A child should never be made to feel guilty for loving both parents.

On Youth Mental Health Day, we must speak plainly about children who are placed in the middle of adult conflict.

Children who feel guilty for missing a parent.
Children who are pressured to reject someone they love.
Children who learn that showing affection toward one parent could upset the other.
Children who are told what to think, what to say, and who they are permitted to trust.
Children who are used as messengers, weapons, witnesses, or bargaining tools.

This is emotional harm. It creates loyalty conflicts and forces children to carry fear, confusion, guilt, and responsibility that should never have been placed on their shoulders. Research has linked destructive interparental conflict and parent-child triangulation with children feeling caught between their parents, along with poorer emotional and relational outcomes.

Parental alienation is not simply a disagreement between adults. It is the systematic damaging of a child’s relationship with a parent through manipulation, denigration, intimidation, interference with contact, false narratives, or pressure to reject someone they love. It can damage a child’s identity, emotional security, confidence, trust, and ability to form healthy relationships long into the future.

The World Health Organization recognizes psychological violence, including rejection, intimidation, threats, and hostile treatment, as harmful to children’s development and mental health.

Reference: https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/violence-against-children

Protecting children means allowing them to love both parents freely and without fear, where it is safe for them to do so. It means refusing to normalize the use of children in adult conflict. It means listening when a child is being pressured, frightened, isolated, or taught to see love as betrayal.

Bill C-223 must be stopped because further complication recognizing parental alienation and alienating behaviours from the court’s consideration would make an already complex family-law system even more complicated. It could prevent courts from properly and fully examining whether a child’s rejection of a parent has been shaped by manipulation, intimidation, interference, or emotional abuse. Which furthermore exposes the need for properly trained professionals capable of recognizing the signs, especially when context and history is also on the table. 
A law that limits the evidence courts may consider does not automatically make children safer. It may instead leave some children and loving parents without an effective way to have the full reality of their situation examined.

If you are watching your relationship with your child change, dealing with controlling behaviour, false allegations, intimidation, interference with contact, do not wait until the damage becomes even harder to repair. Seek qualified legal and mental-health support, document what is happening, and keep speaking up. Never back down from the truth. Know that truth always comes out. Your child deserves the truth to be known, so does the alienated parent. This level of malice and abuse cannot stay in the shadows.
Bring it all to light. 

Your child deserves protection.
Your relationship deserves to survive. ❤️♻️

Please sign and share the petition to stop Bill C-223.