It is understandable if your divorce from your spouse is considerably difficult for your minor child to cope with. You may be making your best efforts toward making this shared custody arrangement and overall lifestyle change as painless as possible. But even still, you may notice that your child’s behavior towards you is drastically different from what they once were. This may be so extreme, to the point that you begin to question if parental alienation is happening. With this, please read on to discover how to fight back against parental alienation and how one of the seasoned Somerset County child custody lawyers at the Law Offices of Kisha M. Hebbon, LLC can help you identify and address this issue effectively.
By definition, parental alienation is when one parent behaves or acts in a way that causes a child to dislike, fear, or distance themselves from another parent. A crucial point to this is that the alienated parent has not done anything to prompt the child to feel or act in such a manner.
You may be devastated if your child has alienated themselves from you. But this also leaves a damaging effect to your child. Namely, parental alienation may cause your child to experience feelings of anxiety, depression, and overall emotional distress. They may even have self-esteem and self-identity issues that they never struggled with before.
In the long-term, experiencing parental alienation in their upbringing may lead your child toward self-destructive behaviors and possibly even substance abuse issues. Further, they may have difficulty forming and maintaining friendships, familial relationships, and romantic relationships.
For the sake of your child’s well-being, and your overall relationship with them, you must do everything possible to fight back against your former spouse’s parental alienation.
This may start with having an open and honest conversation about your concerns with your former spouse. Sometimes, parental alienation is an unintentional act. So you may give your former spouse the benefit of the doubt in that they mean no harm; and hopefully, they can reverse their behavior and actions going forward.
In the meantime, you may enroll your child in therapy. Or, your child may even attend family therapy together with you and your former spouse. This way, you may mend the relationships that were temporarily severed.
Unfortunately, it is possible that your former spouse may not accept your concerns as serious, and they may continue to intentionally alienate your child from you. In this extreme circumstance, you must take it upon yourself to petition for a post-judgment modification on your custody arrangement with the New Jersey family court.
With a successful petition, the court may grant you greater parenting time opportunities to make up for the moments you once lost with your child. At the same time, they may order your former spouse to supervised visitation, to ensure that such alienating behaviors and actions have stopped once and for all.
We advise you to reach out to one of the competent Somerset County family lawyers sooner rather than later. We are confident that you will not regret retaining the services of our team at the Law Offices of Kisha M. Hebbon, LLC.
