MEDIA CONTACT: Matt McGaugh - 970-429-2042
Pitkin County Adult and Family Services is partnering with Response and Aspen Family Connections to help parents understand how children can be impacted when they witness domestic violence, a family fight or experience parental alienation. A Family Conflict Workshop featuring psychologist and author, Jennifer Harman, PhD., is being offered to the community on April 29th from 6:00 - 7:30 p.m. at the Koch Seminar Building on the Aspen Meadows Campus. The event is free and open to the public.
“Whether you accidentally argue with your partner in front of your kids, when domestic violence is involved or even when a parent feels alienated from their children because of a family separation; it may be causing trauma for your children that can impact healthy development,” said Pitkin County Adult and Family Services Manager, Matt McGaugh.
Jennifer J. Harman, PhD, has done extensive research in the area of intimate and family relationships and has likely encountered your situation before. She co-authored the book, Parents Acting Badly: How Institutions Promote the Alienation of Children from their Loving Families and serves on the Board of Directors for Simply Parent (www.simplyparent.org), a non-profit dedicated to serving alienated parents. Her expertise is focused on how interpersonal and social factors affect families after separation and divorce. Dr. Harman’s workshops will cover how family conflict (all the way from couples arguing to parental alienation in divorce) affects child development, and how to provide appropriate support to counter those effects.
These workshops will focus on the effects of family conflict of all kinds on children and will provide treatment options and strategies to deal with the effects.
“Family life can be stressful and we know parental conflict is tough on kids, whether it’s just arguing in front of children or something more severe,” McGaugh said. “Hopefully the parents who attend the workshop will leave with some tools for how to help their kids when there has been conflict in the family.”
The workshops in Aspen are being offered by Pitkin County Human Services and Response: Help for Survivors of Domestic Violence and Sexual Assault. For more information,
call 970-920-5235