Parental Alienation: Definition, Syndrome, & Effects​

By Charlie Huntington, M.A., Ph.D. Candidate
Parental alienation is when one parent intentionally tries to turn their child against the other parent. Let’s see what the research says about it.​
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I know few people whose parents have divorced that say the whole divorce process went well and that they were never torn between their parents. For many children of divorce, the experience often feels like a question of allegiance. Whose child am I? Where will I live? Where do I want to live? Children and parents alike face incredibly tough choices that will have consequences for years to come.
For the divorcing parents, it is often difficult to avoid expressing negative emotions about each other in front of the children. Psychologists and therapists have written a great deal about how important it is—unless one parent is truly abusive and dangerous—for children to remain in contact with both parents. Divorcing parents don’t often tell the same story about what’s wrong in the family, though, and on rare occasions, they can end up giving wildly different or even false accounts. Some of these rare occasions can meet the definition of parental alienation, a controversial topic among psychologists. In this blog post, I hope to wade through the research and the debate on this topic to provide you with a level-headed, unbiased account of what parental alienation is.
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What Is Parental Alienation? (A Definition)​

According to the originator of the concept of parental alienation, Richard Gardner, this is a phenomenon in which a child begins to refuse to spend time or have contact with one of their parents because they have been “alienated” from that parent by the other parent (Gardner, 1998). How would the alienating parent accomplish this? By convincing the child that the alienated parent is unsafe or does not love the child, by getting the child involved in actively vilifying the other parent, and by reducing or sabotaging the time the child spends with the other parent (Gardner, 1998). Through this process of parental alienation, a child learns to fear, reject, and ultimately hate the other parent (Darnall, 2011).
 
For parental alienation to occur, according to Gardner, there must be no legitimate reason that the alienated parent is pushed away; instead, in the absence of any actual wrongdoing on the part of the alienated parent, the alienating parent has instilled their own negative emotions about the other parent into the child over time. And here I have to stop the proceedings and say that many psychologists disagree with the very idea of parental alienation (Meier, 2020). They note that the original example that Gardner gave, in which a mother lies about the father of her children sexually abusing the children, is actually quite a rare occurrence. They raise the very real concern that the idea of false allegations will lead people to take abuse claims by mothers less seriously, putting children at risk of remaining in legitimately abusive homes.
 
Just as allegations of sexual assault are very rarely found to be false, these allegations of child sexual abuse—and parental abuse more broadly—almost always have some validity to them (O’Donohue et al., 2018). This makes the idea of a parent telling a complete lie to vilify the other parent a dangerous distraction. The extent to which actual lawyers and judges have come to focus on whether parental alienation is taking place likely undermines real efforts by parents to keep their children out of abusive situations (Meier, 2009).
 
The main criticism—and it is a strong and widely held one—of this concept of parental alienation, as well as parental alienation syndrome (more on that in a moment), is that Gardner developed it based purely on his own work counseling parents who were divorcing. He estimated that child abuse allegations were unfounded most of the time, if not in nearly all instances (Gardner, 1992), and he used a lot of language about mothers “punishing” fathers and “brainwashing” children. Since these claims clash with other research on child abuse and divorce, and since his language was highly gendered, child safety and domestic abuse advocates, as well as many other researchers, were and remain skeptical of Gardner’s claims (Meier, 2009).
 
For a recent take on how psychologists see the idea of parental alienation, I recommend watching this video:

Video: Parental Alienation​

Examples of Parental Alienation

As I give you these examples of parental alienation, I want you to understand that according to Gardner’s theory, these are behaviors that an alienating parent would engage in. For example, he would say that most of these behaviors are things a mother would do with her children solely for the purpose of making the children disengage from their other parent. However, these are behaviors that an abusive parent, including a father, may also use to try to control or manipulate the family dynamic. In fact, these behaviors are more common from abusive parents than from parents who are trying to keep their children safe from abusers (Dalton et al., 2003).
 
Examples of alienating behaviors can include insulting and demeaning the other parent, whether or not they are present, encouraging the children not to obey that parent, deliberately keeping the children away from that parent, and telling the children that the other parent does not love them or want to be with them. This parent might even go so far as to blame the other parent for things the alienating parent themselves actually did wrong. For example, if the alienating parent intentionally brings the children very late to an agreed-upon handoff and the other parent is no longer there, they may blame the other parent and say that this means the other parent isn’t interested in the children. Or the alienating parent might say that the family cannot go out to eat or buy something they need because the other parent is withholding money, whether or not this is true (Dalton et al., 2003).​

Effects of Parental Alienation

Children who are alienated from their parents experience a number of negative outcomes (Baker & Ben-Ami, 2011; Bernet et al., 2010). The primary concern is that these children end up estranged from one of their parents who could potentially be a source of important love and care in their lives. The children can end up very confused about whether they are bad themselves, or the child of a bad person, and their sense of secure attachment is sure to be threatened by these dynamics.

When psychologists interview people who have experienced parental alienation as children, they find that these adults are very conflicted about what happened and what they were made to do (Baker, 2006). For example, many of them recall being forced to say unkind things to the alienated parent, which conflicts with the positive feelings they continue to hold toward their parent. They knew as children, and understand as adults, that they were being used, but in a way that they could not understand at the time.

For this reason, it is very important, in cases where parental alienation has truly taken place for no justifiable reason, that the children be reunited with the other parent in a therapeutic way (Darnall, 2011). This should involve steps such as helping the alienating parent change their behaviors, getting the child out of a triangulated position and into a healthy relationship with the alienated parent, and reducing a sense of blame (Garber, 2011). This can be achieved when the children have grown up, but ideally it is initiated while they are younger so the damage can be minimized. In cases where the alienated parent was a truly loving and safe parent the whole time, having the children returned to their custody may actually be helpful in the healing process (Templer et al., 2017); however, this should only be done with the support of a therapist who specializes in family therapy.

Parental Alienation Syndrome

Gardner (1992) created the concept of parental alienation syndrome to specifically describe how a child behaves when they have been systematically alienated from one parent by the other. As I share the standard child behaviors with you that Gardner believes constitute parental alienation syndrome, bear in mind that he reported on only a handful of custody dispute cases when presenting this new idea.
 
In parental alienation syndrome, a child has been “brainwashed” or “programmed” by one parent to intensely dislike and stay away from the other parent. A primary symptom is the child criticizing the other parent, but in a way that suggests the child has been fed the words to say. For example, what the child says may sound overly mature or oddly specific, or it may reference events that a child would not be expected to care much about. If the child is asked to explain more about what they are saying, they will usually struggle to do so.
 
Another symptom is that the child may show some hesitation to be around the alienated parent, but when they are alone together, they may show more positive behaviors toward that parent; it is mainly in the presence of the alienating parent that the child shows this reluctance. The child may also profess to hate the alienated parent’s extended family but have difficulty saying why. Finally, children with parental alienation syndrome often greatly fear losing the love of the parent doing the alienating.
 
Last, and perhaps most important, for parental alienation syndrome to be in effect, a child must have previously had a completely normal and healthy relationship with the alienated parent. This is important, because in most families with an actually abusive parent, those abusive behaviors would have already strained the parent-child relationship considerably.​

Parental Alienation Against the Mother​

Most claims of parental alienation are leveled by a father against the mother: The father claims that the mother is baselessly saying he has been abusive or unsafe. The courts seem to have a bias against mothers who report that fathers have been abusive, and when fathers claim that they are being parentally alienated, the likelihood of mothers gaining custody actually goes down (Meier, 2020). As we have noted, this is concerning, because almost all accusations of child abuse are at least somewhat substantiated (O’Donohue et al., 2018).

Parental Alienation Behaviors

Other parental alienation behaviors we have not discussed so far include general manipulation of the child’s thoughts and feelings and keeping important information from the alienated parent (Poustie et al., 2018). An alienating parent might do things such as removing all pictures of the alienated parent from the house, deleting the alienated parent’s phone number from their children’s phones, or refusing to talk about the alienated parent at all.

Parental Alienation and Abuse

When a parent is actually abusive, psychologists have termed the necessary distancing of that parent from their children “estrangement” (Garber, 2011). The line between estrangement and parental alienation can be very difficult to discern. A parent who is trying to protect their children from a legitimately abusive co-parent may have a difficult time doing so without engaging in at least one or two behaviors that might resemble parental alienation behaviors.
 
At the same time, the act of parental alienation, when it does happen, constitutes child abuse as well (Poustie et al., 2018). After all, the alienating parent is intentionally sabotaging what was previously a happy and safe connection.

Parental Alienation and Divorce

Most instances of parental alienation occur in families where divorce is taking place (Gardner, 1998) and the custody dispute is becoming difficult. However, it is possible for parental alienation to take place in intact families as well.

Quotes on Parental Alienation

  • “The best, most mature co-parents will tell their therapist—and not their child—how much the other parent sucks.” — Hayley Gallagher
  • “Parental alienation is an emotional act of violence that is aimed at an adult, but critically wounds a child.” — Steve Marboli
  • “Effective parenting has nothing to do with pointing out our faults and everything to do with working out solutions.” — R. Knost
  • “Parental alienation is a form of emotional terrorism that can destroy families.” — John A. Zervopoulos
  • “The best security blanket a child can have is parents who respect each other.” — Jane Blaustone

Articles Related to Parental Alienation

​Want to learn more? Check out these articles:

Books Related to Parental Alienation

If you’d like to keep learning more, here are a few books that you might be interested in.

Final Thoughts on Parental Alienation​

If you take anything from this article about parental alienation, I want it to be a sense of caution about the whole concept. Clearly, in some very rare cases, one parent alienates their children from the other parent solely because they want to maintain custody or to punish the other parent. However, most child custody disputes are much more complicated, and most claims of child abuse have some evidence behind them. We should keep in mind how complicated this picture is before jumping to the judgment of anybody involved in a custody dispute (Doughty et al., 2018). 

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