Children Held Hostage: How Children Are Programmed — Clawar & Rivlin (2013)

Love Over Exile is a plain-language research archive on parental alienation, written by Malcolm Smith — an alienated parent and author of the forthcoming book Love Over Exile — for non-specialist readers who want to understand the evidence base without a psychology degree or a journal subscription. This page is one entry in that archive.

If you have ever tried to explain to someone that your child was turned against you — not estranged by anything you did, but deliberately or unwittingly programmed — you have reached for the idea at the centre of this book. Children Held Hostage is the work that first documented that process at scale, and it remains the most-cited clinical and legal reference in the field.

What is Children Held Hostage?

Children Held Hostage is a book by the sociologist Stanley S. Clawar and the clinical social worker Brynne V. Rivlin, published by the American Bar Association's Section of Family Law. The first edition appeared in 1991 under the subtitle Dealing with Programmed and Brainwashed Children; the second edition, in 2013, was retitled Identifying Brainwashed Children, Presenting a Case, and Crafting Solutions and expanded the underlying case base.

Its standing comes from two things. The first is its scale: it is built on more than a decade of forensic case work, and by the second edition the authors had drawn on over a thousand families. The second is its publisher: an American Bar Association text carries weight in family courts that a self-published treatise never could.

A word of honesty up front, because it is the key to using the book well. This is a clinical and legal practitioner text, not a controlled scientific study. Its findings come from the authors' own referred caseload of high-conflict families, and its numbers should always be read as patterns within that sample rather than rates across the general population.

Held to that standard, it is invaluable — foundational, even. Read as epidemiology, it would be overclaimed.

How was the study done?

The research behind the book is best described as a large clinical and forensic case series. The original 1991 edition rested on a 12-year study of roughly 700 families; the 2013 edition expanded this to over 1,000 families drawn from the authors' counselling, mediation and forensic-evaluation work.

What gives the analysis its texture is the range of evidence the authors worked from. They did not rely on a single questionnaire. They drew on court transcripts, clinical and therapy notes, audio and video recordings, direct observation, and interviews with children, relatives, mental-health professionals, judges and conciliators.

That richness is also the design's limit. Because the families were drawn from the authors' own referrals — people already in serious custody conflict — the sample is selected toward high-conflict cases, and there is no control group. It is the right method for mapping how programming works in detail, and the wrong method for estimating how common it is in the population.

What did Clawar and Rivlin actually find?

The book's most-quoted figure is that, within their studied caseload, some degree of programming was practised by roughly 80% of the divorcing parents, with about 20% doing it at least once a day. The honest framing — which this article insists on — is that this 80% describes the authors' high-conflict, custody-disputing sample, not all divorces.

Used correctly, the finding is still striking. It says that once a separation has tipped into serious conflict, the transmission of a distorted picture of the other parent is not the exception but close to the norm. The authors also reported that around 80% of the children in the study wanted the programming detected and stopped — a separate figure that should never be merged with the 80%-of-parents one.

Underneath the numbers sits the book's lasting conceptual gift: a vocabulary that keeps three different things apart.

Programming, brainwashing, alienation — three different things

Most people, including many professionals, use these words interchangeably. Clawar and Rivlin's enduring contribution is to insist that they are not the same, and that telling them apart is what lets a court ask the right questions.

• Programming is the content — the themes, stories and beliefs a parent transmits to the child about the other parent. It is the message.
• Brainwashing is the process — the ongoing interaction by which the child is persuaded to accept the programme and elaborate on it as if it were their own. It is the method.
• Alienation is the outcome — the child's resulting rejection of, and estrangement from, the target parent.

The most useful move the authors make is to add that programming can be conscious and deliberate or unconscious and unintentional. A parent drowning in their own fear and grief can transmit a poisoned picture of the other parent without any plan to do so — and the harm to the child is real either way. That reframing matters enormously in practice, because it shifts the question away from proving malicious intent and toward documenting behaviour and its effect on the child.

How does a child get turned? The eight stages

Clawar and Rivlin's signature framework is that programming hardens into rejection not in a single moment but through a recognisable eight-stage process. Setting it out plainly helps parents see that what feels like a sudden, baffling change in their child usually had a long runway.

1. A thematic focus emerges or is chosen — often tied to a family ideology or a grievance that becomes the organising story.
2. The child's bond to the programming parent is strengthened, building the dependence the rest of the process leans on.
3. Sympathy for the programming parent is induced — the child is recruited into seeing that parent as the wronged or fragile one.
4. The child shows early compliance signs — fear of visits, reluctance on the phone, small refusals.
5. The programming parent tests compliance through questioning after contact and rewarding the "right" answers.
6. Loyalty is tested — the child is pushed toward expressing a preference, toward picking a side.
7. The campaign escalates — into embellished or invented allegations and, often, a global rejection of the target parent.
8. The programme is maintained over time — from gentle reminders to intense pressure, so the rejection does not soften.

Two things are worth drawing out. The model treats alienation as a developing process, which is why early documentation matters so much — the runway is where it is most visible. And it is distinct from Gardner's mild/moderate/severe spectrum: the eight stages describe how a child is turned, not just how far.

Why even "mild" programming matters

Perhaps the book's most consequential argument — and the point on which the authors most clearly diverged from Richard Gardner — is that the harm of programming is not confined to severe cases. Clawar and Rivlin held that even subtle, low-level programming seriously damages a child's development: their capacity for reality-testing, for independent thought, and for trusting relationships.

This reframes the stakes for a family court. It means a case does not have to reach the dramatic extreme of total, stated rejection before the child is already being harmed. Damage is being done in the quieter cases too — the eye-rolls, the loaded silences, the small rewritings of shared history.

It is on exactly this point that Clawar and Rivlin part company with Richard Gardner, whose contemporaneous "parental alienation syndrome" framing is often confused with theirs. The table below sets out the difference.

| Dimension | Clawar & Rivlin (Children Held Hostage) | Gardner (Parental Alienation Syndrome) | |---|---|---| | Signature model | An eight-stage process of programming | A mild / moderate / severe spectrum | | Harm threshold | Even mild, low-level programming seriously harms the child | Emphasis falls on the severe end of the spectrum | | Core distinction | Programming (content) vs brainwashing (process) vs alienation (outcome) | A diagnosable "syndrome" located in the child | | Evidence base | Clinical/legal case series of 1,000+ family-court cases | Clinical observation; the "syndrome" framing is contested | | Publisher / standing | American Bar Association, Section of Family Law | Self-published (Creative Therapeutics) |

The practical upshot is that "mild / moderate / severe" is Gardner's language, while the eight stages and the harm-of-mild-programming argument are Clawar and Rivlin's — and it is the latter pair that modern, behaviour-and-impact-focused family courts find most usable.

It is also why the authors' finding that around 80% of the children wanted the programming detected and stopped is so poignant. Beneath the surface compliance, most of the children knew something was being done to them, and wanted an adult to notice and intervene. The authors concluded that the legal system of the time, in most states, was simply not equipped to do so.

How does this sit with the modern evidence base?

Children Held Hostage is best understood as the foundational clinical case evidence on which the field's later, more rigorous empirical work was built. Clawar and Rivlin worked independently of Richard Gardner in the late 1980s and reached overlapping conclusions; their book references his.

The lineage from there is reasonably clear. Amy Baker developed qualitative and quantitative studies of adults who had been alienated as children. Jennifer Harman produced experimental and prevalence research that reframed alienating behaviour as a form of family violence. William Bernet led work on diagnostic criteria and the field's research database.

The honest way to state the relationship is this: Clawar and Rivlin supplied the large-scale clinical case evidence and the conceptual vocabulary; the later researchers supplied the peer-reviewed empirical scaffolding. A reader who wants to understand parental alienation needs both — the case-level texture of Children Held Hostage and the controlled evidence that came after.

What are the honest limitations?

Three limitations should travel with every citation of this book. First, it is not a controlled or peer-reviewed study — it is an observational case series from the authors' own referred caseload, so its sample is selected toward high-conflict families and its figures cannot be read as population rates. The 80% is a within-sample finding, full stop.

Second, its language — "brainwashing", "programming" — is forensically loaded, and critics of parental-alienation framing have fairly warned that such terms can be weaponised in custody litigation. A careful reader uses the book's framework to describe behaviour and impact, not to hang a dramatic label on an ex-partner.

Third, it is largely the practitioners' own analysis of their own cases, without independent triangulation against other observers. None of this makes the book wrong; it makes it foundational clinical evidence and a conceptual model — to be read alongside the controlled research, not in place of it.

Why this matters — for parents, clinicians and the courts

For an alienated parent, Children Held Hostage offers something specific: the language to name what happened to your child without resorting to either helpless confusion or courtroom-loaded accusation. The programming–brainwashing–alienation distinction lets you describe content, process and outcome separately, which is exactly the granularity a modern welfare assessment rewards.

For clinicians and courts, the eight-stage model is a reminder that alienation is a process with a history — and that history is documentable. The book's enduring argument, that even mild programming harms children and that most children want it stopped, is the moral centre of the field's later, more rigorous work. It is the place the evidence base began.

Primary Sources Cited

• Clawar, S. S., & Rivlin, B. V. (2013) — Children Held Hostage: Identifying Brainwashed Children, Presenting a Case, and Crafting Solutions (2nd ed.). American Bar Association, Section of Family Law. ISBN 978-1-62722-155-9. ABA.
• Clawar, S. S., & Rivlin, B. V. (1991) — Children Held Hostage: Dealing with Programmed and Brainwashed Children (1st ed.). American Bar Association, Section of Family Law. Internet Archive.
• Baker, A. J. L. (2007) — Adult Children of Parental Alienation Syndrome: Breaking the Ties That Bind. W. W. Norton.
• Harman, J. J., Kruk, E., & Hines, D. A. (2018) — Parental Alienating Behaviors: An Unacknowledged Form of Family Violence. Psychological Bulletin 144(12), 1275–1299. DOI 10.1037/bul0000175.
• Gardner, R. A. (1987) — The Parental Alienation Syndrome and the Differentiation Between Fabricated and Genuine Child Sexual Abuse. Creative Therapeutics.