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48 Fam. Ct. Rev. 112 (2010)
OUTCOMES OF FAMILY COUNSELING INTERVENTIONS WITH CHILDREN WHO RESIST VISITATION: AN ADDENDUM TO FRIEDLANDER AND WALTERS (2010)

handle is hein.journals/fmlcr48 and id is 112 raw text is: OUTCOMES OF FAMILY COUNSELING INTERVENTIONS WITH CHILDREN WHO RESIST VISITATION: AN ADDENDUM TO FRIEDLANDER AND WALTERS (2010) Janet R. Johnston & Judith Roth Goldman Preliminary findings on the outcomes of family-focused counseling interventions for alienated and estranged children are presented based upon data from a longitudinal study of children in chronic custody disputes who were interviewed as young adults and from the clinical records of long-term therapy with these children who were resisting visitation. Our family counseling intervention model' is a dynamic, family systems and develop- mental approach to visitation resistance and includes both parents and child in therapy that is contract bound and court ordered.2 It is based upon our prior research studies of children in high conflict custody disputing families that found that in a large portion of cases, children who reject a parent are not singularly alienated by an angry, vindictive ex-spouse, rather they are also often young, emotionally vulnerable children who are simultaneously enmeshed with the preferred parent and realistically estranged by inadequate, problematic, or abusive parenting on the part of the rejected parent.3 Hence, our assessments and interventions are tailored to the dynamics of the specific and often multiple factors in each case. In this brief paper we report on outcomes of our family counseling approach from two sources. The first source was a long-term follow-up study of children of highly conflicted custody disputing families interviewed 15-20 years later, comprising 37 young adults aged 20-3 0 years from 22 families. All of these subjects had been provided with 20-3 0 hours of family-focused counseling at the time of the custody dispute when they were ages 4-14 years and subsequently, 1/4 of them had been in therapy of various kinds by court order or parent stipulation.4 The second source was the authors' records of therapy with 42 children from 39 families who were resisting or refusing visitation during their treatment in the context of a custody or access dispute with an average duration of almost a decade. The children's ages ranged from 2-17 years when first seen and from 9-29 years when last seen in therapy. In view of the descriptive nature of the studies and small samples, a cautionary note: the outcomes reported below should be viewed as preliminary and speculative hypotheses requiring further research, rather than conclusive findings. The goals of our counseling interventions are broader than parent-child reunification. Whereas restoring a child's regular contact with a rejected parent is the simplest to assess objectively, the quality of that relationship may still be problematic and variable. Children may resume contact with a parent but their negative attitude towards and beliefs about that parent may not shift, their behavior toward that parent might remain unpleasant or avoidant, and the truce between parent and child can be short lived. Our multiple goals of treatment, Correspondence: Johnston@email.sjsu.edu FAMILY COURT REVIEW, Vol. 48 No. 1, January 2010 112-115 c 2010 Association of Family and Conciliation Courts

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