The Controversial Parenting Theory That’s Showing Up in Court Everywhere
Over the past year, Hannah Dreyfus has published a stream of “parent’s worst nightmare” journalism on ProPublica. A recent story featured a Colorado mom, Christine, who lost custody of her young son to his father despite the many times over the years that mandated reporters had registered their suspicions of his physical and sexual abuse with the state. Another, from earlier this year, examined the case of Utah siblings Ty and Brynlee Larson, who barricaded themselves in a bedroom and broadcast their story on TikTok after a court ordered their mom to return them to their father. Child welfare investigators for the state had determined that their claims that their father sexually abused them were “supported”—but, to the judge, that didn’t matter.
In both cases, the controversial theory of “parental alienation”—the idea that one parent had “brainwashed” the kids to turn against the other parent—had swayed a family court judge to the “alienated” parent’s side. In other instances, Dreyfus reported, courts have ordered kids found to be “alienated” to attend mandatory “reunification camps” run by therapists who believe in the theory and think that compelled togetherness is the way to bring families back together. The cases Dreyfus has reported on, and the ones Type Investigations/Insider featured in a recent series by reporter Olivia Gentile, showcase kids whose parents, when accused of abuse, have leveraged accusations of alienation to regain custody. The details of these cases can be shocking: In one, reported by Gentile, a mother lost custody due to accusations of alienation after her son accused her ex of sexual abuse. She then found child porn her ex had uploaded on an old cloud drive they had shared. (For now, pending his trial, she has her kids back.)
It’s hard to know how often accusations of “parental alienation” make a difference in a custody case when possible abuse is involved, because generally records from family court are sealed unless they are appealed, and parents accused of alienation may not want to rock the boat by speaking to a reporter. But behind the scenes, Dreyfus said that she’s “heard from hundreds of parents” who’ve had alienation accusations used against them. On the other side of the ledger, you can find communities of people on Reddit and YouTube commiserating about having been the target of what they believe is a campaign of alienation.
Dreyfus and I spoke recently about why parental alienation isn’t recognized by mainstream mental health professionals, the origins of the idea, and what changes, if any, may be coming in the way family courts handle accusations of alienation. Our conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.
Rebecca Onion: How did you get involved with reporting on parental alienation?
Hannah Dreyfus: I moved to the Southwest to take up a spot with ProPublica, and we did a call in the fall of 2021, I believe, for stories in Colorado. And this one mom, Christine, reached out with this sort of unbelievable story where there had been a series of professionals—therapists, medical professionals, school principal, teachers—who had voiced concerns that her son was being sexually and physically abused by his father. Yet, the courts were taking away her custody, and citing the damage that she was having, psychologically, on her kid.
I connected with Christine. I heard her story. At that point, she had primary custody of her son, and it didn’t even occur to her that she would lose it. She was reaching out to let me know what was going on in the courts and what the allegations that were being leveled against her were.
And we went through this journey together, a very painful journey of watching the courts decide to take away her son based on claims that she had been psychologically manipulating him to believe he was abused, in a process of “parental alienation.” And that’s what sort of brought me down the rabbit hole of this theory that continues to have a lot of influence in family courts across the country, and yet has never gained acceptance in mainstream scientific circles.
I sort of splintered off on a bunch of different veins of reporting, but I stuck with Christine’s story all this time, and publishing it was the culmination of all of the work that I’ve done to try to understand how this concept plays out intimately in people’s lives and in family court.
The story of the two kids who barricaded themselves in their bedroom in Utah came up along the way, I’m assuming?
I was working on Christine’s story all along, and as I became more acquainted with the community of parents—both parents who believed themselves to have been alienated and parents who had been accused of alienation and were suffering the consequences—these really outrageous stories were coming to my attention. And so, when the Utah story came up, I said to my editors, “Hey, do you mind if I take a quick break from these other long projects? Because I think this story really has the potential to really bring this issue into the limelight.”
It involved teens who are willing and able to talk, which is something that’s really valuable in this reporting, and definitely not always the case. And it has a pretty clear structure: a father who had been accused of abuse; that abuse was substantiated by child welfare officials in Utah; despite that substantiation, the judge was ordering these teens back into their dad’s full custody on the basis that they were being emotionally harmed through parental alienation. And I said, “This is a chance to really show people what’s at stake here in a very dramatic way.”
You cite the work of legal scholar Joan Meier, whose 2020 study found that when an accusation of parental alienation is leveraged against a mother—in a case where the father has been alleged to be abusive—the mother is almost twice as likely to suffer a loss of custody. (The effect didn’t hold when the genders of the parents were reversed.) You don’t heavily emphasize the gendered aspects in your reporting, but reading these stories and seeing Meier’s study, I worked my way around to the belief that the idea of parental alienation is fairly anti-female. The way people making accusations of parental alienation—who might be male or female—point to the women in these cases as being anxious, controlling, bitter, vindictive, and sometimes gold-digging felt like it was playing on tropes of women being good at manipulation and relational violence. Is this fair to say?
I think it’s important to realize that the origins of this idea, which lie in the 1970s and 1980s, when psychiatrist Richard Gardner coined the term “Parental Alienation Syndrome,” are extremely dependent on the portrayal of women as irrational and hysterical—just the oldest tropes in the book. The worst thing women can do when they’re bitter, angry, vengeful, or so the trope goes, is try to frame a spouse as an abuser—as a child sexual abuser, even worse. If you just dip into Gardner’s writings, you’ll be shocked—he has a book called Sex Abuse Hysteria: Salem Witch Trials Revisited. He does not shy away from this presentation of women. That’s where this theory, in its first iteration as a “syndrome,” originated, relatively recently. So, that’s No. 1.
Today, you have scholars who study parental alienation who have worked really hard to distance the theory from its gendered roots. Psychologist Jennifer Harman, for example, would very much take issue with the idea that this is a gendered phenomenon.
My perspective is that those who try to whitewash and separate the idea from the history of this theory, according to my research and my wanderings into the original work of Richard Gardner—it can’t be divorced from that. If scholars nowadays are saying that this is more of a relational phenomenon, and that it’s just something that is happening between families and it doesn’t have to do with gender, that’s definitely moving far afield from the way the theory was originally intended and used.
Claims of parental alienation get leveled at fathers and mothers, but in its original iteration and use as a way to deflect or explain a claim of abuse, it was very specifically targeted at women, and used the concept that mothers were hysterical and vengeful, and that is why these abuse claims were coming up, because they were brainwashing their children to believe they were abused in order to get back at an ex.
You mentioned there are people who are trying to get parental alienation labeled as a psychological condition, and even included in the DSM-V. (It was last submitted for inclusion in the DSM-V in 2012, but the application was rejected.) Why would someone want it to be a diagnosable condition?
Anytime you write about something this personal and charged, it’s inevitable that people are going to criticize your reporting and say, “How dare you say parental alienation is not real? I’m a parent. I’ve been alienated. It’s the most painful thing that’s ever happened to me.”
First of all, we never made the claim that parental alienation is not real. I’m absolutely sure that there are parents who have been alienated. What we’ve been focusing on are cases where alienation is used specifically to offset claims of abuse—and claims of abuse where there’s a significant amount of evidence. Alienating behaviors when there’s no abuse? It’s definitely possible that in any contentious divorce, a parent might try and bring kids to their side. But I think there’s a difference when there’s another explanation for why a child doesn’t want to be with a parent, and if that explanation is, I was physically, emotionally, or sexually abused, that should be taken pretty seriously.
Where does it stand in the DSM-V sense?
In terms of its acceptance as a disorder, usually when something is accepted as a disorder—let’s say schizophrenia—it has a specific group of symptoms that occur equally across a random sample of the population, that manifest equally with people of all different socioeconomic backgrounds, and you can point to a series of diagnosable conditions and symptoms of the disorder. I think what experts say is that parental alienation is missing a lot of these factors.
Also, going against the idea that it might become accepted as a disorder is the fact that this only shows up in a very specific setting, and is usually only alleged in families where parents have a lot of money, because the cottage industry to treat parental alienation is extremely expensive and paid for personally. The courts do not pay for forced reunification therapy. Linda Gottlieb’s four-day program, which costs $15,000, not including aftercare, is paid for out of pocket by parents—court-ordered, but paid for by parents, and so it’s not being diagnosed equally among the population.
And it’s not being diagnosed by clinicians. It’s being diagnosed by lawyers and judges who are leveraging it more as an argument in court. Frequently—not always, but frequently—the people who diagnose it don’t have any psychological training. If a guardian ad litem is appointed by the court and says, “These kids are being alienated,” what psychological training do you have to diagnose this condition and recommend that a court treat it with any sort of psychological therapeutic program? A lot of the people who are the biggest defenders of parental alienation themselves are not licensed therapists. Some of them are, but some are not.
What else do you think people need to understand about this?
Kids have a mind of their own. I think everybody knows that. If you’re trying to program a 16-year-old—literally brainwash them to think something—they’re not going to necessarily cooperate. Somebody put it super well for me: It’s not a crime for kids not to want to associate with their parents. One legal scholar I was talking to pointed out: What right do parents have to their kids? They have a right to parent them, but do they have an enforceable right to be loved? Do they have an enforceable right for kids to want to spend time with them?
Because that’s what these reunification programs are trying to do. They’re trying to court-order teens and kids who are resisting time with the parent. They’re trying to literally force them to, and they’re pathologizing it and saying, These teens are suffering from parental alienation, and they’re blaming it on the other parent for being the influencer and the cause of that. That completely removes the agency of a child from the equation, even if there are no allegations of abuse.
Kids resisting parents, that’s not a disease. That happens everywhere, always; that happens in healthy families and unhealthy families. It’s very hard to pathologize the fact that a teen doesn’t want to spend time with a parent. It’s very difficult to do so.
