Teresa C. Silva

By Teresa Silva and Peter Sandström

Parenting is generally conceived as a unidirectional construct in which parents are thought to be the direct or indirect cause of different child outcomes. Children who exhibit problematic behavior, who display hurtful and uncaring behavior toward others or who are aggressive or turn to delinquency when they reach adolescence are often viewed as the product of insufficient parental competence (i.e., nurture) in addition to inherited genetic predisposition (i.e., nature). Competent parental behavior, on the other hand, counteracts the development of callous-unemotional traits and disruptive conduct by promoting the internalization of prosocial and normative behavior. However, empirical evidence consistently shows that the general behavioral patterns of parents and children become interdependent and mutually reinforcing during childhood. Parents with low parental competence, who interact with temperamentally difficult children, consistently create coercive exchanges that produce escalations in child oppositional and aggressive behavior, subsequently increasing the likelihood of continued harsh parenting strategies. Therefore, early prevention and intervention programs must have a systemic approach and target the parents, the children, and the interaction process itself. If the cycle of harsh, negative, and confrontational interactions is not broken during early childhood, there is a risk that coercion settles as a baseline pattern of conduct for future relationships.

Part of the book: Parenting

By Teresa C. Silva

Parental alienation (PA) is a form of childhood emotional abuse in which one parent instrumentally uses the child to inflict psychological harm on the other parent for revenge. The consequences of parental alienating behaviours range from mild (e.g., the child shows a certain resistance towards visiting the targeted parent but warm parenting is still possible) to severe, where the positive affective parent–child bond is severed and extremely difficult to reinstate under family therapy. In PA processes, parenting is disrupted with the targeted parent and dysfunctional with the alienating parent. Consequently, the child is at a high risk of developing internalising (e.g., depression, anxiety) and externalising (e.g., use of drugs/alcohol, violence) problems during later developmental stages and through the lifespan. Although the prevalence and severity of PA cases in our societies are largely unknown, in part because the construct is still an ongoing debate among academics, practitioners and family justice professionals, different authors defend that it should be treated as a public health problem. Early prevention should be the primary objective and family justice, child protection and mental health services must coordinate efforts to support the families and promote the best conditions for the development of affected children.

Part of the book: Parenting