Call For Children’s Artwork
New Approach to Examine Children’s Feelings when parents separate
August, 2021, Nashville, TN…Children who experience parental alienation have very strong feelings about their parents. Typically, the children manifest black-and-white thinking. That is, they have the idea that one parent is totally good (the favored or alienating parent) and the other parent is totally evil (the rejected or alienated parent). One child literally told me, “My Mom is my angel. My Dad is a devil.” This is not a normal way of thinking. Psychologists use the term “splitting” for this phenomenon; it has also been called “lack of ambivalence.”
Most children love to draw. They readily express their inner feelings, opinions, and perceptions of relationships through their artwork. My colleagues and I are collecting drawings made by alienated children. We believe alienated children will have distinct methods for displaying their thoughts and feelings, such as worries, unhappiness, confusion, and loyalty conflicts. They are also likely to reveal their feelings about their parents and siblings.
See on this page a drawing made by a 9-year-old girl who was alienated from her father. I apologize since this drawing may be disturbing to some readers. The child is sending a message to her father, in which she is wielding a sword and has decapitated her dad, whom she previously loved and enjoyed. (The drawing has been reproduced from The UK Parental Alienation Study, 2020, with permission from Good Egg Safety CIC.)
If you want to participate in this project, please send me drawings made by alienated children. We hope to receive artwork from various stages of parental alienation: prior to its onset (showing a happy relationship with both parents); during early alienation (perhaps showing mixed feelings toward family members); during severe alienation (showing black-and-white thinking); and after the alienation has resolved (showing a comfortable relationship with the previously rejected parent).
What will we do with these drawings? We will likely reproduce some of them in Contemporary Family. We will make some of them available on a website related to parental alienation. My colleagues and I may use some of them as examples of children’s artwork in journal articles or presentations at professional meetings.
Questions? Want to participate? Contact Dr. Bernet at william.bernet@vumc.org.
Submissions Guidelines for Artwork Do we need permission to reproduce children’s artwork? If the child wants to give permission for us to see and use their work, that is a good thing. If you are the recipient of a card or message from the child, you are the “owner” of the artwork and you can decide whether you want to send it to us. If you are a therapist, you probably need permission from the child’s parent to send us their artwork. Let me know if you have questions about any of this.
Bio: William Bernet, M.D., is a child psychiatrist and professor emeritus at the Vanderbilt University School of Medicine. He is known internationally as a leader in forensic psychiatry, especially with regard to parental alienation. He is the co-editor of Parental Alienation — Science and Law. Dr. Bernet was the founder and first president of the Parental Alienation Study Group. Contact: william.bernet@vumc.org
