International Parental Alienation Awareness Day

                         Yesterday 25th of April was a day to remember to all of us to fight parental alienation. Sometimes the way a parent loses the custody of a son, it is already a kind of parental alienation. Besides more lies can be create to separate father and son who were living together since birth. This cowardice can't stay unpunished. A father that has been raising his son since four mmonths old very well, now he is eight years old as everybody knows can't be victim of parental alienation like I am being now. This post is a summary of two articles. The first was published at https://www.facebook.com/ParentalAlienationStudyGroup/posts/april-25th-is-international-parental-alienation-awareness-dayparental-alienating/1445772747583960/. The second was published at https://www.awarenessdays.com/awareness-days-calendar/parental-alienation-awareness-day/

Parental alienating behaviors are not the same as the everyday disagreements, tension, or communication problems that can arise in many family relationship, whether parents remain together or separate. While many families experience period of conflict, alienating behaviors go further than that. They involve repeated actions that draw a child into adult conflict and gradually shape the child's view of a safe parent. The central concern is not the conflict between adults, but the impact on the child. These patterns of conduct that can pressure a child to fear, reject, avoid or disconnect from a safe parent. The harm is psychological, emotional, developmental and relational. Alienating behaviors can include denigration, obstruction of contact, adultification, information control, false or exaggerated narratives, and punishment of the child for showing affection, curiosity, grief or connection. Over time, a child may learn that love for one person creates consequences with another. That is not a free choice. It is pressure placed on a developing child's attachment system, identity, memory and sense of safety. Not every child's rejection of a parent is alienation. Children must always be protected from abuse, neglect, and unsafe relationships. But when rejection is being shaped by manipulation, interference, or loyalty demands, it requires careful assessment,and early intervention. Awareness means recognizing a serious form of family harm in which children may be drawn into rejecting a safe or loved parent, and where healthy, loving relationships can be undermined, fractured, or lost altogether. Children deserve protection from harm. They also deserve the freedom to love safe parents without guilt, fear or punishment.

 This awareness day was created as a part of global awareness campaign about parental alienation. Parental alienation is described "a behavior by a parent, or an adult a child trust, such as a grandma, etc., that could create alienation in the relationaship between a child and a parent." The behavior displaced can be mild and temporary but also extreme and ongoing. Obviously any kind of behaviour that is displayed as a result of parental alienation can be damaging upon a child and could have potentially life long consequences. Parental Alienation Day aims to highlight to care givers the effects that parental alienation could have on children and educate adults in order to identify signs that either they or other are behaving in a manner that could affect the children in their care. Typical types of behaviour displayed by parents or other can include: 1) constantly badmouthing/belittling the other.  2) limiting the other's contact  3) forbidding the child from discussing the parent.  4) creating the impression that other parent doesn't love the child.  5) trying to force the child to reject the parent to make the former partner a former parent as well. With awareness comes education, and with education, comes the power to stop the mental and emotional abuse of children.