articles
China Elevator Stories
many children in China suffer parental alienation by a grandparent
Unlike the EU, China does not recognize that parental alienation is a form of domestic abuse.
08/08/2023
Ruth Silbermayr
Author
Parental alienation is the psychological manipulation of a child by one parent against the other. When this alienation is carried out by a grandparent, I’ll refer to it here as parental alienation by a grandparent.
When my two sons, both very young at the time, started playing a game called “Let’s throw Mummy into the garbage bin” regularly while we were still living in Siping, I couldn’t help but wonder who had taught them this. I suspected it was their grandmother who had started manipulating my children against me when I wasn’t around.
When our older son turned one, my ex began regularly belittling me, often saying I was a worthless mother. He would alienate our son—and later, after our second son was born, both sons—from me, frequently handing them over to his parents for long periods. This marked the beginning of the end of our marriage.
Unlike my ex-husband, whose efforts to alienate our children from me were often obvious, his parents tried very hard to conceal their actions, making it more difficult for me to recognize the signs initially. Some of these signs were so subtle that they would be hard to detect even for someone familiar with parental alienation.
In the summer of 2019, I stayed in a small town in Germany to work on my husband’s residence permit for Austria. Meanwhile, my husband and his family remained in China with my children. I hadn’t wanted to be separated from my children, but my husband refused to let them accompany me to Germany.
Throughout the summer, my ex-husband’s mother, who looked after my children during the day, almost always found an excuse to prevent my video calls with them. She’d tell me they were eating, playing, preparing to go outside, watching cartoons, or that one of them was sleeping. When I scheduled a call for later, she would simply “forget” about it.
In 2019, the European Court of Human Rights confirmed that parental alienation constitutes emotional abuse of children. From my own experience, I would call parental alienation by a grandparent an issue of pandemic proportions in China. However, unlike the EU, China does not recognize parental alienation as a form of domestic abuse.
Have you experienced parental alienation?