An Update on the DSM-V Campaign

Even with the counter-campaign against it declared by the National Organization for Women (NOW), the campaign started by Fathers & Families to support the inclusion of Parental Alienation in the fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-V) has been greatly successful.  The DSM, considered the diagnostic "bible" of the American Psychiatric Association's, is undergoing its fifth revision, and a group of 70 mental health experts from 12 countries are part of an effort to add Parental Alienation to this edition of the manual.
Fathers & Families, a renowned pro shared parenting organization, asked their members and sympathizers to send letters to the DSM-V Task Force in support of their effort, and so far, thousands have responded to their call.  Dr. Darrel Regier, vice chair of the task force, recently declared that their Task Force has "… gotten an enormous amount of mail -more than [on] any other issue."
To ensure that the Task Force understands the severity of Parental Alienation, Fathers & Families is urging its followers and every person concerned about our children well-being, to keep their enthusiasm and to keep on writing letters to the committee, telling their stories and explaining that Parental Alienation is a real mental health problem and needs to be taken seriously by our health and legal professionals.  You can do it through their website; to do so, click here.

What Do Children Want?

In his article titled “Australian Study Asks Children Their Ideas About Custody”, Robert Franklin, one of the regular collaborators of the Fathers & Families website, reviews a study done by Dr. Alan Campbell of the University of South Australia (Child Care in Practice, 7/1/08).

Dr. Campbell and his team interviewed a group of Australian children between the ages of 7 and 17, all of them children of divorced or separated parents. The study wanted to answer three basic questions:

1. What are children’s views on their ability to participate in decisions that directly affect them following their parents’ separation?

2. To what extent do children’s interview texts reflect an adequate understanding of children’s rights?

3. How do children construct their understanding of the concept of their ‘‘best interests’’ in relation to post-separation decision-making about their futures?

Campbell questions come from previous studies that show that courts tend to ignore children’s views on divorce, separation, and custody, a behavior that is based on the dubious idea that courts know better than children what is in their “best interests.”

The study proved that children not only have very specific views on these issues, but that they also wanted to express them. For example, most of the interviewed children wanted to have some input in the decisions that were being made about their lives, they believed that this was their right; as Franklin writes, “they wanted their voices to be heard.” When discussing the topic of the so-called “best interests of the child,” they stated that being consulted should be part of the concept. They believed that when courts ignore their voices, they are ignoring one of the main things that would guarantee their best interests.

The children were also concerned about the lack of fairness that prevailing custody arrangements represented for their parents and for them. They considered the practice of awarding primary custody to one parent unfair to both the non-custodial parent and them.

Children wanted fair custody arrangements and considered the common practice of primary custody/visitation unfair. They believed that only fair custody arrangements could satisfy the law’s requirement that the courts act in their best interests.

The interviewed children tended to consider that experts appointed by courts (social workers, psychologists, etc.,) interfere rather than serve the process, and that family members, including members of extended family, should be the ones making decisions about custody. Any input from outside the family was considered less legitimate than the advice and counsel of family members. Although this idea would be almost impossible to put into practice, it shows that children understand family as a complete unit, a concept that family courts tend to ignore.

As Franklin writes, maybe it is time already to start listening to our kids.

The Parental Alienation Syndrome and the DSM-5 (2 of 2)

The DSM is an exhaustive bible used by psychiatrists, psychologists, family practitioners and other health professionals, to classify mental disorders. Now that its publishers are working on its fifth edition, or DSM-V, there is a movement to include Parental Alienation in it, a movement that includes among its members hundreds of mental health professionals, doctors, educators, family law professionals, and prominent citizens from 10 different countries. A team integrated by psychiatrist William Bernet, M.D., Wilfrid v. Boch-Galhau, M.D., Joseph Kenan, M.D., Joan Kinlan, M.D., Demosthenes Lorandos, Ph.D., J.D., Richard Sauber, Ph.D., Bela Sood, M.D., and James S. Walker, PhD, wrote a text titled “Parental Alienation Disorder and DSM-V”, in which they make the case for including Parental Alienation Disorder in DSM-V. Their proposal was submitted to the Disorders in Childhood and Adolescence Work Group in August of 2008.

If Parental Alienation is included in the DSM-V, it will have radical effects in the way this disorder is treated by insurance companies, the pharmaceutical industry, government, and academia. It will increase Parental Alienation’s recognition and legitimacy in the eyes of family court judges, mediators, custody evaluators, family law attorneys, and the legal and mental health community in general. According to the above mentioned William Bernet, adding Parental Alienation “would (…) lend credence to a charge of parental alienation in court, and raise the odds that children would get timely treatment.”

Fathers & Families is asking everyone to write the DSM-V Task Force to urge them to consider including Parental Alienation Disorder. Thanks to this effort, the Task Force has now listed Parental Alienation Disorder among the “Conditions Proposed by Outside Sources” that are under consideration to be included.

The Task Force welcomes comments that could provide evidence indicating that Parental Alienation should be included in DSM-V. People can send letters to the DSM-5 Task Force until the middle of 2010. In 2011 the issue will be considered; the DSM-5 will be written in 2012 and published in 2013. Fathers & Families advises that when you write your letters you should:

1)Keep the focus on your children and how the Parental Alienation has harmed them.

2)Stick to the facts related to the Parental Alienation.

3)Be succinct.

4)Fill in all fields on our form.

5)Be civil and credible, and avoid any profanity or use of insulting language.

6)Emphasize that Parental Alienation Disorder is a large-scale problem.

To send your letters through the Fathers & Families initiative, please click here.

The Parental Alienation Syndrome and the DSM-5 (1 of 2)

Fathers & Families, the pro-shared parenting organization, is leading a campaign to include Parental Alienation Syndrome (PAS) in the fifth edition of the “Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders,” or DSM-5 (Campaign: Ask DSM to Include Parental Alienation in Upcoming Edition). Before inviting my readers to join the campaign, I would like stop and give a brief explanation of what the Parental Alienation Syndrome is.

The Parental Alienation Syndrome or PAS is a mental disorder that appears during divorce/separation and/or child-custody disputes, and its primary symptom is the child’s unjustified rejection against the non-custodial parent. It grows out of the brainwashing performed by the custodial parent, who turns his or her children against the other parent, destroying this way the attachment between the children and the target parent. PAS is a very common and well-documented phenomenon. Estimates of children with PAS are close to 200,000 children in the U.S., the same amount as children with autism.

The child also contributes to the disorder, denigrating the alienated parent, while giving frivolous reasons for his or her behavior, insisting that he or she alone came up with the ideas towards the alienated parent, and feeling obligated to protect the alienating parent.

Dr. Douglas Darnall describes three categories of alienating parents:

-The naïve alienators (mild): They are ignorant of what they are doing and are willing to be educated and change.

-The active alienators (moderate): When they are triggered, they lose control of appropriate boundaries.

-The obsessed alienators (severe): They are committed to destroying the other parent’s relationship with the child.

For more information on PAS, please refer to the following books:

Douglas Darnall. Divorce Casualties: Protecting Your Children from Parental Alienation

Jayne A. Major. Parents Who Have Successfully Fought Parental Alienation Syndrome

New Data on Fathers and their Children

Two recent articles on the relationship between fathers and their children give new data on this important issue. The articles are Our Fatherhood Crisis , by Glenn Sacks and Robert Franklin, published on June 21, 2009 in The Washington Times (http://washingtontimes.com/news/2009/jun/21/our-fatherhood-crisis/?feat=home_commentary), and Obama’s Father’s Day Criticism of Dads Misses Mark by Glenn Sacks and Robert Franklin (http://lifestyle.msn.com/your-life/family-parenting/article.aspx?cp-documentid=20440872&page=print). I want to quote some of the most relevant facts that appeared on these articles:

1 - Professor Rebekah Levine Coley lead a recent Boston College study of low-income minority families, and found that when nonresident fathers are involved in their adolescent children's lives, they worked as an important protective factor, decreasing markedly the incidence of substance abuse, violence, and delinquency.
Writing about this study, MSNBC health and science writer Linda Carroll explains that:

"When it comes to preventing risky teen sex, there may be no better deterrent than a doting dad. Teenagers whose fathers are more involved in their lives are less likely to engage in risky sexual activities such as unprotected intercourse, according to a new study...While an involved mother can also help stave off a teen's sexual activity, dads have twice the influence."

2 - Professors Kathryn Edin of Harvard and Timothy Nelson of the University of Pennsylvania conducted a study of low-income, unmarried fathers and found that most strive to be good parents but often are thwarted by the children's mothers' interference. They found that these dads provide what monetary support they could, but focused on the non-financial aspects of fatherhood. These aspects include educating their daughters about relationships with males and teaching their sons how to defend themselves.

Ms. Edin's soon-to-be-published subsequent studies (Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing) found that when mothers move on to have new partners their actions are "strongly associated with increases in the probability that the biological father will have no contact with his child.” When fathers move on to have subsequent partners and children, they largely retain their desire to be in their original children's lives. According to Ms. Edin: "The evidence points more strongly to the role of mothers 'swapping daddies' than it does to the role of fathers 'swapping kids.'" A single mother's new partnership "may provide strong motivation [for her] to put the new partner in the 'daddy' role." The biological father is then less likely to be involved because the mother is more likely to exclude him and/or because he may feel he's now redundant.

When a mother wants to exclude her children's father from their lives, she can push him out easily. Family courts usually award custody to mothers, and are extremely lazy enforcing fathers' visitation rights. In most states, mothers are allowed to move their children thousands of miles away from the children's fathers, destroying the fathers' bonds with their children.

3 - Dr. Perry Crouch is a gang intervention specialist in Los Angeles. He states that only about half of one percent of the gang members he deals with have fathers in their lives.

4 - Michigan Attorney General Mike Cox, after examining hundreds of pre-sentencing reports detailing the family histories of convicted criminals, found that the common denominator of those cases was that one parent, usually the father, was missing from the home.

5 - In Growing Up With a Single Parent: What Hurts, What Helps, sociologists Sara McLanahan and Gary Sandefur analyzed data from five different studies and concluded that children of single parent families are more than twice as likely to drop out of high school as their peers with two parents, they're also less likely to go to college if they do finish high school, and more likely to be both out of school and out of work, proving that fathers and educational performance are also strongly linked.

6 - The Urban Institute report titled What About the Dads? tells that even when fathers inform child welfare officials that they would like their children to live with them, the agencies seek to place the children in the foster care system instead, pushing fathers away from their children.

Readers should also check out the statistics on these issues gathered by the people of Fathers and Families: http://fathersandfamiliesorg.siteprotect.net/site/infores.php

For an unified movement

Last February 11 I received the news about the merger of Sacks Media Group and Fathers and Families, and the appointment of Glenn Sacks as Executive Director of Fathers and Families. The announcement states that the merger “gives the family court reform movement an excellent chance to build the powerful, well-funded national advocacy group it has long needed to effectively drive our agenda forward”, “a giant step towards the unification of this movement” (http://www.fathersandfamilies.org/?p=1461).

Fathers and Families (http://www.fathersandfamilies.org/), a 50,000+ members Massachusetts based organization, promotes a family court reform that would establish equal rights and responsibilities for fathers and mothers, and, by doing so, would protect the children of divorced parents’ right to the love and care of both parents. A very successful and well-organized group founded by Ned Holstein (nedholstein@fathersandfamilies.org), MD and MS, Fathers and Families has a highly successful history both in the media and in family courts.

Glenn Sacks (GlennSacks@FathersandFamilies.org), a happily married father of two with a Master's Degree in Latin American Studies from UCLA, distinguished schoolteacher in Los Angeles and Miami, is a men's and fathers' issues columnist, commentator, and radio talk show host. His radio show His Side with Glenn Sacks, which has received extensive media attention, discusses gender and family issues from a perspective sympathetic to men and fathers. He has made hundreds of radio and TV apperances, and his columns have appeared in dozens of the largest newspapers in the United States. He has been quoted in dozens of major publications, and his work has been covered by hundreds of radio and television stations, as well as in articles. His opinion columns and his works have been reprinted and/or discussed or quoted in numerous books. And last but not least, Sacks publishes an E-Newsletter with 50,000+ web traffic (http://www.glennsacks.com/).

This merge is an example to follow. Glenn could have followed his path as a solitary prophet and continue to achieve as many goals as he had already achieved. Fathers and Families is an organization strong enough to continue its history of achievements without having such a visible media personality as Glenn. But the greatness of their decision is the realization that uniting their separate forces they would create a new force that will be much stronger than the mere sum of both.

We need more people willing to sacrifice protagonism and personal glory with the purpose of strengthening our movement. There is a given behind the decision taken by Glenn Sacks and Fathers and Families: our children are more important than us. No matter how big or prominent we could be, we should subordinate each and every one of our efforts to the goal of securing the happiness of our children. It is already time for the different pro-joint custody organizations to concentrate forces, to leave behind their individual interests and tiny differences and work toward a cohesive and strong movement that could have a visible presence and a loud voice at a nationwide level. I, as a member of such an organization, already signed to be a member of one of the Fathers and Families Action Squads (http://www.fathersandfamilies.org/?page_id=1347).

Let us work together. Let us have one voice. Our children are waiting.