Preface

I have spent more than two decades of my practice focused, with some intensity, on the problem of parental alienation. In that time I have represented targeted parents and, in a smaller number of cases, parents accused of alienating conduct. I have been retained as a consulting and testifying expert on the subject of parental alienation, and I was one of the attorneys connected to In re Marriage of Bates, the Illinois Supreme Court case that remains a landmark in this field. I say all of this not to establish authority for its own sake, but to be candid with the reader about the vantage point from which this book is written. The majority of the data and narrative in this book derives from the decades of posts that I have written in my Illinois Divorce Lawyer Blog.

This is a practice guide, and its intended reader is the guardian ad litem — the attorney appointed under Section 506 of the Illinois Marriage and Dissolution of Marriage Act to investigate the facts of a case, interview the child and the parties, and report to the court in the best interests of the child. It is also written with child representatives, attorneys for the child, family-law practitioners, evaluators, and judges in mind, because the guardian ad litem never works in isolation. But the organizing question of every chapter is the practical one that a guardian ad litem must answer: what do I actually do when a case lands on my desk with allegations that one parent is turning a child against the other?