Yes, The Dr. Phil Showis doing another show on parental alienation and Dr. Phil’s producers are frantically searching for a parental alienation family willing to appear on the program. While many targeted parents want to believe that Dr. Phil can reunite them with their children after the Courts, family members, friends and full-time mental health professionals couldn’t, Mike Jeffries, author of A Family’s Heartbreak: A Parent’s Introduction to Parental Alienation, uses his latest Basil & Spice blog at http://www.basilandspice.com/love-and-relationships/category/jeffries-mike to point out that television can’t script a happily-ever-after ending to parental alienation.

“The story is heartwarming, that’s for sure,” Jeffries said. “However the media had the perfect opportunity to discuss the reunion within the context of an ex-husband who may have deliberately alienated two little children from their mother for three decades and the media swung and missed.”

To read Jeffries’ complete column and leave a comment please visit http://www.basilandspice.com/love-and-relationships/82010-parental-alienation-theres-no-co-parenting-happening.html.

Yesterday was the 10th anniversary of Elian Gonzalez’s return to Cuba. You remember Elian. He was five years old when a fisherman found him bobbing around the Atlantic Ocean in an inner tube. His Mom and others died in the waters off the Florida coast trying to reach the United States from Cuba. His family in Miami wanted to keep Elian in the U.S. — despite the wishes of his father in Cuba. Presidential candidates George W. Bush and Al Gore even got involved in the debate, and a SWAT team and INS agents had to pry Elian loose from his relatives’ custody so he could return to Cuba and his Dad.

A conversation with my future ex-wife about the Elian Gonzalez situation was one of my first signs that I would one day lose my relationship with my son. I missed the sign until yesterday — when I read that Elian said he is thankful for spending the last ten years with his father. But that’s the funny thing about signs — they are all around us. In my most recent Basil & Spice blog at http://www.basilandspice.com/love-and-relationships/72010-cubas-poster-boy-for-parental-alienation-elian-gonzale.html I explain how future alienated parents can miss the obvious.

“In A Family’s Heartbreak we talk about how parental alienation just doesn’t damage a child’s relationship with the targeted parent, but eventually damages the child’s relationship with both parents,” Jeffries says. ” This alienating parent may think she is going to jail for the noblest of reasons, but wouldn’t the children be better off having the love an attention of both parents this summer rather than being estranged from one parent while the other parent sits in jail?”

Basil & Spice is a daily content provider to online and print news organizations. Mike Jeffries is one of 400 Basil & Spice contributors.

The program will focus on parental alienation and the progress parents, legal and mental health professionals have made raising awareness of this destructive family dynamic in the public’s consciousness. The DSM Review Board is currently considering a proposal to put parental alienation in the next edition of the Diagnositc and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders — making this week’s America’s Injustice program particularly relevant.

Listeners can access the program at www.talkshoe.com or call in at 724-444-7444, program ID 52056.

The American Psychological Association (APA) reports in its latest Stress in America research that parents typically misjudge the amount of stress on their children. Twenty percent of children ages 8 to 17 reported that they worry a great deal, while only 3 percent of parents rated their children’s stress levels as extreme. Further, while only 13 percent of parents thought their children suffered from stress headaches, 36 percent of the kids reported stress headaches. Thirteen percent of parents thought their children have difficulty sleeping, while 45 percent of children reported trouble sleeping. While 18 percent of parents thought their children worry about the family’s financial situation, the kids reported that 30 percent of them are worried about the family finances.

Some alienating parents believe their children have the right to know what the other parent “is really like.” Other alienating parents believe that their children are “mature enough” to make decisions that force them to choose sides in their parents’ conflict. Adult conflicts are stressful enough for adults. Now the research shows that all parents underestimate the amount of stress children feel on a day-to-day basis. There is no good reason to further stress out your children by pulling them into conflicts that make them choose between Mom and Dad.