Navigating Parental Alienation in Custody Battles
What is parental alienation and how does it affect your case? My name is Carl Birkhead. I’m a family law attorney with Wirth Law Office in Tulsa, Oklahoma. I’ve been practicing law for about seven years now. I want to help you make law easy by just going into a little bit about what parental alienation is and what you can do to try to remedy that.
What is Parental Alienation?
So first off, parental alienation is like it sounds. It’s basically when one parent is doing everything that they can to alienate the child from the other parent. They’re refusing visitation. They’re refusing phone calls. They’re bad-mouthing the parent to the child. They’re doing everything that they possibly can to just sour, poison, and napalm that relationship between the parent and the child.
The courts don’t like this. Even in situations where you have a parent that’s not a bad actor. I have plenty of cases where the other parent is an abuser an alcoholic or on drugs. And even then, I have to tell my clients, look, you cannot interfere with the parent-child relationship.
The Court’s Stance on Parental Alienation
It’s something that the courts are going to do for you in that instance by restricting visitation, putting steps that have to be put in place until you can have unsupervised visits, requiring professionally supervised visitation, and sometimes even requiring therapeutic visitation. In those instances, it’s not alienation. It’s more just protecting the child and making sure that they can have that relationship with the parent safely and healthily.
That’s something that the court does. You can’t do it though. You can’t just say, not without really good reason, you can’t just say, yeah, I’m not gonna let you see your kid. Or yeah, no, I’m not gonna let you talk to your kid. Or yeah, you know, your other parent’s just an absolute piece of garbage. You can’t do that. That’s frowned upon a lot in court.
How Parental Alienation Affects Custody
I’ve got a case right now where Dad is doing that. He’s trying to keep this little girl away from mom and is doing everything he can, making up allegations, making up just accusations of ridiculous drug use, substance abuse, everything. They’re all unfounded, but it’s all just a tactic to keep my client away from her daughter. And what you have to do is you have to be able to show the court that this other parent is acting in bad faith.
And that bad faith is damaging, if not destroying the relationship between your client and the child. The courts hate it when parents do this to the point that if you can successfully prove parental alienation, that in and of itself at times has been enough grounds to flip custody and give custody to the parent who’s not doing the alienating.
Practical Advice for Parents
What I tell all of my clients in these situations is just don’t talk about the other parent. If the kids bring the other parent up, acknowledge what they’re saying and redirect them to something else. Even if it’s something bad like, “Oh, you know, Dad was drinking a beer last night.” “Huh, that’s interesting. Why don’t we go watch SpongeBob right now? I hear there’s a great episode that’s about to show.” Something like that.
Don’t engage in the conversation with your kid as much as possible and then address it with your attorney. Whatever you do, no matter what, you cannot and should not be bad-mouthing that parent to the child. Let the courts handle that and protect the child as much as you can.
Reach Out for Legal Guidance
If you have questions about it, if you have concerns, or if this is something that you think might be a victim of parental alienation, please give our office a call. We have a great team of family lawyers. I’m one of them. We’re going to do everything that we can to help you make law easy. Call us today at 918-879-1681 for a low-cost initial strategy session.
