Intakes, Outtakes, & Orphans

This page features excerpts from my past and forthcoming publications, as well as outtakes from my publications—passages that, for various reasons, I chose to remove during the editing process but which may have interest and merit on their own. Some of the material was cut to meet the publisher’s space requirements. Other times I decided that the passage was not needed or was too removed from the chapter’s theme.

The orphans are passages from unfinished books, newsletter articles, speeches, or notes for books, articles, and other projects. (I borrowed the term orphans from one of my favorite singer-songwriters, Tom Waits, who used the term for the title of his album of recorded tracks that never previously appeared on his CDs.)

I hope you will enjoy the published selections and the behind-the-scenes glimpse of words that have not (yet) made the cut.

When reading the latter, please make allowances for the fact that these passages are raw and unedited.

Signature Dr. Richard Warshak.

This page is for your reading enjoyment. All of the following is copyrighted material and cannot be reproduced or distributed in any manner without my written permission. Thank you for respecting my intellectual property.

QuickLinks: Intakes | Outtakes | Orphans

INTAKES

"It is a mistake for custody evaluators and courts to routinely assume that both parents contribute equally to a child’s estrangement."

"While we would expect a child caught in the maelstrom of divorce poison to carry the scars of battle, we have no reason to assume that the potential harm caused by reuniting with a parent is greater than the harm caused by losing that parent."

— excerpts from Divorce Poison: How To Protect Your Family From Bad-mouthing and Brainwashing
© 2010 Richard A. Warshak, Ph.D.

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OUTTAKES

The importance to teenagers of living in a harmonious family was documented in a classic research project inspired by Dallas psychiatrist Robert Beavers, M.D. Dr. Beavers observed that his colleagues seemed most interested in how psychiatric problems developed. Yet relatively little was known about the characteristics of families that raised well-functioning children. In 1972 Dr. Beavers set out to rectify the situation. He located a group of families with emotionally healthy teenagers. Then he and his team of researchers videotaped each family’s interactions. Through careful study of the tapes, they were able to identify the central common features in homes that raised solid teens.

A key factor was what they called “a strong parental coalition.” In psychologically healthy families, parents enjoy a partnership and it is clear that they function as team leaders. Though they respect the child’s feelings and these often influence family decisions, the home is neither child-centered, nor one in which one parent dominates everything.

In families with troubled teens, the child wields more power than an adult. Instead of being lined up by generation, the generation barriers are broken. If the structure of the family were an organizational chart, rather than have two parents at the top in leadership roles, at the top would be a child and a parent.

This of course is what brainwashing parents attempt to accomplish. They want their children to be allied with them against the other parent. The families that had the most severely disturbed adolescents were those in which one parent was aligned with the child against the other parent.

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ORPHANS

This is from a keynote speech I delivered in Arizona in 2000 discussing my views on relocation, parental alienation syndrome, and overnight access between young children and both parents. To read a summary of the contents of this speech, or to purchase it in pamphlet form, click here and scroll to CR20.

Many evaluators fail to recognize the limitations of their procedures and the poor foundation for their conclusions and recommendations. They make the same errors over and over again without pausing to take stock of what they are doing. They couch personal biases in pseudo-scientific rhetoric. They pass off their tentative speculations as firm conclusions and truths. They shoot from the hip, often gunning down the best interests of the children and the emotional well-being of at least one parent. In the process they undermine the reputation of the entire enterprise of custody evaluations.

Batman and Parent-Absent Children

The following was written after the release of the film Batman Returns. It is taken from my keynote speech delivered on May 1, 1993 to the Children’s Rights Council in Bethesda, Maryland. The title of the speech is: The Custody Revolution: Beyond Fathers’ Rights and Mothers’ Rights. To read a summary of the contents of this speech, or to purchase it in pamphlet form, click here.

Batman is the only comic book superhero to remain continuously in print since the Golden Age of comic books, 54 years now, outlasting even his most famous colleague, Superman, who you may have heard, bit the dust last year at the hands of Doomsday.

Batman has become a 20th century myth. To reach this status Batman must have struck a deep chord in the public unconscious, particularly among children.

For years comic book superheroes have helped youngsters leap life’s hurdles. They serve as efficacious and moral role models, offer a temporary retreat from internal fears and worries, provide a vicarious outlet for aggression, and allow children to feel a sense of power and goodness in compensation for reality’s inevitable blows to self-esteem.

Batman, though, is no ordinary superhero. True he fights on the side of good versus evil. But he is no shining knight on a white horse; he is a Dark Knight who prowls Gotham City’s terror-torn streets in a black armored forbidding charger. Back home in his bat-infested dark cave, Batman bears an uncomfortable resemblance to Dracula (who, not incidentally, is acknowledged by Batman creator Bob Kane as one inspiration for the Caped Crusader’s dark look).

Except for a period darkened by the specter of censorship in comics (in the late 50s and 60s), Batman has not been the hero we’d like our children to emulate. He is a somber, driven, tortured soul, incapable of normal rewarding interpersonal relationships. He lives in an urban nightmare, and this may provide a clue to the widespread appeal of the movies among contemporary urban dwellers, who see the despair and futility of our big cities reflected in Gotham City. When Gotham’s mayor attempts to tranquilize the masses with false reassurances in the face of unpredictable chaos, adults in the audience hear echoes of our own politicians’ empty rhetoric.

Certain children, though, have a special affinity for Batman. For these children, the drama of Batman Returns plays on a different internal stage — one that has been darkened by the trauma of parental abandonment. Twenty-five million children in our country live apart from at least one of their parents. The parent most often absent is the father; nearly ten million children have not seen their fathers during the past five years.

These children are victims of the myth that fathers are second-class parents, a myth that finds expression in the prevailing practice of restricting a divorced father’s contact with his children to every other weekend; four days per month is what our society considers sufficient for a divorced father to take his rightful place in the life of his children.

Cast in the peripheral role of a visitor, it is no wonder that some men fail to appreciate their importance to their children, and gradually drift out of their lives. Fathers may rationalize their withdrawal by pointing to society’s devaluation of their role, as in the case of the judge who ruled that a father could not see his children on Christmas “because children belong with their families at Christmas.” We may prefer to assume that children can easily survive paternal deprivation, that they don’t really need their fathers that much. But study after study tells us we are wrong.

Regardless of the reason for a father’s absence, his children will be quick to identify with fictional characters who are, themselves, attempting to come to terms with parental abandonment. And Batman Returns serves up a double dose of these. Batman, we know, is the orphan Bruce Wayne raised by a loyal butler. He is driven by an unremitting desire to avenge his parents’ murder. The Penguin, deliberately rejected by his parents, spends the movie struggling for his rightful place in society. You can bet that the theme of abandonment is not lost on those children who have suffered a similar fate.

Perhaps, when you return home, you will rent the video of Batman Returns. And you can sit back, relax, and enjoy the adventures of the Dark Night. And as you watch the Penguin deal with his abandonment by terrorizing Gotham City, and Batman cope with his by terrorizing the terrorists, you can wonder — along with 10 million children — where have all the fathers gone and what can we do about it?

And you can be thankful that organizations exist whose purpose is to rectify this very problem.

And it’s a good thing they do, because our sons and daughters do not have Bruce Wayne’s faithful butler to help them.

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