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Monday, June 08, 1998 By Sally Kalson
Anyone who's ever tried to force a child to do something against his will knows this, and without an advanced degree: You can make a kid, say, sit at the piano and move his fingers on the keyboard. But you can't make him feel the music, and you sure as hell can't make him love it.
There's behavior, see, and there are feelings. Compel the former if you will, but don't expect to control the latter.
Now, take three adolescent boys whose divorced parents are doing battle. Order them not only to see the father they don't want to see, but to see him in a positive, respectful frame of mind or their mother will go to jail.
Imagine giving a father the power to say to the children: Thank me nicely enough, show me enough gratitude and respect, or I'll have your mother locked up and it will be your fault!
It sounds like something from a Chinese re-education camp. Alas, it comes from the courtroom of Westmoreland County Common Pleas Judge John J. Driscoll, in the case of Louis Grieco, Donna Scott and their three sons, then ages 11, 13 and 15.
This cruel - and arguably unconstitutional - order was in force in March when Nathan, the oldest boy, died at home by his own hand. A few weeks earlier, he'd written an essay about his life of "torture" - including a father who "threw us out of the house" and was "harassing us through court case after court case."
The story was reported last week by Post-Gazette writers Mackenzie Carpenter and Ginny Kopas, and it wasn't pretty.
Driscoll entered his order at the recommendation of an "expert witness" named Dr. Richard Gardner, who calls the approach "threat therapy" - a contradiction in terms on par with "winnable nuclear war."
The name alone has "crackpot theory" written all over it. So does Gardner's claim that once the children were coerced, they'd probably "relax" with their father, even "enjoy" him. This is a little too close to the advice men used to give women in case of rape.
Gardner, 67 and a Columbia University psychiatrist, has complained that too many therapists assume sex between adults and children is always bad, "no matter how tender, loving and nonpainful" for the child. He contends that judges like to try such cases because of their repressed pedophilic impulses. Indeed, he wrote, "All of us have some pedophilia within us."
In the Grieco case, Gardner claimed the children were victims of "parental alienation syndrome," in which mothers vindictively brainwash children into making false abuse allegations. It sounds terrible, and it is - because parental alienation is not a syndrome at all, according to the manual of mental health disorders published by the American Psychiatric Association.
Instead, it's a Gardner invention, propagated mainly in self-published books and tapes that bypass the peer review process designed to weed out bad science. Yet Gardner is making big money advancing it in courtrooms across the country.
I'm not taking sides in the Scott-Grieco matter. It's hard for an outsider to judge the merits of a custody dispute, and parents do sometimes influence a child's feelings toward each other.
But sometimes kids have good reason for not wanting to see a parent. That doesn't mean they should be allowed to skip court-ordered visits. But this be-good-or-mom-gets-it business is nothing short of court-imposed emotional blackmail. Shame on everyone who was a party to it.
I will say this much for "parental alienation syndrome": It opens up some interesting possibilities.
Maybe "judicial misadventure syndrome" could explain why judges make ill-informed rulings and could be used to overturn them. "Pseudo-science syndrome" could account for specious theories masquerading as expert testimony and be used to bar them.
But even if we could compel such things, we'd have to defend everyone's right to react with displeasure. Judges, theorists - and yes, even children - are entitled to their feelings.
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