I’ve been meaning to publish a review of Welcome Back Pluto: Understanding, Preventing, and Overcoming Parental Alienation for some time now. Having watched it myself and with some children who are targets of parental alienation, I think it is a very helpful video for most kids who are at risk for alienation but who have not yet been totally turned against parent they are being encouraged to hate.
There are a lot of positive reviews of this video on Amazon, I’d encourage you to read them. Instead of simply rehashing the universally positive general comments about the video, I’m going to outline chapter by chapter what you’ll see when you watch it so you can better understand what Dr. Warshak is trying to accomplish with this video.
Chapter 1 – What is Alienation?
This first chapter explains what parental alienation is and what it isn’t. It makes it clear that even though it sounds like it has something to do with space aliens, it has nothing to do with this. It explains alienation in the general sense, that people can hate a person, their government, or their family. It breaks down the level of alienation in levels via the terms disillusioned, alienated, and estranged. It also explains that alienation can be realistic, such as when somebody has been very cruel for a long time, or unrealistic when the rejected person was once loved but now is not despite not having done anything to justify this.
I often use the term “target parent” to refer to what the video calls the “rejected parent”, in part because I’ve observed that such parents are often not only targeted for alienation but also for defamation, false accusations, harassment, intimidation, and more by the parties who are out to harm them and the children’s relationships with them. Read more…
Veteran’s Day was last week, but despite the holiday for government workers it is clear that the American government does not care for its soldiers. You would do well to remember that American soldiers put their lives on the line to fight to defend a country that treats them as criminals and slaves who are worthy of nothing but poverty and death. As a result, the leading cause of death for these soldiers is suicide.
In a video from 2009, CNN reported that the number of military suicides (354) outnumbered the number of soldiers killed in combat (335). This trend has continued in the years since 2009.
Why is that so many soldiers are killing themselves? Soldiers have to deal with the trauma of combat and resulting PTSD (Post Traumatic Stress Disorder) and depression. On top of that, then they are frequently denied contact with their children and are accused of being murderers and child abusers thanks to their time in the military. Then they are forced to pay ridiculous child support levels set by black-robed criminals in family law courts while their ex-spouses enjoy vacations and luxury goods as they eat MREs and camp in battlefields if fighting to defend the nation that enslaves them or are homeless except for bunking on a buddies’ sofa if they are not. Read more…
What is the one thing a sociopath does not want other people to know? The truth. More specifically, sociopaths do not want the truth about them to be known as they are insecure, malicious, and devious people. Beyond being embarrassed by the truth of their behaviors and thoughts, they have a deathly fear of being exposed and rejected. That’s in large part because they use lies, manipulations, and distortions to control other people and get what they want. If others were to know about their true nature, they realize that most would want nothing to do with them. They would lose the support networks of malicious minions they control and incite to abuse other people. Therefore sociopaths have a strong motivation to attack, discredit, harass, and ruin anybody who presents arguments and facts that might tend to raise questions and doubts about their behaviors and their false statements.
Many sociopaths are so insecure and malicious that they feel similarly motivated to go on the offensive, perhaps with lesser severity, in reaction to people who might embarrass them with obviously nasty (to them) comments like “Is that lettuce stuck between your teeth?” or “Your car is filthy! There’s a $3 carwash special across the street.” If that gets them unhinged, just imagine what being exposed as a child abuser, false accuser, liar, or thief will do.
Sociopaths Experts At Blaming Others, Greatly Fear Being Blamed
Nobody likes to be blamed, but a responsible person will accept blame for something appropriate. Sociopaths don’t like to accept blame for anything, even if it is well-earned. While part of this is likely from their typically narcissistic “I’m better than you” and “rules don’t apply to me” attitudes, there’s more to it than that. They may realize that blaming is how they control others to harm the targets they viciously attack, often family members or former love interests. They understand both the destructive and defensive powers of blaming and make regular use of both.
Sociopaths may be especially cognizant of the risk that people whom they have used to abuse others might even turn against them, especially those who might be greatly angered by how they were manipulated into participating in destructive and harmful activities against others. People like to blame others. While sociopaths do it with extraordinary intensity and dishonesty, the people they manipulate are likely to do it, too. After all, a sociopath was able to manipulate them into unjustly attacking a former partner, a child’s other parent, teacher, doctor, counselor, therapist, or some other party the sociopath doesn’t like and that clearly demonstrates they are the sort of people who are into blaming others. Who is to say they won’t turn and attack the sociopath when they realize how they were used? Read more…
Sweden seems like a progressive country to the uninformed. It has parental leave policies for both genders. While mothers have always availed themselves of such leave, fathers seemed reluctant. So the parental leave laws have changed over time to encourage fathers to take time off of work after the birth of a baby. At present, two months of the 390 leave days allocated for parents must be used by the father or they are lost.
Consider contemporary family life in Sweden. In the past, new parents split 390 days of paid leave however they liked—monthly, weekly, daily, and even hourly. Women used far more of it than men. But today, new fathers no longer rush back to work, leaving the mother to raise little Sven all by herself. The reason for the change? Smart public policy.
In 1995, Sweden passed a simple but revolutionary law: couples would lose one month of leave unless the father was the one who took it. A second use-it-or-lose-it month was added in 2002, and now more than 80 percent of Swedish fathers take four months off for the birth of a new child, up from 4 percent a decade ago. And a full 41 percent of companies now formally encourage fathers to go on parental leave, up from only 2 percent in 1993. Simply put, men are expected to work less and father more.
By altering the roles of the Swedish father and the Swedish worker, Sweden’s paternity-leave legislation has, in turn, rewritten the rules for Swedish men (and, by extension, women). “Swedish dads of my generation and younger have been raised to feel competent at child-rearing,” writes Slate’s Nathan Hegedus, an American who experienced the system firsthand. “They simply expect to do it, just as their wives and partners expect it of them.” If a man refuses time at home with the kids, he faces questions from friends, family, and, yes, other guys. Policy changes produced personal changes—and then, slowly but surely, society changed as well.
On the surface, this sounds quite progressive. The United States lacks similar leave policies and American men often feel discouraged from taking time off from work for family matters. They fear they will be looked down upon, ridiculed, or passed over for promotions if they take more than a short time away from work for a new baby.
But the reality is that Sweden’s progressiveness is merely a veneer over a solid core of the same false feminist male-bashing that predominates in the Western world. Children in Sweden, you see, are treated as property of the mother. If the mother doesn’t want to share, she simply starts making false abuse allegations. No proof is required, obviously a mad mom’s word is more reliable than all the evidence in the world. She will be quickly and easily rewarded with sole custody, marginalizing the father to no more a few days per month with the children.
Many fathers quickly see even this small amount of contacted whittled down to just a few hours of supervised visitation, supervised because obviously fathers cannot be trusted with children if the mother says so. In Sweden, as in the United States, men are guilty upon accusation and must struggle to prove themselves innocent, a task which is effectively impossible in many cases. After all, if you are a man who was accused of some crime that nobody else saw and there is no evidence of it occurring or not occurring, how are you to prove that you didn’t do it when a mom says you did? You can’t, so her lies win.
If a father fights for equal child custody, Swedes will consider him a brute. If he is beaten senseless by false accusations from a malicious mom, his life in tatters, he will suffer in many ways including by very limited contact with his children. Then Swedes will consider him a deadbeat. Being a father in Sweden is a losing proposition, the only chance of success is at the whim of a woman. But if she changes her mind, for any reason — her affair, her drug abuse problem, etc. — the father is instantly a degenerate who should be banned from seeing the children without the watchful eyes of the state closely monitoring his every move.
This is no different, really, than the United States and many other nations in which men are not even second-class citizens in all matters involving families and children. Not only is this extremely unfair, it contributes to a wide range of social problems including gender conflict, parental alienation child abuse, and harming children’s educational attainment and mental health.
To their credit, many women understand these issues very well and fully support equal rights. Some of them are strident enough about it to actively support both the father’s rights movement and going to significant effort to ensure their own ex-partners stay involved in their children’s lives. Unfortunately, there are more than a few naysayers remaining. Some of them are quite intent on not only denying equal rights but going so far as to even any messages that advocate for changes they do not approve.
Amnesty International Shows Its Sexist Bias
A lot of children in Sweden are upset about deprivation of access to a loving parent, generally their fathers. Four Swedish high school students, Sara Sivesson, Jerry Wallén, Sandra Atas, and Oskar Krantz, set out to expose Sweden’s human rights crimes against children and fathers to the world. They produced a video which they submitted to Amnesty International for a human rights video contest. Their video explains what happens to so many Swedish fathers who long to spend time with their children but who are prevented from doing so by the typical false feminist tool of false accusations.
The video made it to the finalist stage. The students were of course very excited by this.
But then a woman’s violence organization in Uppsala reportedly demanded that Amnesty International remove the video from the competition and its website. Read more…
Dr. Amy Baker is a researcher studying and reporting on parental alienation and parental alienation syndrome. As she explains, parental alienation refers to the behaviors and tactics used to cause children’s relationship with a parent to suffer. Parental alienation syndrome (PAS) refers to the effects on the child, especially when they become so severe that the child doesn’t want to spend time with a parent and expresses disgust and dislike for that parent without a valid reason.
In her book Adult Children of Parental Alienation Syndrome, she discusses many case studies of parental alienation and presents summaries that show common alienation tactics and the long term damage to the children and the target parent.
The video below features Baker talking with WABC TV host Ken Rosato in 2009. She discusses what motivated her to study parental alienation and some of her findings on common alienating tactics and effects on children. Read more…
On September 9, 2010, law enforcement finally caught up with parental child abductor Melinda Thompson, formerly Melinda Stratton. On April 24, 2008, she had disappeared with son Andrew Thompson after leaving Australia to go to Germany on a Singapore Airlines flight from Sydney to Frankfurt. Her professed intent was to keep the boy away from his father, Ken Thompson of New South Wales, Australia. After more than a year searching for his son, in mid-2010 he traveled to Europe to do a bike tour across the continent in search for his son. He biked over 3000 miles across nine countries raising awareness of his missing son. He wore clothes covered with pictures of Andrew.
Ken discussed in an interview with BBC news about how he discovered Andrew had been found. He had stopped cycling in Germany between Nuremberg and Stuttgart to check his email. There was an anonymous message stating that Andrew had been found and Australian authorities would contact him. Read more…
Parental alienation child abuse is a worldwide problem. As most of our news-oriented coverage is focused on the United States and Canada, some may not realize that parental alienation and destructive family law courts are plentiful outside of North America, too. This story highlights one troubling alienation case in Singapore.
Parental Alienation in Singapore
Wee Cheng of Singapore, one of our many readers worldwide, is a divorced father of a young boy named Adriel Cheng. His limited 8 hours of contact per week hasn’t been honored in two years. The courts will do nothing but reward the mother’s contempt for their orders. Adriel hasn’t seen his father almost half a year because of interference being enabled and enforced by human rights violators in the Singapore schools and family courts.
While Singapore has a fine reputation in many areas, Mr. Cheng’s experience shows that the government of Singapore is engaged in human rights violations and is intent on enabling parental alienators to abuse their children. In Cheng’s case, the courts and schools are directly involved in access blocking and interfering with the parent/child relationship. They have even threatened police action against him for attempting to spend time with his son at a school carnival. Read more…
We recently received notice that the American Coalition for Fathers and Children is working on putting together graphics and slogans for signs, banner, brochures, flyers, and other literature to support its goals of enacting shared parenting legislation and reform of child support and domestic violence laws across the United States. They are putting together working groups to create this content and have some people with professional backgrounds in graphic design already on board. They would like to get more skilled volunteers involved. They are also seeking ideas to develop into signs and other materials to help parental rights and family law reform groups get their messages out to the general public.
We’ve seen some of the signs and banners similar groups have created (California Coalition for Families and Children comes to mind) and would like to encourage them to share their work and ideas with ACFC. ACFC aims to build a library of such content and share it with like-minded groups and individuals. Read more…
Rob’s recent comment pointing out the Ben Vonderheide case in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania made me curious. After all, it’s not often that you see the government actually prosecute somebody for making malicious false reports to the police to terrorize a father and block access to a child. On the surface, it looks like the government got it right in this case. Dig deeper, however, and you find that Ben Vonderheide is a poster case for government-backed terrorism against a parent who has been repeatedly abused by the government. The government is now using his son, Quinta Xavier Vonderheide, as a pawn in its vindictive battle to hide its crimes against the state’s children and families and attack those who attempt to expose them.
Alienating Ex Convicted of Lying to Police Gets Sole Custody
Quinta’s mother is Vonderheide’s ex-girlfriend Wendy Flanders. She has systematically alienated her son from his father and engaged in access blocking, denigration, defamation, and false police reports to destroy the child’s relationship with his father. She is unable to accept that their son should have time with both his parents and is willing to break the law, scheme, manipulate, and conspire to ensure that he will never see his father again. As is typical, family law courts reward such behaviors unless a parent can afford to bring contempt of court charges against the abuser.
She even attempted to change his name to Quinta Xavier Flanders, a common stunt for alienating parents who alter their children’s names to remove all mention of the hated ex.
This is nothing new for Flanders as she is a serial parental alienator. She has engaged in this child abuse not only involving Quinta, but also regarding her daughter Bryna Elizabeth Flanders-Harris and that girl’s father John Harris. In that case, she used false allegations of child sexual abuse among other methods. There are also reports that she attempted similar family terrorism against another previous ex, a Mr. Caruso who is no longer alive to defend himself and his child Emily from the sociopathic Flanders. Read more…
(Originally published January 15, 2009. Updated August 27, 2010.)
So you’re getting a divorce, or have already gotten one. Have any kids in the picture? You can bet they are confused about what you and your ex-spouse (or soon-to-be-ex-spouse) have done by breaking up the family. Kids need to understand what is going on from such a big family change as a divorce, and it’s not a simple thing for them. Why? Well, for starters:
Children often blame themselves for the divorce.
They need to know that divorce is an adult problem, not one caused by children.
Child self-blame for divorce creates psychological problems, some of which can be long-term and severe.
Children need to know that it’s OK to love both parents.
They are often put in the middle and made to “pick sides” by one or both parents and don’t like this at all.
They need to know that parents who try to make them “pick sides” and bad-mouth the other parent are doing the wrong thing so they won’t participate and may possibly help their misguided parent(s) control themselves.
Even in an amicable divorce involving children, there are going to be questions and worries. All of the books discussed in this posting can help with those, especially for the intended audience which is generally late toddler-hood to early grade school, about ages 2 to 9.
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