Sun finally shines a light on parental alienation, thanks to my old ‘mucker’ Deidre

Let’s get Deidre Sanders on board in our fight against PA!

As most people know here, I’m a journalist and broadcaster – real McCoy!

I write for national newspapers and magazines regularly and I have a cable TV opinion show on AirTVinternational which is featured on Roku.

But stories about parental alienation have rarely managed to break on to a national platform – except in my own blog, which has 75,000 readers.

I know the national news agendas well, obviously, and, in a way, I understand why my colleagues are reluctant to pick up the baton and run with the heartbreaking stories of suicide, broken families, lost dreams and mentally injury to our children.

The main stumbling block is of course that so many of the tragic things that so many of us are living through involve court action, particularly family courts.

And journalists, like me, are hamstrung by the laws surrounding reporting things which are going through court, held in camera and will identify a child.

And, if you trawl round social media – the first place to check the truth and the tone of something which might get on to the agenda – too often all you see is anger, libel, profanity and tales of masses of litigation.

Then we have to look at the news agenda itself over the last four years – it has been overtaken by the plague of Covid and before that, Brexit. There simply haven’t been that many open news spots.

But today we had a breakthrough … an old ‘mucker’ Deidre Sanders took up the cudgel, at least for a few minutes. She gave some sane and sage advice.

Deidre has been The Sun’s agony aunt for the past 35 years, and she is legendary. She is also a mum and a grandmother.

Our careers in a way mirrored each other’s – I went from the Sun to the Daily star, Deidre went from the Daily Star to the Sun. I moved on from the Star to many other morning papers and the BBC – then into travel and publicity.

Deidre stayed at the Sun and built up a good team which operates from Bedfordshire.

Occasionally our paths would cross and we would follow-up some of the stories she had highlighted.

This is the advice for victims of PA she offered in her column in the Sun.

“Children do not fully understand adult relationships or behaviour.

When parents split up it can feel very scary, as they wonder what will happen to them. And sometimes children blame themselves.

It sounds like your husband is taking advantage of this to make himself seem like the good, blameless parent while you are the wicked one who doesn’t care about them.

His criticism of you will confuse them and affect their self-esteem in the long term because you are half of them.

Tell him he needs to stop criticising and lying about you because it is damaging to them.

Keep trying to talk to the kids. Give them lots of reassurance that you love them.

Please don’t sink to your husband’s level and slag him off to them.

Sometimes children want to talk outside the family.

Could you leave the details somewhere for them without making it obvious?”

Good enough – but keep telling us your stories and I promise when we have the right ones in the numbers we need we will go to Deidre and ask her to jump on board with our fight properly.

Please, though put your comments and stories in the comment box at the end of this article… one simple reason, if they appear in FB comments it becomes very difficult for us at the preservation society to collate them.

#deardeirdre #thesun #parentalalienation