Awareness without enforcement is theater. This is what it looks like from inside it.
By Michael Phillips | Father & Co.
Today, April 25, is Parental Alienation Awareness Day. Seventeen U.S. states have officially recognized it, Maryland among them. Organizations will post graphics. Advocates will share statistics. Politicians who have never sat across a table from a family court commissioner, magistrate, or judge will retweet things about protecting children.
My son is 7 years old. I have not had a single day of parenting time with him since he was 4.
I am aware. I have been aware every single day since January 21, 2024.
This Didn’t Start in January 2024
The current period of estrangement — now more than 15 months — is not the first. It is the longest. But my son and I have been here before, separated by manufactured crises and legal maneuvers for stretches that lasted a year at a time, while he was too young to understand where I went or why I stopped showing up. There were all the times he didn’t know I was outside waiting for him, while his mother hid him from me.
The architecture of it started early. When my son was less than a year old, a false domestic violence allegation was used to remove me from our home. It worked. I was gone before he could form a memory of me living there. The allegation was not pursued to trial. It didn’t need to be. Its purpose wasn’t conviction — it was displacement. By the time the legal picture clarified, the damage to our day-to-day relationship was already done.
What wasn’t visible to a court, or to anyone else at the time, were the postpartum struggles the other parent was experiencing — real struggles, I have no doubt — that went unaddressed and unacknowledged by the people around her. I am not writing this to relitigate that period. I am writing it because that context matters when you are trying to understand how a child ends up with one parent gone and no one connecting the dots.
The Pattern Has a Name
Parental alienation — sometimes called Hostile Aggressive Parenting — describes a pattern of behavior by one parent that erodes or destroys a child’s relationship with the other parent. It can be subtle. It can also be systematic. It involves restricting contact, making accusations timed to legal filings, controlling the narrative a child receives about the absent parent, and ensuring that the child’s primary emotional reality is shaped entirely by one source.
Researchers and clinicians increasingly classify it as a form of child abuse. Not because the child is physically harmed, but because they are being systematically separated from a parent who loves them, and being taught — consciously or not — to fear, resent, or simply forget that parent exists.
Parental alienation is child abuse.
I want to be precise about something: this publication does not frame these issues as a gender story. The structural variable is not which parent is male or female. It is which parent holds physical control of the child. Whoever has that leverage — mother or father — holds the ability to use it. In my case, I am the father. In thousands of other cases documented in family court systems across the country, targeted parents are mothers. The mechanism is the same. The child suffers either way.
What It Actually Costs
There is a version of this story that focuses on what it costs me. The legal fees. The hearings. The filings that trigger new allegations timed with procedural precision to muddy the record and delay proceedings. Every time I have taken a legal step to enforce my court-ordered parenting time, something new has appeared — a new accusation, a new motion, a new crisis requiring the court’s attention before we can get back to the question of why a child has not seen his father.
But the more important accounting belongs to my son.
He has spent at least roughly more than half of his life in a state of manufactured estrangement from a parent who has spent every day of that time fighting to be in his life. He is 7. He cannot contextualize that. He cannot know that there is a court order entitling him to time with his father. He cannot know that the order has not been enforced. He only knows what he has been told, and what he has been told has been told to him by one person.
The mental health toll on targeted parents is documented and real — anxiety, depression, grief that doesn’t resolve because the loss isn’t final, it’s just ongoing. But the toll on children is where the research becomes most sobering. Kids raised without a parent — particularly when taught to fear or reject that parent without cause — face elevated risks of identity confusion, difficulty with trust, depression, and in some cases, substance abuse and low achievement in adulthood. They also face something more insidious: as they grow older, they begin to carry the alienating parent’s narrative as their own memory. The stories they were told become the stories they believe they lived.
That is what I think about. Not the hearings. My son, at 16 or 17, telling someone a version of his childhood that was constructed for him before he was old enough to question it.
Awareness Is Not Enforcement
Maryland has officially recognized Parental Alienation Awareness Day. Maryland’s Circuit Court for Montgomery County — one of the wealthiest, most resourced court systems in the state — also has a family court docket that has repeatedly declined to enforce its own parenting time orders in my case. Access denial treated as a scheduling inconvenience. Contempt motions that go nowhere. The burden of enforcement placed entirely on the targeted parent, who must pay to return to court, again and again, to ask for something that was already ordered, already adjudicated, already on the record.
The recognition and the practice exist in entirely different worlds. Montgomery County is not a rural backwater with an underfunded court. It is the most populous county in Maryland, with a circuit court that handles billions of dollars in civil matters. It has no excuse for treating a child’s enforced estrangement from a parent as an administrative inconvenience.
What would enforcement actually look like? It would look like treating a violated parenting time order with the same seriousness as any other court order. It would look like automatic sanctions — not discretionary ones — when a parent denies court-ordered access without a legitimate safety basis. It would look like a legal system that treats false accusations deployed as litigation tactics as the abuse of process they are, with consequences. It would look like commissioners and judges who understand that every month a child goes without a parent is not a neutral holding pattern — it is active harm, accumulating.
One More April 25
I will keep filing. I will keep showing up to hearings. I will keep building the record. That is the reality of being a targeted parent — you do not get to stop. You cannot afford to stop, because stopping looks like abandonment, and abandonment becomes the story.
If you are a parent living this — denied access, facing smear campaigns every time you attempt to enforce your rights, watching your child’s childhood move past you through the window of a court filing — this day is not for the organizations posting graphics. It is for you. You are not failing your child by being absent. You are failing nothing. The system is failing you both.
My son is now 7. I have not held him in three years.
He will know I never stopped fighting.
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