Before the mid-1980s, judges didn’t pay much attention to one parent disparaging the other in combative child custody cases, attorney Joan S. Meier, JD, told participants at special session on child custody cases involving allegations of family violence at an APA/American Bar Association conference in May.

“Judges would roll their eyes and say that neither parent should denigrate the other,” said Meier, founder and legal director of the Domestic Violence Legal Empowerment and Appeals Project and a clinical law professor at George Washington University.

Since then, however, concern about denigration of one parent by the other has been elevated into a new paradigm that has taken hold in courts — the idea that mothers falsely claim child abuse by fathers as a way to ensure they win custody.

While all child abuse claims need to be investigated, this
theory implies a question about whether and how often abuse
allegations are really attempts to gain the upper hand in custody
disputes. What courts have focused on less is the question of
what so-called parental alienation means and how it actually
affects children.

Despite family courts’ major emphasis on parental alienation, research by alienation experts shows that only a tiny percentage of children end up seriously alienated from one parent in divorce cases, said Meier. That finding — that parental alienation is really a small problem — should transform family court practice, she said. What’s more, she said, the studies consistently show that those kids are usually alienated for a good reason and one that’s related to the disliked parent’s behavior. “We have a tempest in a teapot in terms of family courts’ treatment of parental alienation as a dominant concern,” she said.

The use of the parental alienation model has grave consequences, said Meier, with children often removed from caring mothers and handed over to abusive fathers when judges are too quick to dismiss abuse allegations as false.

“Once you slap the alienation label on one parent, the other parent can do anything and not be held accountable,” said Meier, calling on courts to rely on more balanced evaluations