I'm a social worker and a child of divorce.  Divorce is hard enough on kids but too many parents make the children suffer terribly by doing everything they can to make the child hate the other parent, including enlisting his/her parents and siblings. This is parental alienation. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parental_alienationIt's a continuum but anyone who has been subjected to this as a kid knows how life-scarring it is. When other members of the family get into the fight, the child has no safe harbor and is forced to take sides and "lose" the other parent.  Child abuse?  It can be.