Can Children Be Persuaded to Love a Parent They Hate?
Photo illustrations by Kensuke Koike
If life were fair, Benjamin and his sister, Olivia, would be spending this sunny July day fishing with their father and riding bikes around the small town in northern Ontario that they consider home. Instead, they are trapped in a townhouse in an ersatz Alpine village with a therapist and the mother they loathe, along with her partner and his two sons.
The day begins at 9 a.m., when a blond, middle-aged woman greets them by the unlit fireplace in the living room. She’s the therapist, and she tells the kids that while they’re here at the Family Bridges program, in a resort community two hours north of Toronto, they’ll watch some videos; learn to discuss problems as a family; and, of course, play a little miniature golf, shop in the village. Benjamin, a gangly 15-year-old, gazes out the sliding-glass doors, watching enviously as hikers ascend the gently sloping Blue Mountain. This isn’t a vacation, he thinks. This is an internment camp for brainwashing.
The kids are sitting in a semicircle in front of a large television screen with the therapist and Randy Rand, the founder of Family Bridges. Their mom, Meredith, and her partner, Eli, have positioned dining-room chairs on the edge of the group, watching for any signs of softening in the children’s flinty anger. (All of the children’s and parents’ names in this article have been changed.) The therapist cues up a well-known optical illusion, the drawing that morphs between the profile of a young lady and an old woman. Things can look like one thing and be another, she suggests in her gentle voice. Shut up! thinks Olivia, who at 13 is as self-possessed as her brother is awkward. We’re not buying a word of this.
Benjamin and Olivia know what they know. Since their parents divorced in 2008, their mom has dragged their dad, Scott, to court and drained his bank account—he’s told them all about it. They’ve heard from him, too, that their mother suffers from depression, that she was once addicted to prescription drugs, that she cares less about them than she does about the students at the school where she teaches. All they want is to live with him full-time, but she won’t let them.
Later, the therapist asks Benjamin and Olivia to watch a video of some basketball players passing a ball back and forth. Count the passes, she instructs. The big reveal: The two siblings missed the person in a gorilla suit walking through the crowd. When you focus on one narrative, the therapist says, you miss important information. As the four-day program unfolds, she becomes more direct, urging the pair to rethink their assumptions. Perhaps their father is deliberately turning them against their mother, she says, introducing an idea called “parental alienation.” While their dad is painting their mother as narcissistic and selfish, maybe those traits actually belong to him?
Through it all, the children remain impassive, serving up correct but shallow answers to any question they’re asked—“false compliance,” the therapist would call it if she were lecturing her colleagues. Olivia and Benjamin are supposed to be within sight of an adult at all times, but in a rare moment alone, they manage to commiserate. “Dad’s still our favorite, right?” Olivia whispers. “We’re not letting them crack us.”
Benjamin shakes his head. “We’re not falling for it.”
But then on the third day, when the therapist asks Benjamin to describe his relationship with his dad, he walks out to the patio, plunks down in a chair, and puts his head in his hands. Olivia follows, holding his hand as he cries. A
