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48 Fam. Ct. Rev. 91 (2010)
HELPING ALIENATED CHILDREN WITH FAMILY BRIDGES: PRACTICE, RESEARCH, AND THE PURSUIT OF HUMBITION

handle is hein.journals/fmlcr48 and id is 91 raw text is: HELPING ALIENATED CHILDREN WITH FAMILY BRIDGES: PRACTICE, RESEARCH, AND THE PURSUIT OF HUMBITION Richard A. Warshak and Mark R. Otis This article briefly summarizes and responds to feedback offered by Joan Kelly regarding Family Bridges: A Workshop for Troubled and Alienated Parent-Child RelationshipsTM. We emphasize principles that promote an educational atmosphere, as opposed to a therapeutic one, and the court's role in contributing to successful interventions with severely alienated children. Among the considerations discussed are: working with favored parents, economic comparisons of Family Bridges with counseling approaches, modifying the program for use in prevention and with milder cases of alienation, and issues related to training additional team leaders and conducting outcome research. Keywords: alienated children, alienation, child custody, divorce, estrangement, Family Bridges, parental alienation, pathological alienation, reintegration, reunification Working in an emerging area of practice requires a delicate balance of courage and caution-courage to pursue new paths, caution to ensure the well-being of those we serve. This balance is expressed through the virtue of humbition: a fusion of humility and ambition (Warshak, 2002, 2007). Applied to the field of healing disrupted parent-child relationships, humbition allows social scientists and practitioners to balance an ambitious application, extrapolation, and expansion of available knowledge, experience, materials, and procedures with an acceptance of realistic limits to our ability to help parents and children manage the dynamics of alienation. In the field of divorce and custody research, Joan Kelly is a model of humbition. She offers a balanced perspective on her own original empirical contributions (Kelly & Emery, 2003) and assertively draws on the literature and her experience as a clinician and mediator, both to inform current practice and to advocate long-term research that, while ambitious, is feasible and would enhance the quality of services to families undergoing divorce (Kelly & Johnston, 2005). In her commentary to Warshak (20 10a), Kelly has done it again. She accurately captures the essence of the principles, goals, structure, and content of Family Bridges: A Workshop for Troubled and Alienated Parent-Child RelationshipsM (Family Bridges); she articulates several essential concerns; and she provides the outline of a blueprint for an ambitious project that would respond to such concerns to the benefit of the families with alienated children. This article briefly summarizes and replies to Kelly's concerns, all of which we have spent many hours pondering as Family Bridges evolved. Correspondence: warshak@att.net FAMILY COURT REVIEW, Vol. 48 No. 1, January 2010 91-97 c 2010 Association of Family and Conciliation Courts

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