The Involvement of Minors in Parenting Conflicts

At the end of the case of an organic rotisserie in a residential neighborhood in New York, I couldn't help but listen to a dialogue between mother and daughter: "Ask your father why he left us". "It's your father's fault that you can't go to Bermuda for the golf course this year. ”“ But Mom didn't buy me wireless headphones with the new phone ”. "Face if on Monday you don't feel like leaving with him for the cruise we tell him you're not well ". "Make him angry so if he scolds you make a video with the phone that I show him to the lawyer "

With a cake in his hand of oversized blueberries, which in organic terms had only the price, and with my six-year-old son who repeated "You are a lawyer so you don't help the lady e his little girl who need so much ", I was hoping for the opening of another box so as not to have to hear the rich divorcee doing damage to her daughter and ex-husband again.

Even though I have been a lawyer in Italy and abroad for twenty-five years now, I cannot and cannot tolerate the insane involvement of children in the war between the ex.

Still too often, minors are involved in the conflict between parents and by spectators of the daily and reciprocal recriminations between mother and father, sometimes I take on the role of leading actors in what often turns into a game of massacre.

Children, as I wrote a few years ago with Carlo Alfredo Clerici in the very current volume “My parents separate, And I?”(Red! Edizioni) are often forced to carry the weight of the conflict of loyalty and even have to choose which side to take. These dynamics come to draw the well-known phenomenon of parental alienation, the most serious ones involve a true enlistment of the minor in defense of one parent with the radical marginalization of the other and often degenerate into the so-called PAS (parental alienation syndrome), still not of the all scientifically outlined and the subject of heated debates in the psychological and forensic field but often cited in various judgments both of the courts of merit and of the Cassation that I was able to comment on The Familiarist (Giuffrè Editore).

In order to speak of parental alienation, in any case, the existence of two essential elements is necessary, correlated with each other by a close cause / effect relationship: the indoctrination of the child by one parent to the detriment of the other, and the uncritical (and unconscious) adherence of the child to the position of the alienating parent, of which he becomes an accomplice, even coming to feel obliged to take sides and associating himself with the smear campaign of one parent against the other.

This alarming phenomenon is decidedly international and completely transversal, understood in all social, cultural and geographical contexts also in our country.

It is necessary that all professionals: lawyers, psychologists, judges, technical consultants, teachers, social workers, are adequately trained on the phenomenon and this not only to discourage the responsible parent but to be able to notice the phenomenon and not become, even unconsciously, accomplices of the alienating parent.

In the Courtrooms too often we see real opposing fronts where even the professionals lose what should, regardless of the positions of their respective customers, be the true common goal: the protection of the child.

The children need both parents and the experts tell us, also to learn to be good parents.

Returning to the rich American lady, the wise cashier, in her simplicity, commenting with her colleague what she had heard, said "other than golf courses in Bermuda, they do not know how much money they will spend for their daughter in therapists if they go on like this".

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