No parent sets out to hurt their child. Yet parental alienation often takes root through small, unintentional choices. The real question for divorcing parents isn't whether they'd ever try to alienate their child, since most wouldn't dream of it, but how to avoid accidentally falling into the trap anyway.
Remove Your Own Ego
It is easy for your own judgments, or those of others, to turn divorce into a referendum on who the "bad guy" is or who is at fault for the marriage ending. This outlook can easily lead a parent to feel that if their child wants to spend time with the other parent, or prefers the other parent, then they are inferior in some way. All children, and children of divorce especially, benefit from an involved, loving relationship with both of their parents. Remember that even if things did not work out with your spouse, they are still your child's parent.
When Talking to Your Children
Anything said to a child should be for the child's benefit, not to unburden a parent's own feelings or to extract information. Some parents, often without quite realizing it, start treating a child as a source of intelligence, asking what happened at the other house, what was said, and how things are going there. This makes your child a pawn in the divorce and has lasting negative consequences. The child is put in an impossible role: tiptoeing around a parent's emotions, feeling responsible for managing how that parent feels, or sensing that they have to pick a side. None of that serves the child.
Common Unintentionally Alienating Behaviors
A few patterns show up repeatedly in families where alienation develops, usually without any conscious intent behind them.
The most obvious is making negative comments about the other parent to the child: calling them irresponsible, unhealthy, or unhinged, or offering up armchair diagnoses about them. Whether or not those characterizations are accurate doesn't really matter. Hearing them isn't helpful to a child, and it taints how the child sees that parent.
It should be noted that children often hear harmful things about the other parent by listening in to conversations had within their earshot. Children have remarkably sharp hearing, especially for conversations conducted in hushed or hurried tones. If a child senses that something is being kept from them, they'll often try to listen in without a parent ever realizing it. That means parents need a wider definition of "earshot" than they might assume, and should be careful not to speak negatively about the other parent with the child around.
Running a child through a litany of questions after time spent with the other parent can also send the implied message that something is wrong with the other parent. That discomfort, the sense of being squeezed for information or made to feel uneasy, is itself a mechanism through which alienation can take hold.
Sharing your own anxiety about them spending time with the other parent, either by directly saying so or through nervous behaviors, signals to the child that the other parent is unsafe in some way. Work through your own feelings with a therapist, rav, or trusted friend.
The Long View
Children sometimes make choices at a particular age, including choices about a relationship with a parent, that they then come to regret years later. Parents and other adults involved have a responsibility to educate and guide children toward healthy choices, without forcing them into a relationship they resist.
Take a moment to think about where you want your child to be ten years from now. Think specifically, not just in general terms, but financially, emotionally, socially, and religiously. Think about the child's whole life rather than just the current conflict. Then ask the harder question: what do I need to do today to make that happen? Waiting until that ten-year mark to start is too late. Keeping the question "what is actually best for my child, and how can I be the best person for my child" in the foreground is what helps parents avoid drifting into alienating behavior without meaning to.
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