It is Sunday at five. The bag is packed and sitting by the door. Your ten-year-old son is sitting on the couch with his arms crossed. For the third time, he has made it clear that he does not want to go to his other parent’s home. Your phone keeps buzzing with messages from the other parent: “Where is my child? It’s my parenting time.”

Unfortunately, you have two bad options in front of you. You can force your son into the car and watch him cry the whole way. Or you can text your co-parent that your child is not coming and brace for what follows.

We see this scene at our clinic in Ontario every week. Sometimes it is the first time it has happened. Sometimes, the emotions have been building for months, and this is the moment when things finally begin to break down.

Either way, the parent faced with their child refusing to go to the other parent’s home is often left asking the same two questions: What is happening, and what am I supposed to do about it?

We try to answer both questions in this article but it won’t tell you whose fault it is, because in most families that is the wrong question. However, it will tell you what the refusal can mean, which responses make it worse and what the first weeks should look like if you want this to get better. 

This happens in more families than you think

About 1.2 million Canadian children have lived through their parents’ separation or divorce by 2019, according to Statistics Canada. That is 18 per cent of everyone aged 1 to 17. Most of those children move between two homes without serious trouble but a meaningful number do not.

Therapists often refer to these situations as parent-child contact problems. However, these difficulties are sometimes misunderstood and labelled as parental alienation, even though there can be many different reasons why a child resists or refuses contact with a parent.

On the 6th episode of our podcast, Joanna Seidel, MSW, RSW, Acc. FM uses the wider term and she is specific about why. Because there is rarely a single explanation. 

Difficulties inside the parent child relationship, a long separation, high conflict between the parents, parenting problems, family transitions and the child’s own vulnerabilities all show up and in many families several are at work at once. Exposure to alienating behaviour, which Keren Wisniewski describes later in the episode, is one item on that list.

That is why the clinic does not begin by asking whose fault it is. The questions Joanna Seidel, and the rest of our team at Toronto Family Therapy & Mediation, start with a different approach. We try to understand what happened in this family, what is keeping the problem ongoing and what does this child need.

What a child’s refusal can look like

Some children announce it right away: “I am not going. I do not want to see that parent.” That version is painful at first but at least it is clear.

But others go quiet. Keren Wisniewski, MSW, RSW, a social worker on our team with more than fifteen years of experience with children, adolescents and families, sees a different set of signals far more often. They can be stomachaches on the morning of a transition, headaches, emotional dysregulation, rigidity or a child who cannot or will not follow the other parent’s rules and expectations.

Teenagers do it differently. They often walk into the therapy room with a narrative already written and a list of grievances ready to read out loud to their parent. The list is real to them. Whether it matches what happened is a separate question, and one we come back to below.

At the far end, Joanna Seidel, MSW, RSW, Acc. FM has sat with families where the refusal turned physical: screaming at the door, a child hitting a parent who reached for them. If you are there, you are not past help, but unfortunately you are past the point where waiting is an option.

Why children resist a parent after separation

There is a spectrum, and it is worth being honest about both ends of it.

Sometimes the refusal is justified. A parent was abusive, called the child names or behaved in ways that frightened them. Or a parent was barely around during the marriage and now, post separation, wants a closeness the child has never had and does not trust. In those families the child’s reaction fits the history and our job is not to talk them out of it.

Sometimes it is not. A child prefers the parent who did most of the daily care, which is normal and not the same as rejection. A teenage girl wants her mother more this year and her father less, which is a developmental stage, not a verdict. Or a child has been soaking up small things like a comment to a friend on the phone or a sigh when the other parent’s name comes up. None of it was planned and all of it adds up.

Most families are a mix. Barbara Jo Fidler, Nicholas Bala and Michael Saini, a Toronto psychologist, a Queen’s law professor and a University of Toronto social work researcher, wrote the standard Canadian text on this in 2013, and their central finding was that very few cases have one cause. There are many different reasons. For example, the parent being refused usually did something, even if it was small. Or the parent doing the refusing usually contributed, even if they would be horrified to hear it. The separation itself also did some damage and the child brought their own anxiety or sensitivity into the mix.

As Joanna Seidel, MSW, RSW, Acc. FM, puts it on the podcast: “Parents don’t wake up in the morning and intend to do these things. But as family dynamics play out and stress comes into these families’ lives, sometimes they behave in ways that they don’t realize, that they don’t have insight.” 

What not to do in the first weeks

If we get back to our fictitious story at the beginning of the article, the instinct is to solve the problem tonight. But whenever you feel that way in a similar situation, resist that. Because here is what tends to backfire.

Do not force your child into the car: Physically moving a child who is refusing teaches them that their fear does not count and it hands them a new story about the parent waiting at the other end. Joanna describes the clinic’s goal as lowering the resistance and the anxiety first, so the child is more open and more ready to see the parent they have been refusing. Dragging does the opposite.

Do not take the refusal at face value either: This is the mistake the other parent makes. “My poor kid does not want to see his dad, so we will roll with it.” It feels kind but it is not. 

Nicole Khaitman, MSW, RSW puts it bluntly: “If a child learns all they have to do is cut off a relationship or a tie with somebody because that person did them wrong, that’s going to be their coping mechanism to deal with people their entire life. What happens if a boss does something to them that pisses them off? What happens if a colleague is rude to them? It becomes their survival technique.” Keren Wisniewski, MSW, RSW adds: “The therapy room becomes a place to change that pattern for that child. That therapy room should not be promoting the avoidance behaviour. That therapy room should be helping them develop skills so that they can tolerate the difficult emotions and still be able to engage without avoiding.”

Do not interrogate after visits: “What did you do? Was she there? Did he say anything about me?” Children hear the question under the question. Our team’s list of alienating behaviours is mostly this kind of thing: small, repeated, unplanned. The phone call with a friend that the child overhears from the next room or the face you make or the way you never ask about the good parts. They all add up.

Do not let the child become your protector: Nicole Khaitman, MSW, RSW sees this often with teenagers. A fourteen year old who says, with real conviction, “my dad hurt my mom,” describing events she was not present for. She has taken on an adult’s grievance as her own and is now fiercely loyal to one side. It looks like strength but actually it is a child carrying weight that is not even hers.

Do not run to a lawyer first: Joanna’s advice at the end of the episode is direct: you do not have to run to lawyers or to litigation. Therapists can help. The earlier they are involved, the smaller the problem they are working with.

What to do instead

Get curious before you get anything else: Sit down when it is not transition time. Ask what happened, who said what, how it felt. Then stop talking. Get curious before you get anything else. Nicole Khaitman, MSW, RSW describes how she responds when a child’s account does not seem to be their own: “I don’t question the child. I don’t berate the child or anything like that. I lean in to find out more.” The questions she works through are simple: “Why are they thinking the way they are? Who told them that? Where did they hear that? How did it impact them?” Her aim is for the child to have “their own independent thinking,” because “once I separate that, then they’ll be able to see things for what they truly are.” A child who feels investigated shuts down, but the same child who feels asked keeps talking.

Validate without agreeing: Keren Wisniewski, MSW, RSW teaches this to every parent she works with, and it is the single most useful sentence in this article: Validation is not agreement. You can say “I can hear how angry you are about what happened at Dad’s” without saying “and you are right about all of it.” You are taking responsibility for how the child feels, not signing off on every claim in the list.

Keep the door open in small ways: If a visit is not happening this weekend, something else can happen like a phone call or a text. Nicole Khaitman builds this kind of contact into the plans she develops with families, with parameters in place and one instruction: keep it light. The relationship does not need a breakthrough this week, but it needs a pulse.

Audit your own behaviours: Keren’s work with the preferred parent starts with one question so you need to ask yourself: which behaviours, intentional or not, might be influencing your child? Notice what your child hears about the other parent on the phone or at the dinner table. Notice what you ask after visits and what you do not. The child picks up small comments rather than anything you say to them directly.

Call a family therapist this month: You don’t have to call a lawyer, at least not yet. And you may not need formal reintegration therapy as a first step, which is the structured and sometimes court ordered. Joanna Seidel, MSW, RSW, Acc. FM is clear that most families who come in early only need ordinary family therapy: a few sessions with each parent, a few with the child, some co-parenting work. However, both parents must be open to learning, willing to accept guidance from the therapist, and committed to putting their child’s well-being first. This includes recognizing the importance of supporting their child’s relationship with both parents, provided those relationships are safe and in the child’s best interests.

Reintegration therapy is generally intended for families where the relationship between a parent and child has significantly broken down, often over several months or years. Seeking therapeutic support early, when a child first begins resisting contact, can help prevent these difficulties from escalating into a more serious and prolonged breakdown in the parent-child relationship.

Why waiting makes it worse

Time is the variable that matters most, and it only runs one way.

Joanna’s warning is important. The more time that passes, the further the gap between the parent and the child grows. A missed weekend becomes a missed month without you realizing it, and the child builds a story to explain the missed month. The parent being refused gets anxious and pushes, which confirms the story. Nicole Khaitman, MSW, RSW sees a common pattern in these families: “Nine times out of 10, the child’s avoidant, the rejected parent’s anxious.” The therapeutic setting, she says, “is where you want to teach them and guide them to move away from avoidant attachment to secure attachment.” That means helping them “lean into it and have hard conversations, even if their voice shakes.”

The timeline depends on the family, of course. 

Nicole Khaitman, MSW, RSW worked with “an eight year old girl who was rejecting her mother at the time and was really closely aligned with her father.” She met with each parent individually, did co-parenting work and met with the child, first alone and then with her father. Then came what she calls “gradual steps”: the child read her letter out first, her mother repeated back what she had heard, and then her mother read her own letter. After that, Nicole developed a plan for phone calls and texts between sessions. “It could take up to a year,” she says. “With this particular family it took six months, so it was quite fast, I thought.” 

Keren Wisniewski, MSW, RSW shares a similar experience. She worked with a twelve year old who was resisting contact with her father after a high conflict separation. The child went from refusing to see her father in the community on her own, and “started resuming overnights.” As Keren puts it, “now they have quite a positive relationship.”

If you are the parent being refused

Most of this article is written for the parent in the doorway, the one dealing with a child who does not want to visit the other parent. If you are the one on the other end of the phone, here are two things.

First, Keren Wisniewski, MSW, RSW gives hope to every parent who walks into the therapy room heartbroken. A fracture now does not mean the relationship with your child is permanently broken. With the right support, it heals. She has watched it happen enough times to say it with confidence.

Second, the way back starts with accountability. Joanna calls it “the first step in healing.” In Keren’s case with the twelve year old, once the child and her father were ready to be in the same room, the work began with “an accountability letter from that father to explain some of the wrong turns that he had taken and how he’s going to commit to change.” As Keren puts it, “that made a big impact on that child, hearing that accountability.” In Nicole’s case, the mother read her own letter to her daughter after the child had read hers first.

How Toronto Family Therapy & Mediation can help

For most families who call early, the answer is family therapy that consists of individual sessions with each parent, sessions with the child, co-parenting work and joint sessions when everyone is ready. Where the relationship has fully broken down or a court has ordered it, we also provide structured reintegration therapy.

The therapists quoted in this article do this work every week. Joanna Seidel, MSW, RSW, Acc.FM founded the clinic in 2006 and has been declared an expert witness in parenting assessments and reintegration therapy. Keren Wisniewski, MSW, RSW has more than fifteenyears with children and families in high conflict separation. Nicole Khaitman, MSW, RSW specializes in parent child contact problems, reintegration and co-parenting after separation.

We have offices in North York and in Midtown Toronto, and we see families across Ontario virtually. Call (416) 629-7410 or send us a message. 

Frequently Asked Questions

At what age can a child refuse to see a parent in Ontario? 

There is no fixed age. Ontario courts give a child’s views more weight as the child gets older and more mature, but the views are one factor among several, not a deciding vote. In practice a sixteen year old’s refusal carries real weight and a nine year old’s carries less. Neither one cancels a parenting order on its own.

Should I force my child to go to the other parent’s house? 

Not physically. Forcing a frightened child into a car entrenches the fear and gives them a new reason to resist. What you can do is refuse to treat the refusal as final: keep the contact alive in small ways, stay curious about the reasons and get a family therapist involved early.

Is my child’s refusal parental alienation? 

Sometimes, and often only partly. Alienation describes one cause: a child’s rejection shaped by the other parent’s words and behaviour. Many refusals have other causes, including the refused parent’s own conduct, and most have more than one. A family therapist can help sort out which is which. Starting from the assumption of alienation tends to make the other parent defensive and the child more entrenched.

How long does it take to repair the relationship? 

Six months to a year is typical for families who come in early. But it takes longer when the silence has gone on for years. Unfortunately, the families who rush, or who stop as soon as one visit goes well, are the ones most likely to end up back where they started.

Please note that the information on this page is for educational purposes, not a substitute for professional diagnosis.