The anger between you and your spouse over your divorce can be so strong that it feels toxic – and that’s never more true than when the atmosphere begins to negatively affect your relationship with your children.
During your weekends with your children, you notice they have changed. Where they used to be loving, now they are angry and disrespectful.
Parents should put their kids first – but that doesn’t always happen
During divorce proceedings, both spouses should do their best to make decisions that benefit their children. Issues such as custody, visitation and child support should ideally focus on the best interests of your children.
Your spouse’s anger now seems to be guiding all of their actions that involve your children. They say they want more custody or visitation; they also say they need more child support. Worse, they seem to be purposefully trying to make the children see you as “the bad guy” in the relationship.
This could be parental alienation syndrome. Parental alienation syndrome is the emotional and mental damage the children suffer as one of their parents is “programming” them to love them more than their other parent.
The targeted parent may be wholly innocent of any behavior that would justify their children’s changing attitudes toward them, yet the kids may suddenly declare that they were emotionally or physically abused.
Protect your parent-child relationship in every way that you can
PAS can do a vast amount of damage to a parent-child relationship. If you believe that you and your children are being victimized by your co-parent’s emotional aggression, it may be time to look into your legal options. Family court judges take that sort of behavior very seriously.