When parents separate, who suffers more when their child is taken away: the mom or the dad?
If your first instinct is to answer “the mother”, then you’ve fallen victim to a cultural stereotype.
In fact, both parents suffer equally.
Modern marriages are under a lot of pressure.
Marriage used to be a necessity. There were many emotional ties, but that wasn’t all. Many other things bound the two partners together.
Today, marriage is almost exclusively a bond of love. And love often means temporary infatuation.
As a result, two out of five marriages end in divorce.
When a childless couple decides to divorce, things are relatively straightforward. But as soon as one or more children are involved in the proceedings, things take a much more dramatic turn.
Divorce ends the marriage, not parenthood.
The two partners are no longer husband and wife, but they continue to be parents.
Divorce: a major source of stress for everyone
Divorces are always unpleasant and very stressful, not only for the ex-spouses, but also for their loved ones.
But it’s the children who feel the brunt of the separation.
They don’t want to lose mom or dad, they don’t want to choose between two parents.
It’s better for them to receive the love and attention of both parents, whoever is appointed guardian. It’s in the child’s best interests to have a mother and a father, even after divorce.
Child alienation syndrome occurs when the parent to whom the child is allocated, which according to statistics is the mother in over 90% of cases, begins to “poison” the child’s relationship with the other parent.
The child is told, overtly or covertly, that he or she must choose mommy or daddy. That is, they must choose Mom because Dad is such a horrible person.
Messages in which the mother is portrayed as the father’s victim are repeated for months and years, imposing a sense of guilt on the child.
He begins to think that if he feels and shows love for his father, he is betraying his mother.
This influence on the child is particularly powerful if it is exerted by other members of the mother’s family.
It is typical for the mother, under various pretexts, to persistently sabotage the child’s meeting with the father under the terms determined by the court.
In particularly complicated divorces, the mother goes so far as to falsely accuse the father of being a tyrant to whom the child cannot be entrusted or, worse still, expresses suspicions that the father is sexually abusing the child.
In such cases, the social work center is included. Social workers quite often accept the mother’s view of the situation and, for fear of making a mistake to the child’s detriment, take decisions that are to the father’s detriment.
All this ultimately leads to a complicated web of legal manipulations whose main aim is to prevent contact and re-establish the emotional bond between child and father.
A father who has been estranged from his child suffers not only because he doesn’t see his child, and because his child is very reserved towards him even when he does see him, but also because of the injustice inflicted on him.
He also suffers from the lack of interest and slowness of the social services and other bodies that should be protecting fathers, and therefore children’s rights, more quickly.
Although statistically speaking, fathers are the victims of their children’s alienation, there are opposite examples of fathers alienating the mother’s child.
In practice, I have had several examples in which the father, through emotional and other manipulations, succeeded in alienating children whose guardian, by court order, was the mother.
In most of these cases, the father used money to satisfy and even corrupt the children. With a more or less subtle disqualification of the mother as a person.
How does the loss of an emotional bond with a parent affect a child?
Statistics show that these children are considerably damaged afterwards.
Compared to other children, they are more at risk of dropping out of school, becoming delinquent, using drugs and alcohol, becoming depressed or having another mental disorder, or attempting suicide.
And that’s something the parent of a four- or five-year-old doesn’t even think about.
But professionals know all this. So they feel obliged to approach child alienation syndrome in relation to parents more carefully.
Types of abuse
Today, alienating a child from the other parent is considered a form of abuse.
That’s why, in some countries, it’s customary, when it’s established that one parent is alienating, for custody to be awarded to the other parent.
For all those who want to divorce, the best thing to do is to consult a marriage counselor with your spouse. It’s important to work on the feelings stemming from the husband-wife relationship.
The aim? That they don’t spill over into the father-mother-child relationship.
Many experts are in favor of automatic joint custody. In the long term, it avoids wars over children.
And it forces both partners to learn to work together as father and mother.