Gender and Long Distance Parenting

Along my journey gathering community around long distance parenting, I’ve read and seen a lot of things regarding divorce, child custody, non-custodial parents, deadbeat parents and parental alienation syndrome. One thing that sticks out to me is how gender biased the stories typically are.

Rather than being centered around parents in general, it’s about fathers or mothers or men or women. Take for example this post by Richard Gardener. He all but blames the advent of parental alienation syndrome upon mothers even going so far as to say :

We see here how those who deny the existence of PAS are adding formidably to the grief of women. Women’s past denial and discrediting of PAS has now come back to haunt them. Women are now being injured by their own weapons, or, as the old saying goes, they are being “hoist by their own pitards.”

That is one of the most ridiculous, one sided, prejudiced things I’ve ever read. Granted, mothers were often awarded physical custody based primarily upon the fact that they were women not so long ago – but had the tables been turned, I have no doubt that men would have perpetrated parental alienation syndrome before women. Parental Alienation Syndrome is not a product of mothers or women or men or fathers, it’s a product of spiteful, irresponsible parents with a grudge who feel they should have some sort of power over their children’s relationship with their other parent.

And further, although admittedly… (More)