What is the child’s part in Parental Alienation?

Gardner notes that the PAS is more than brainwashing or programming, because the child has to actually participate in the denigrating of the alienated parent. This is done in primarily the following eight ways:

• The child denigrates the alienated parent with foul language and severe oppositional behavior.
• The child offers weak, absurd, or frivolous reasons for his or her anger.
• The child is sure of himself or herself and doesn’t demonstrate ambivalence, i.e. love and hate for the alienated parent, only hate.
• The child exhorts that he or she alone came up with ideas of denigration. The “independent-thinker” phenomenon is where the child asserts that no one told him to do this.
• The child supports and feels a need to protect the alienating parent.
• The child does not demonstrate guilt over cruelty towards the alienated parent.
• The child uses borrowed scenarios, or vividly describes situations that he or she could not have experienced.
• Animosity is spread to the friends and/or extended family of the alienated parent.

In severe cases of parent alienation, the child is utterly brain- washed against the alienated parent. The alienator can truthfully say that the child doesn’t want to spend any time with this parent, even though he or she has told him that he has to, it is a court order, etc. The alienator typically responds, “There isn’t anything that I can do about it. I’m not telling him that he can’t see you.”
http://www.breakthroughparenting.com/PAS.htm