Sarah Heidebrecht

This type of legislature around parental alienation, a debunked concept created by a child pedophile, has been beaten dead year after year, often pushed by the same folks in NH's legislature and judiciary. It's nearly always opposed by anyone with a medical background, given parental alienation isn't accepted in the DSM diagnostic criteria. I oppose this bill, as I have the ones before it. Instead of incorporating more complex and medically unsound language in the the parenting statutes, how about the state actually train DCYF and others who work with families (schools, social workers, etc.) to recognize verbal and emotional abuse of children and families AND do something about it? If I recall DCYF has one of the worst investigation outcomes for this type of abuse out of all 50 states. Require judges to truly care if a child is being disparaged and harmed - make them penalize parents at the onset, not by having the harmed parent/children have to come back to court for years and pay thousands of dollars to a system that doesn't uphold its own orders. Forget calling DCYF about emotional abuse as well at this point. I have dozens of examples of my ex manipulating, disparaging me to our child, and involving them in adult conversations or interruptions of my parenting time. The judge(s) don't care and this legislation, as faulty as it is, isn't going to fix the problem of one abusive parent harming another parent/child, particularly when DV and coercive control are present (and they almost always are). Judges aren't trained adequately or at all on these factors, and certainly are not equipped to handle this level of investigation of concepts that they don't understand.... all this if you can even have a due process hearing within a few years of filing and watching your child be harmed endlessly until it doesn't matter any longer because no one will care in this system.