July 8 • 8PM ET

Parents who have been cut off by their children experience enormous pain and confusion. Sadly, those emotions often cause parents to communicate or behave in ways that hurt their ability to move the relationship with their children toward reconciliation. In this talk, I will review the 5 most common mistakes and the best way for parents to heal them if they have occurred. 

Dr. Coleman is a psychologist in private practice in the San Francisco Bay Area and a Senior Fellow with the Council on Contemporary Families, a non-partisan organization of leading sociologists, historians, psychologists and demographers dedicated to providing the press and public with the latest research and best practice findings about American families. He has written for the New York Times, The Atlantic, NBC THINK, The Behavioral Scientist, CNN, MarketWatch, the San Francisco Chronicle, Greater Good Magazine, AEON, Huffington Post, Psychology Today, and more. He has given talks to the faculties at Harvard, the Well Cornell Department of Psychiatry and other academic institutions. A frequent guest on the Today Show and NPR, he has been featured on Sesame Street, 20/20, Good Morning America, PBS, America Online Coaches, and numerous news programs for FOX, ABC, CNN, and NBC television. He is the author of numerous articles and chapters and has written four books: The Rules of Estrangement (Random House); The Marriage Makeover: Finding Happiness in Imperfect Harmony (St. Martin's Press); The Lazy Husband: How to Get Men to Do More Parenting and Housework (St. Martin's Press); When Parents Hurt; Compassionate Strategies When You and Your Grown Child Don't Get Along( Harper Collins). He is the co-editor, along with historian Stephanie Coontz, of seven online volumes of Unconventional Wisdom: News You Can Use, a compendium of noteworthy research on the contemporary family, gender, sexuality, poverty, and work-family issues. His books have been translated into Chinese, Korean, Russian, Polish, and Croatian. He is the co-editor, along with historian Stephanie Coontz of seven online volumes of Unconventional Wisdom: News You Can Use, a compendium of noteworthy research on the contemporary family, gender, sexuality, poverty, and work-family issues.

July 15 • 8PM ET

Constitutional issues are seldom raised in family court. There's a good reason for that: they are unlikely to be seriously considered by the court! But that doesn't mean that constitutional issues aren't relevant to family law. There is now more than a century of Supreme Court decisions holding that parental rights are "fundamental constitutional rights". The phrase "fundamental constitutional rights" is not just lofty, but empty, rhetoric. It has a very specific legal meaning and should have important implications for how courts handle custody disputes between parents. Fundamental constitutional rights may not be interfered with by the state unless there is a "compelling state interest" to be achieved by doing so. And, when there is such an interest, the state must proceed in a manner that involves the least serious infringement on those rights. The implications of the doctrine that parental rights are fundamental constitutional rights are significant and they constitute an indictment of the way courts routinely address issues of child custody in divorce cases. There is, I will argue, a constitutional right to a presumption of shared parenting when parents divorce. Despite this, I caution parents not to rely on this constitutional argument in seeking to retain custody of their children when they divorce. Donald C. Hubin, Ph.D., is a Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at The Ohio State University, former Chair of the OSU Department of Philosophy, and Founding Director Emeritus of the Ohio State University Center for Ethics and Human Values. He received his B.A. with honors from the University of California, Davis, and his M.A. and Ph.D. degrees from the University of Arizona. He specializes in ethics, social/political philosophy and philosophy of law. One of Don’s main areas of current research is the nature, basis and implications of parental rights. In this area, his major articles are:

● “Parental Rights and Due Process,” The Journal of Law and Family Studies, 1:2(1999)123–150;

● “Daddy Dilemmas: Untangling the Puzzles of Paternity,” The Cornell Journal of Law and Public Policy, 13(2003) 29-80;

● “Fatherhood,” International Encyclopedia of Ethics, Wiley-Blackwell, (2013); and • •

● “Fractured Fatherhood,” Journal of Family Theory & Review, 6(2014)76-90.

● “Procreators' Duties: Sexual Asymmetries,” Oxford Handbook of Reproductive Ethics, (2017) 301-324. Don has been active in citizen action groups to promote shared parenting and has also served on several state commissions, including the Ohio Child Support Reform Shareholders’ Group (2001–2003) and the Ohio Child Support Guideline Council (2003–2005). He currently serves as Chair of the National Board of National Parents Organization (NPO).

July 22 • 8PM ET

Alienation is significantly driven by repeated over-exposure of a child to a parent’s intense and unmanaged emotions. This presentation will address some of the brain dynamics associated with contagious emotions and some of the personalities associated with insufficient emotional boundaries. Then there will be an explanation of how teaching self-management skills to parents and children can help them overcome or reduce alienation by learning skills for appropriately managed emotions with the New Ways for Families skills training method. The talk will include video clips of parents being taught these skills.

Bill Eddy is co-founder and chief innovation officer of High Conflict Institute. He pioneered the High Conflict Personality Theory (HCP) and is the world’s leading expert on methods for managing disputes involving people with high conflict personalities. Bill has worked as the senior family mediator at the National Conflict Resolution Center, a certified family law specialist representing clients in family court, and a licensed clinical social worker therapist. In 2021, he received the Lifetime Achievement award from the Academy of Professional Mediators. He serves on the faculty of the Straus Institute for Dispute Resolution at the Pepperdine University School of Law in California and is a conjoint associate professor with the University of Newcastle Law School in Australia. He has delivered talks and trainings in more than 30 U.S. states and thirteen countries and is the author or co-author of 20 books. His popular blog on the Psychology Today website has more than 5 million views. He trains lawyers, judges, and mediators, and regularly consults on issues of alienation, family violence, and false allegations in family court cases. 

July 29 • 8PM ET

Most of us, being normal human beings, tend to focus a lot on the things that are presently bothering us or are grievously missing from our lives. We unconsciously magnify the importance of those particular things, victimizing ourselves with more pain and anxiety than is absolutely necessary. 

The late Dr. John Killinger was a noted author, minister, and professor, has pastored eight churches, including the First Congregational Church of Los Angeles and Marble Collegiate Church in New York City, and has taught at such major universities as Vanderbilt, Princeton, and Chicago. His wife Anne was the author of A Son Is a Son Till He Gets a Wife: How Toxic Daughters-in-Law Destroy Families, the book that spawned the alienated parents and grandparent movement in America. He himself has written more than 70 books, including three volumes of From Poppy with Love: Letters from a Grandfather to the Grandchildren He Isn’t Allowed to See. He has appeared on numerous radio and TV programs across the U.S., and served for many years as a special seminar leader for chaplains in all branches of the American Armed Forces. ​ Among almost all the alienated grandparents I have met—and I have met many--the fact that they can’t see or enjoy regular visits with their grandchildren has assumed an exaggeratedly large role in their thinking. I have found, in my own experience of living with alienation, that it is very helpful and often necessary to consciously minimize my concentration on my grandkids, to psychologically shrink the time I give to thinking about them, and to spend more time and concentration on the other aspects of my daily living. This doesn’t mean I love those precious grandchildren—there are four of them, now aged 11 to 17—any less. It simply means that I am not allowing my grief at being unable to see and be with them to color or distort the rest of my existence. Life is simply too great and too beautiful to allow this alienation factor to diminish the wonder and glory of it!