The article previewed/linked below – authored by a US based Parental Alienation Expert is powerfully educative and informative. It provides elaborate real life examples to support its valid argument that kids can, and do lie (often coached by a naughty parent in dispute with a partner) when asked to “testify” in matters relating to their quarreling parents.
My experiences strongly convince me that MANY experts in this part of the world, who have to work with disputing partners with kids, often invest little or no time to READ and LEARN about this aspect of issues they have to mediate in.
Quite often they are clueless about the REAL possibility that serious problems – like LYING – could be happening. This is why many literally brag when discussing their work, that they KNOW how to get the kids they interview to tell them the TRUTH. They fail to realize it is possible for the kids they interview to be coached to tell lies by one parent, against a target parent. This makes them prone to being sometimes hoodwinked and used, by a naughty manipulative, vindictive parent against the other parent.
The above is why I consider such experts (I wonder HOW they are recruited to play sensitive roles of this kind!) a danger to those couples (and their kids) that they have to work with.
Aside from my personal experiences and observations, this problem of kids lying when testifying is something that reports have shown (See some examples in Google) happens quite a lot, making it imperative that experts take pains to check for it, before any decision is made in mediating disputes.
This is why I am compiling and promoting articles like the one below, as widely as possible, for the attention of disputing couples, and any experts or professionals working with them. Kids are fickle minded and LOVE their parents.
A manipulative parent can use them to hurt the other, even if the child does not like it.
Read the article below to better understand that things are not often as straightforward as they may seem, where so called “child testimony” is concerned.
Failure to put these considerations into use when dealing with disputing couples with kids could lead to villification of an innocent partner!
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TITLE: When children lie and why they lie and why people who work with separated families should know that they lie and whyPREVIEW:
False allegations are a feature of family separation, especially when that separation is accompanied by high levels of conflict. Writing in the splendidly detailed and must have book for all mental health practitioners working with separated families – Parental Alienation – The Handbook for Legal and Mental Health Professionals, T W Campbell tells us
False allegations of CSA (Child Sexual Abuse) typically originate as rumours and can spiral out of control as the ensuing processes of rumour dissemmination gather greater and greater momentum. False allegations do not involve the malicious premeditation found in fabricated allegations (page 164)
Fabricated allegations however, are differentiated by Campbell as being
based upon premediated determination to direct allegations at an entirely innocent person (page 164)
Which is why, when we are working with separated families where such allegations are made, it is important to know how the allegation arose in the first place and then what impact the allegation had upon the concentric circles around the family. This allows differentiation and differentiation allows deeper understanding, of the nature of the allegations and why and how they arose.
Continue reading full article…
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