An open plea to all alienators, even if you think you are not one, you need to read this.

Alienation can come in many forms, it can be in your jokes, or it can be blatant. You may not even think you are alienating, but are you? When our children are small the pediatrician talks to us about proper nutrition, we are all very well aware that a child must have a balanced diet in order to grow up healthy, but children also need both parents to grow up healthy.

Children only know love from the time they are born, have you ever said something about someone, perhaps the other parent, in front of or to your child? Children do not know how to react as adults do, but they still have feelings. When you make a comment or a joke about the other parent in a child hearing space, they do hear. If you say things like that all the time, they learn to think like you, because they look up to you and look to you for their learning and their care. What happens over time with your comments and jokes is you are brainwashing your child.

To move a step forward, if you were the parent without custody, and you wanted your time with your child and were denied, how would you feel? How would you, when you had the chance explain to your child why you had not spent time with them? Now honestly, you must love and want your children if you are the custodial parent, but do you not think their other parent feels the same way?

Even if you are not fond of your x-partner you should think about if the shoe were on the other foot. Because someday, that shoe may be on the other foot. If not from you loosing custody for any amount of reasons, but because in the process of alienating your children from their other parent, you actually end up alienating your children from yourself. You could very well find yourself later in life not knowing what your grown children are doing, and even worse, you may never get to know grandchildren that you may have.

Instead of thinking in the “NOW” perhaps if you are an alienator, or potential alienator, you should think into the future. You can not predict what the future will bring, but maybe you should play around with a few scenarios, the ones you really do not want to think about but should.

Even after reading this blog post, if you do not take the time to think about your words and your actions, I hope that you file this away in your mind, and later in the years, after the kids are grown and gone from the next think about how your life is then, and think about this post. Will you be the lonely parent who has nothing more than a memory of the children they once wanted all for themselves? Or will you be the parent who worked beyond your own needs, wants and selfishness to make your kids more healthy and happy?