Professor Nick Bala and his collaborator Barbara Jo Fiddler, are recipients of an international family justice organization’s top award for their work on promoting dialogue on the highly controversial topic of parental alienation.
Professor Nick Bala and his collaborator Barbara Jo Fiddler, are recipients of an international family justice organization’s top award for their work on promoting dialogue on the highly controversial topic of parental alienation.

When parents split in a high-conflict separation, children often end up resisting contact with one parent. As the number of these cases has grown, so has controversy about “alienation” and concern about how the family courts around the world should deal with them. Professor Nick Bala, Law'77, and his longtime collaborator, Dr. Barbara Jo Fidler, a clinical developmental psychologist from Toronto, have made a key contribution to promoting dialogue and understanding, and have been recognized for it.

Bringing together views of researchers and practitioners with conflicting perspectives, Bala and Fidler guest-edited “Parent‐Child Contact Problems: Concepts, Controversies, & Conundrums,” the April 2020 Special Issue of the interdisciplinary Family Court Review. Realizing the need for both legal and psychological contexts to be considered in such cases, in the fall of 2018, Bala and Fidler began approaching leading authorities to contribute to the Special Issue. They ended up with 17 articles by leading experts, some by multi‐disciplinary teams, from several countries and professional backgrounds. 

“Some of the contributors really emphasize ‘alienation’ is due to the influence of the favoured parent, often but not always the mother, in promoting rejection of the other parent,” says Bala. “Others argue that ‘alienation’ is not even a reliable concept, and that children’s resistance to contact is usually the result of abuse or at least poor parenting, and minimize the influence of favoured parents.”  

He notes that it was a challenge to get all of the contributors to agree to contribute to a single journal. To promote dialogue, Bala and Fidler asked those with conflicting views to read one another’s work, and write a series of responses that appear in the Special Issue. Bala observes that “these cases have profound effects on children and parents, and those who work with them are deeply committed, sometimes to differing perspectives.” The contributors all had strong views, and there was a need for careful editing, including toning down rhetoric and seeking clarifications and clarity. 

“Our goal is to increase knowledge and promote discussion about how to better understand and respond to these most challenging cases,” says Bala, “as well as to identify areas where there is uncertainty, controversy and the need for further dialogue and research.”

In recognition of their “incredible editorial work,” Dr. Matthew Sullivan, President of the Association of Family and Conciliation Courts (AFCC), selected them for this year’s AFCC President’s Award. “Nick Bala and Barbara Fidler are the model of an interdisciplinary partnership that was essential to this monumental task,” says Sullivan. “They brought the respect of their respective professional groups, the recognized expertise from their legal and mental health disciplines, the mutual trust and admiration they have for each other and the editorial skills to elevate the quality of the scholarly debate of such a polarizing issue for families and the courts.” 

Bala and Fidler will accept their award via the Zoom meeting platform later today at a meeting of the AFCC, a 5,000-member international organization of family justice professionals and researchers.