so far out of control for so long that the court deemed extreme measures appropriate. The judge’s ruling was sensationalized in the press with headlines such as “Children Sentenced to Jail” for refusing to have lunch with their father. The story has broken all over the country; the Washington Post, for instance, ran a headline on July 9th that read “Michigan judge bullies children in open court for refusing to see their dad.” According to the Huffington Post, “Judge Throws 3 Kids in Juvenile Center for Not Being Nice.” In reality, the children, who refused to comply with the judge’s order that they sit down to lunch with their father in the courtroom cafeteria, we sent to Children’s Village (across from the courthouse) which, amongst other things, houses juvenile criminals.
Leave it to the press to oversimplify the facts to the point of demonizing a judge who is widely regarded by the attorneys who practice in her court as one of the finest family law jurists currently serving on the bench.
The divorce complaint in Maya v Omer Tsimhoni was originally filed on December 17, 2009. The first custody and parenting time motion was filed five months later. Almost six years later, there are 470 entries in the court docket, most concerning custody, parenting time, therapy and a myriad of issues surrounding the raising of the Tzimhoni children. Can you imagine the financial cost to this family, or the long-term cost to the emotional health of the children? Judge Gorcyca has determined that the mother has done everything she can to poison the relationship between the father and children – a classic case of parental alienation taken to extremes.
Unfortunately, family law attorneys and judges deal with parental alienation – to a greater or lesser degree – all the time. I have seen the case where a father learned of his young adult daughter’s death in an automobile accident by reading about it in the local newspaper. Why? The mother had so alienated the children from him that he had been unable to have a relationship with the daughter since her early childhood. I have personally stood by and overheard a client make a poisonous and hurtful comment about the other spouse within hearing of her six and eight year old sons. I have been fired by a client for refusing to lie in a motion for supervised parenting time by claiming that the father had an out-of-control illicit drug habit.
What happens to these children of alienation? Well, many of them end up in the juvenile court system, so dysfunctional that they deteriorate into incorrigibility. Most develop psychological problems that prevent them from forming healthy adult relationships themselves. Today’s children of alienation are tomorrow’s divorce clients, in other words!
If I had one wish, it would be that every parent would understand that children are not weapons to be used to hurt the other parent. Yes, the other parent is hurt. But, it is the children who are emotionally ruined. It is the children who lose a precious relationship, and who grow up with a skewed view of themselves, their parents and who, therefore, never have a chance at a truly happy life.
And, if I have a second wish, it would be that some good comes from Judge Gorcyca’s ruling this week. For good or for bad, whatever your opinion about the court’s ruling, we can only hope that things improve for the Tzimhoni children, and that perhaps, somewhere, another parent is changing behavior so that his/her children are not destroyed in the divorce process.