Parentectomy - A New Term From Ohio

I am not so sure that agree with all of Ohio Family Law Blog's Preventing a Parentectomy After Divorce but the differences are a bit on the minor side and on the whole this needs some serious consideration by everyone.

According to Dr. Williams, a ”parentectomy” is the removal, erasure, or severe diminution of a caring parent in a child’s life, following separation or divorce. A parentectomy is the most cruel infringement upon children’s rights to be carried out against human children by human adults. Parentectomies are psychologically lethal to children and parents.

The consequences for a child may be that he or she is actually abandoned by a parent who became burned out by years of court fights and battling a pervasive pattern of alienation known as parental alienation syndrome (PAS). According to Dr. Williams, that while kids hate to see battling parents, they misinterpret a parent giving up the fight as that parent not caring enough about them. “These children frequently become depressed - especially in later adolescence. At times their depression reaches suicidal proportions. In my own clinical work, as well as in school and emergency room consultation experience during the past 15 years, I have found a very high correlation between suicidality in adolescents and a divorce in their earlier years, which virtually results in one parent being erased from their lives.”

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These prevention measures, which are presented in the spirit of suggestions and based on clinical experience, include:

1. Person contemplating marriage and children should consider a proposed mate’s tendency toward relying on the role of being a parent as his or her exclusive identity. Such persons may need to rely totally on full-time control over the children for identity following divorce.
2. One should try to fall in love with and have children with a mate who has great empathy for children’s needs and feelings. A mother or father with empathy who loves his or her children will usually not subject the children to a parent removal.
3. One should not separate from one’s mate without a scheduled, structured, legal custody arrangement in advance of parting the marital relationship.
4. Once separated, a parent should never speak with and certainly should never see a mental health professional - other than a court appointed one - that he or she has not helped choose in advance; and should further avoid like the plague a friendly-sounding psychiatrist, psychologist, social worker, or counselor, who calls and says he or she wants to help the parents and children through the pain of divorce. This is especially so when that professional has already seen the children and the other parent.
5. Parents should seek and hopefully find attorneys not biased by the conviction that all children need a primary home and a primary caretaker after divorce.
6. The first moment it becomes clear that scheduled custodial time with one’s child is being consistently blocked, the parent so blocked should run (not walk) with his or her attorney to the nearest family court.”