Children respond to the stresses of parental separation, divorce and the tug-of-war often associated with cointested custody litigation in a number of predictable ways. Recognizing polarization, the chameleon-like adaptations of of some children and the signs of alienation, among others, are critical both to conducting therapy and to the process of forensic assessment.

The Best Interests of the Child Standard (BICS) is universally endorsed but persists without definition. As a result, child custody and similarly critical child-centered decisions are made in the name of the BICS without any reliable or valid measure. Attachment theory may provide the scaffolding necessary to operationalizer the BICS concept.

Forensic psychologists, family law professionals and jurists alike struggle with the question of when and how a child's voice might be heard regarding his or her own custody and visitation. This article addresses this issue within the context of developmental theory.

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Garber, Benjamin D. (2007). Conceptualizing visitation resistance and refusal (VRR) in the context of parental conflict,  separation and divorce. Family Court Review, (4)1, 588-599.

Children who resist or refuse contact with one parent do so for one or more among many common reasons. This paper recommends an assessment hierarchy or checklist intended to assist forensic evaluators and the courts to understand and respond to VRR more uniformly, in particular to keep the phenomenom of alienation in perspective.

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Forensic interviews with children are commonly muddied by the interviewer's biases, methods and laeding questions. Unfortunately few protocols and instruments exist intended to minimize these contaminants in the course of eliciting a child's full range of experience. This article introduces the Query Grid, a no-cost, child-friendly flexible and highly informative means of serving this purpose.

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All too often conflicted co-parents view custodial time as their privilege to be bartered and defended like property. In fact, custodial time is a parent's responsibility to the child's time.

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Parental alienation has become a divisive force in child custody litigation, but has yet to be understood in the larger context of child development. This article places the phenomenon of alienation in the context of attachment theory and, in so doing, yields practical applications for psychotherapy process, forensic assessment and courtroom protocols.

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This highly praised three hour discussion regarding the legal, ethical, practical and clinically most efficacious means of structured out-patient psychotherapy with children whose parents are highly conflicted, separated, divorcing or divorced is now available as an on-line CEU/CLE in ethics via webcast.

Applying the concept of parental alienation more broadly and using the framework of internal working models from attachment theory, this article is the first in the field to address the familiar situation in which a caregiver undermines a child's therapy.

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Standard techniques including psychotherapy, mediation and arbitration often fail when highly conflicted caregivers must work together to establish child-centered decisions. This article presents a model of child-centered assessment and intervention appropriate to such highly conflicted co-parents.

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Children's distress associated with parental conflict, seoparation, divorce and litigation can be manifest in many ways, including distractibility, increased activity level and impulsivity. It is a grave disservice to a child to mistake these reactive symptoms for Attention Deficit (Hyperactivity) Disorder. This article addresses the difficult chicken-egg dilemma of family conflict as a reaction to versus as a cause of a child's behavioral and attentional difficulties.

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Inattentive and impulsive children can learn to better control their behavior and attention through internalized self-talk, a skill that can be learned at home or at school. This article describes one means of instilling this skill in the service of improving  behavior, inattention and associated difficulties with self- and peer-esteem.

Identification of the phenomenom of parental alienation and Gardner's (supposed) Parental Alienation Syndrome is running rampant through our courtrooms. This artcle has become a keystone in understanding what is not alienation and, thereby, avoiding inappropriate charges which otherwise threaten the well-being of children and caregivers alike.

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This article establishes practical means for mental health professionals serving children whose parents are conflicted, separated and/or divorced to minimize the likelihood that the therapy would be inappropriately become partisan to litigation.