Browsing by Author "Aleneff, Marja Leena"

Objectives. Parental alienation is known to be manipulation aimed at a child in the family interaction context in order to make the child reject a parent to please the other parent. Although parental alienation has been described already in the 1950's little quantitative research has been done in the field. It has been found parental alienation occurring typically in divorce conflicts is associated with psychosocial problems and clinical symptoms in adulthood. As the studies of parental alienation have focused on the adults until now, it is not known what kind of association there is between parental alienation and adolescents' well-being. The objective of this quantitative pioneering study aimed at teenagers was to find out about parental alienation's prevalence and association with Finnish adolescents' quality of life as well as with the family background factors. The focus of the study was on the association of parental alienation behaviors with an adolescent's quality of life disregarding whether the parents had divorced or the alienating parent succeeded in the alienation of the child or not. The following hypotheses were made: One to two percent of the adolescents has experienced parental alienation. Parental alienation is more prevalent in divorced families and associated with (1) higher rates of depression and anxiety and the lower quality of life (2) meeting the rejected parent after the divorce (3) the deteriorated relationship with the rejected parent after the divorce. Methods. The research was carried out as an anonymous web survey, which was completed by 2027 adolescents (mean age 17.7 years, 87.4 % female). About 36 % of the participants came through 19 Finnish high schools and about 64 % through five websites aimed at teenagers. The questionnaires used in this study were Parental Alienation Behavior Scale (parental alienation), KiddoKINDL-14–17 (quality of life) and Raitasalo's modification of the short form of the BDI (mood). Results and conclusions. As it was hypothesized parental alienation was associated with higher rates of depression, anxiety, the lower quality of life and parents' divorce or separation although it also occurred in families where the parents had not divorced. On the contrary to the hypotheses parental alienation was not associated with meeting the rejected parent, neither was the relationship deteriorated after the divorce of the parents associated with the rejected parent but with the alienating parent. Thus the previously found association between parental alienation and low well-being in appears in to occur already in adolescence. Further research is needed to find out the need for the parental alienation screening for example.