Moving Toward Consensus: Joining Bernet and Baker, Emery, and Griffin to Better Understand the Dynamics of Parent-Child Contact Problems (PCCP)

ABSTRACT

The editors of Family Transitions have bravely and graciously invited this dialogue in an effort to clarify the state of the thinking and the science concerned with understanding and responding to the needs of the child who is aligned with Parent A and resists or refuses contact with Parent B¹

¹ In the interest of efficiency, we refer to Parents A and B without any assumption of gender or marital status. We arbitrarily refer to their child using female pronouns..

This article responds to the considered and insightful contributions of Griffin (2024), Emery (2024), and Bernet and Baker (2024). Many points of consensus are highlighted, most notably agreements that (1) the child’s position within her conflicted family system is routinely associated with multiple, convergent contemporary and historical relationship pressures, (2) understanding a child’s position within her conflicted family system requires consideration of the full spectrum of a child’s relationship ecology in a manner consistent with a rubric propounded by Garber (2024), and (3) the Five Factor Model (Bernet & Greenhill, 2022) can only attempt to answer the question “is alienation afoot?” subsidiary to a broader inquiry into the full ecology of the child’s experience.

KEYWORDS:

• Alienation
• five factor model
• estrangement
• enmeshment
• parent child contact problems
• resist/refuse dynamics

View responses to this article:

Comments regarding “Looking beyond the Sorting Hat: Deconstructing the ‘Five Factor Model’ of Alienation,” by Garber and Simon

Building a Better Way: A Lawyer’s Response to Benjamin D. Garber and Robert A. Simon

Is the Emperor Naked? Questioning the Alienation Hypothesis

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

¹ In the interest of efficiency, we refer to Parents A and B without any assumption of gender or marital status. We arbitrarily refer to their child using female pronouns..

² In January, 2024, Drs. Simon and Garber met with Dr. Bernet, Ms. Griffin and Mr. Ashish Joshi, an attorney with a specific interest and expertise in parent-child contact problems, to discuss and work toward greater consensus in understanding PCCP. Out of this came an agreement that the FFM is a wonderful start but the model needs to be more fully developed, defined, and perhaps additional factors could/would be added. This work is ongoing, and the reader is advised to “stay tuned”

³ This is yet another reason why carefully crafted, non-leading, open-ended interviews with children are essential to the evaluation process, why tools like the Query Grid (Garber, 2007) are invaluable, and why we must interpret the results of judicial in camera interviews with tremendous care (Birnbaum & Bala, 2010).