Community | September 21, 2010 | 2 comments

Parental Alienation - Shh! Don't Tell! It's a Secret! - Parent Using Children against Parent

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ejasun
Lose the innocence, add a threat. Picture the divorced father who allows his son a freedom prohibited in the mother's home and in so doing undermines her authority. "Shh! Don't tell!"

Asking such a child to keep a secret is often an exercise in frustration. It can be like
leaving the same child hungry and alone in a room with a chocolate bar and asking him not to eat it.

The damage may not be done in the telling of the secret so much as in the child's perception of your reaction to the telling. Your anger and disappointment and punishments are unwarranted. It wasn't fair to enlist the child in the first place.

http://www.paawareness.org/article.asp?articleid=198
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2 comments // Parental Alienation - Shh! Don't Tell! It's a Secret! - Parent Using Children against Parent

  • ejasun
    • +1
      ejasun  
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    • Consider what happens all too often between immature, angry or uneducated divorcing parents. Insecure and alone, the divorcing father (for example) wants validation that his pain is real. Who could understand this better, he reasons, than his kids? So he shares a confidence, confesses a secret, all with the selfish (although often unrecognized) goal of proving to himself that he's right, that the estranged wife – still and always the children's mother – is wrong.

      The child taken into a parent's confidence feels special. But being parentified in this way is psychologically destructive. It causes real anxiety when the secret must be kept, often at the cost of the bond with the other parent. It cheats the child, in effect, of her childhood.

      Too often, "Don't tell your mom . . ." becomes a form of abuse known as parental alienation.

      http://www.paawareness.org/article.asp?articleid=198

    • 1 year ago
  • ejasun
    • +1
      ejasun  
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    • You know about those stories. They're all around you.

      All too often, secrets are destructive. Even the best intended, most innocent confidence can generate mistrust, worry and fear, and can even interfere with the course of healthy development.

      Kids are impulsive. If maturation is the process of developing control over impulses, then children are impulsive by definition. Younger, less mature and developmentally delayed kids have to fight against the urges that often overwhelm them. They want immediate gratification. They want the pleasure of telling your secrets.

      http://www.paawareness.org/donate.asp

    • 1 year ago
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