Building Family Bridges™
The original reunification program — and the gold standard —
for alienated children and adolescents, and recovered abducted children.
This innovative four-day workshop helps children reunify with a parent they claim to hate or fear. Building Family Bridges™ offers an opportunity for participants to begin restoring a positive relationship in a relaxed setting with engaging videos and other material.
The workshop’s primary goals are twofold:
- To help children adjust to the transition of living with a parent from whom they are alienated while the children’s contact with their other parent is suspended by the court for an extended period of time.
- To improve the quality of the parent–child relationship.
Building Family Bridges helps children who resist living with a parent, or hold unrealistic negative attitudes toward a parent. Many of these children are caught in the middle of their parents’ conflicts. Some have been abducted by a parent and, when recovered, are returned to the other parent and cannot have contact for a period of time with the parent who abducted them. Family Bridges has fulfilled one aim if, by the end of the workshop, the children are ready to return home with the rejected parent who has been awarded custody.
Building Family Bridges jump-starts the recovery of a positive parent–child relationship and teaches better communication and conflict management skills. The workshop also teaches children how to think critically; how to maintain balanced, realistic, and compassionate views of both parents; and how to resist outside pressures that can lead them to act against their judgment.
Children who reject a parent after divorce, who refuse or resist contact with a parent, or treat a parent with contempt, represent one of the greatest challenges facing courts, divorced families, and the professionals who serve them. Family Bridges helps families whom courts and therapists thought were beyond help.
Building Family Bridges™ is the first specialized program for alienated children, offered since 1991. Only professionals trained and approved by Building Family Bridges may describe their services as Family Bridges, or offer a Building Family Bridges workshop. The only authorized Building Family Bridges workshops are those arranged through our affiliates and us.
It has come to our attention that some people we have not trained are describing their services as Family Bridges or related to Building Family Bridges. These services do not follow the Building Family Bridges protocol that has demonstrated its effectiveness and earned the respect of the family law community.
What Judges, Parents, and Children Say About Building Family Bridges™
“Nothing short of remarkable.” ~ An Ontario Superior Court Justice
describing children’s progress after participating in Family Bridges
“There has been a 180 degree shift in the children’s attitudes.
Both children are now saying kind things about me.”
“She could only attribute [the child]’s amazing progress to the intervention
and not being subjected to the push and pull of the parents.”
– Appellate court decision
“[The child] has transformed from a sad and depressed girl who rarely ventured out into the world, had few friends, and hid behind Goth makeup, to an engaged and active participant in her own life. . .” – Report of a guardian ad litem
“It was almost as though they had never been alienated.”