High-Conflict Custody Cases and Allegations of "Parental Alienation": What Evaluators Should Weigh Carefully
By David Lombard, PhD
Few issues in custody litigation generate as much heat, in the courtroom and in the professional literature, as allegations that one parent is alienating a child from the other. Attorneys on both sides of these cases deserve an evaluator who takes the underlying dynamics seriously without overstating what the science actually supports. I want to lay out, plainly, where the field currently stands.
A Concept With a Real, and Real Contested, History
The term originated with Richard Gardner's 1985 description of "Parental Alienation Syndrome," proposing a specific pattern in which a child develops an unjustified campaign of rejection against one parent, generally attributed to the influence of the other. Since then, the concept has had an unusually divided reception. Some professional organizations — including AFCC and the National Council of Juvenile and Family Court Judges, in joint guidance, and the American Academy of Matrimonial Lawyers — have engaged with the concept and offered frameworks for evaluators to use with caution. Other bodies have been considerably more skeptical: parental alienation has not been accepted as a diagnosable condition by the psychological community, and some critics, including a UN Special Rapporteur, have characterized versions of the theory as scientifically unsupported (Wikipedia: Parental alienation, overview and sourcing).
It's worth attorneys knowing this landscape exists before an expert on either side invokes the term as though it were settled science. It isn't, and treating it as though it were can weaken a case as much as help it.
What's Actually Contested — and What Isn't
The disagreement is narrower than it can sound. Almost no one disputes that alienating behaviors — a parent badmouthing the other, restricting contact without cause, involving a child in adult conflict — occur in some high-conflict families and can harm children. What's contested is whether those behaviors add up to a diagnosable "syndrome," whether a child's rejection of a parent can be reliably attributed to alienation versus the child's own experience of that parent, and — most consequentially — whether alienation framing has sometimes been used to discount legitimate abuse allegations. A federally funded study of custody outcomes found reason for concern on that last point specifically, reporting that allegations of parental alienation were associated with courts crediting alienation claims over documented abuse concerns in a meaningful share of cases reviewed (National Institute of Justice, Child Custody Outcomes in Cases Involving Parental Alienation and Abuse Allegations).
That finding doesn't mean alienation dynamics aren't real. It means an evaluator has a responsibility to investigate each family's specific facts rather than reach for a label that resolves the case before the evidence is fully weighed.
What a Careful Evaluation Looks Like
A few principles guide how I approach these cases:
Abuse allegations get investigated on their own terms, first and independently — not filtered through an assumption that a rejected parent is the "true" victim of alienation.
A child's reluctance or refusal to see a parent is treated as a data point to understand, not a symptom to diagnose. Multiple explanations — including the child's own experience, developmental factors, and family dynamics beyond either parent's alienating conduct — are considered before any single explanation is adopted.
The 2022 APA Guidelines for Child Custody Evaluations call for evaluators to base conclusions on person-focused, individualized data rather than syndrome-based labels applied categorically (APA Guidelines for Child Custody Evaluations in Family Law Proceedings).
Recommendations are tied to documented findings, not to a theoretical framework applied wholesale to a family the evaluator hasn't fully assessed.
What This Means for Attorneys
If you're representing a parent who believes they're being alienated, or a parent facing that allegation, the useful question to ask a prospective evaluator isn't "do you believe in parental alienation." It's whether they'll investigate the specific facts of your case — including any abuse allegations — thoroughly and independently, and reach conclusions the record actually supports. That's a higher bar than invoking a label, and it's the bar I hold myself to.
A Closing Thought
These are among the hardest cases in this work, because there's rarely a tidy explanation and always a child caught in the middle of the search for one. Being honest about what the evidence does and doesn't show isn't a failure of conviction — it's the most respectful thing an evaluator can offer a family in this position, and the court that's relying on the work.
If you'd like to discuss how these dynamics are handled in a specific case, I'm glad to talk it through. [Contact / Schedule a Call]
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