ABSTRACT
This chapter considers interpersonal processes that might deliberately influence a child away from a father. If the family is viewed as a potential open learning system, which can allow the child’s ways of construing relationships and his relational world to change in the wider family changes, the converse can also happen. Analysis of family discourse from related fields orientated the author twenty-five years ago to tactics of power and control in daily family conversations. Then later, during court work, he observes mothers, grandmothers, grandfathers, and children talking in family situations where fathers were collectively held in a negative light, which illuminated the subtle ways that children’s thought can be turned away from any value given to their fathers’ visits. For the author, the piece of family work further raised profound questions about how a child’s mind can become distorted by the process of the two quarrelling parents who have decided not to see anything of each other’s point of view.
