Richard Warshak

Education

Warshak graduated from Brooklyn's Midwood High School in 1966 and received his B.S. degree from Cornell University in 1971. Warshak received his Ph.D. in Clinical Psychology from the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center (formerly the UT Health Science Center) in 1978. He is currently a Clinical Professor of Psychology in the Department of Psychiatry at UT Southwestern.

Career

Warshak's doctoral dissertation, The Effects of Father Custody and Mother Custody on Children's Personality Development, was the first study to directly compare children growing up in father-custody homes to children growing up in mother-custody homes. Warshak collaborated with John Santrock on the Texas Custody Research Project, a series of studies on the effects of different custody dispositions and stepfamilies, partially funded by the National Institute of Mental Health.

Warshak's studies on father and mother custody, remarriage, relocation, parenting plans for young children, the American Law Institute's approximation rule, children's preferences in custody disputes and parental alienation appear in 13 books and more than 75 articles. Warshak's studies are cited often in the professional literature and in case law and legislatures throughout the world.

In 2014 the American Psychological Association published Warshak’s paper, Social Science and Parenting Plans for Young Children: A Consensus Report, in the journal Psychology, Public Policy, and Law. The paper was endorsed by 110 researchers and practitioners who added their names to the paper, “a rare occurrence in social science.” The endorsers, from fifteen countries, include the world’s leading authorities in early child development, parent-child relationships, and divorce. The paper has been translated into more than eighteen languages and has informed parliamentary deliberations in several countries including the U.K., Canada, Israel, Finland, and Sweden.

Warshak was a founding member and past president of the Dallas Society for Psychoanalytic Psychology and was the founding editor of the DSPP Bulletin.

Warshak has several op-ed columns published in U.S. newspapers, and in 2010 he was one of the original team of authors invited to launch the Divorce section of the Huffington Post.

He was one of the four contributors selected to inaugurate the Child and Family Blog co-sponsored by Princeton University, Brookings Institution, University of Cambridge, and the Jacobs Foundation.

Parental alienation

Warshak's 2010 set of three articles on Family Bridges: A Workshop for Troubled and Alienated Parent-Child Relationships triggered a resurgence of interest among professionals in parental alienation and prompted the Family Court Review to devote a whole issue to the problem.

Warshak analyses the controversy about whether a child's unreasonable alienation from a parent constitutes a syndrome and presents arguments both for and against the use of the term, parental alienation syndrome, in court.

Warshak stresses the importance of understanding the multiple roots of parental alienation and the various factors, including the behavior of the rejected parent, that contribute to the origin and maintenance of a child’s unreasonable alienation or estrangement from a parent.

Because of the emotional and financial costs of severe irrational alienation, and the obstacles to its alleviation, Warshak emphasizes the importance of directing educational resources and judicial efforts to the goals of prevention and early identification of children at risk. The DVD he co-authored and co-produced, Welcome Back, Pluto: Understanding, Preventing, and Overcoming Parental Alienation, is the first such program for children, teens, and young adults who are alienated or at risk for becoming alienated. In addition to education, Warshak stresses the importance of courts' rapid and effective enforcement of orders related to children's contact with both parents.

Selected publications

Public appearances and media

As an international media guest commentator Warshak has contributed to segments on more than 75 topics including celebrity divorces, custody disputes, parental alienation, child abuse, stepfamilies, child psychology and parenting, and helping children cope with fears and trauma. He has been interviewed by the major television networks in the U.S., and in Canada, England, and Germany, including ABC 20/20, NBC Today, Dateline NBC, CBS, CNN, BBC, CTV, Fox, Geraldo, and CourtTV. His work has been featured in international print media in the U.S., Australia, Canada, Columbia, England, Germany, Israel, Italy, New Zealand, and Scotland, including The New York Times (Sunday front page story), The Washington Post (cover story), USA Today (cover story), London Sunday Telegraph, Il Giornale (Italy), Toronto Star, The Globe and Mail (editorial, front page, & Life section), Maclean's (Canada), The Age (Australia), and Time magazine (1980), 2004, and 2011.