Over 22 million American parents are being systematically separated from their children. Courts know. Courts are not acting.
Part three of a three-part May Day series on parental rights and the systems that fail working families.
By Michael Phillips | Father & Co.
There is a word for what happens when one party imposes costs on another, extracts value from the relationship, and faces no institutional consequence for doing so. Economists call it exploitation. The labor movement spent a century building regulatory infrastructure to stop it in the workplace. Family courts have spent decades tolerating it in the home.
Parental alienation — the documented pattern of one parent using tactics designed to damage or destroy a child’s relationship with the other parent — is not a fringe concept. It is not a contested diagnosis invented by aggrieved litigants. It is a phenomenon documented in over a hundred peer-reviewed studies, acknowledged in courts across the country, and quantified at a scale that should force a policy response but has not.
I have watched this operate at close range. What I want to make plain here is not the emotional damage — that literature speaks for itself — but the economic mechanism. Parental alienation is, structurally, an act of economic aggression. And the court system that is supposed to stop it has instead become the mechanism by which it continues.
The Scale of the Problem
Three nationally representative polls conducted by researchers at Colorado State University found that over 22 million American adults are the non-reciprocating targets of parental alienating behaviors. An estimated 10 million experience what they describe as severe alienation from their children. Over 3.8 million children in the United States are estimated to be moderately to severely alienated from a parent.
These are not small numbers. They are larger than the populations of most U.S. states. They represent a family crisis operating at a national scale, with no federal response mechanism, no dedicated enforcement infrastructure, and no systematic data collection that would even allow policymakers to track whether the problem is getting better or worse.
The research is also clear on who bears the burden. Mothers and fathers are equally likely to be perpetrators and targets of alienating behaviors using nationally representative samples in the U.S., Canada, and the U.K. The targeted parent is not a demographic. It is a structural position — the parent whose relationship with the child is being actively undermined — and it falls across every income level, every gender, every family configuration.
What targeted parents share is not demographics. It is economics.
The Economic Mechanism
The institution responsible for stopping parental alienation has chosen not to.
Parental alienation imposes costs in several distinct ways, and understanding the mechanism matters for understanding why courts have failed to address it.
The first category is direct legal costs. A targeted parent whose court-ordered parenting time is being interfered with must file for contempt — a process that costs, conservatively, thousands of dollars per filing and produces enforcement action at the court’s discretion. If the court declines to act, the targeted parent must decide whether to file again. Each filing costs money. Each hearing costs time. The accumulation of filings with no enforcement outcome is not a neutral result — it is a transfer of resources from the targeted parent to the legal system, with nothing received in return.
The second category is opportunity costs. Throughout the process of alienation, the targeted parent can endure personal costs that leave them emotionally and financially exhausted. This manifests concretely: missed work for hearings, reduced career mobility due to custody-related geographic constraints, the inability to plan financially when parenting schedules are unreliable. A parent who cannot count on their parenting time cannot structure their professional life around it.
The third category — and the one that gets the least attention — is the downstream cost to children. Parental interference harms both the alienated parent and the child, causing negative psychological effects, including depression and anxiety, impaired educational performance and school dropout, and physical health consequences, including hypertension. These are not speculative harms. They are documented outcomes that carry economic costs measured in reduced lifetime earnings, increased healthcare utilization, and intergenerational transmission of dysfunction. Research shows an intergenerational pattern of parental alienation transmission — adults alienated as children are more likely to find themselves targeted as parents.
The economic case is not that parental alienation feels bad. It is that parental alienation produces measurable, quantifiable harm — to parents, to children, and to the public systems that eventually absorb those costs — and that the institution responsible for stopping it has chosen not to.
The Institutional Failure
Here is what makes parental alienation a rule-of-law problem, not merely a family problem.
When a court issues a custody order, it creates a legal obligation. That obligation is not advisory. It is enforceable by contempt, by modification, by sanction. The court has the tools. The question is whether it uses them.
The data suggests it largely does not. In the studies examining cases where parental alienation was raised before courts, courts found alienation in 61 percent of the cases in which it was raised — but enforcement action remained inconsistent. Gardner’s follow-up research found that in cases where courts did act — restricting the alienating parent’s access or changing custody — there was significant reduction or elimination of alienation symptoms in nearly all cases. In cases where courts declined to act, alienation worsened in over 90 percent.
The intervention works. Courts are choosing not to deploy it.
This is not a failure of law. The legal authority exists. It is a failure of institutional will — the same failure that produces wage theft when labor regulators decline to investigate, or environmental violations when agencies decline to enforce. The difference is that labor law and environmental law have regulatory infrastructure with accountability metrics. Family court has neither.
I have seen firsthand what it costs a targeted parent to keep filing in a system that has demonstrated it will not act. The cost is not just financial. It is the slow erosion of the belief that the legal system means what it says. That erosion is not a personal grievance. It is a civic harm.
Why “Labor Exploitation” Is the Right Frame
The May Day frame is not rhetorical decoration. It is analytically precise.
The labor movement’s core insight was that exploitation is not merely a moral wrong. It is a structural condition — one that persists because the party being harmed lacks the institutional leverage to stop it, and because the institution that could stop it has no accountability mechanism forcing it to act.
Targeted parents are in exactly that position. They have a legal right — a court order — that the system will not enforce. They lack the institutional leverage to compel enforcement without financing new litigation. And the court that issued the order faces no accountability for declining to enforce it.
About half of parents who have been alienated from their child have considered suicide within the last year. They suffer high rates of depression, trauma symptoms, and social isolation. The injuries experienced by alienated parents were consistent with those of victims of other forms of coercive control in one study.
The labor movement would recognize all of this immediately. Powerlessness is the condition that exploitation requires. Powerlessness is what the family court system has systematically created for targeted parents by issuing orders it will not keep.
Family courts should function as courts — issuing orders that mean something, enforcing obligations that exist, and providing a remediation mechanism that does not require the harmed party to finance their own relief indefinitely.
This is not an argument against family courts. It is an argument that family courts should function as courts — issuing orders that mean something, enforcing obligations that exist, and providing a remediation mechanism that does not require the harmed party to finance their own relief indefinitely.
What a Center-Right Accountability Framework Looks Like
The conservative argument for family court accountability is not complicated. It rests on three principles that the right has defended consistently in every other institutional context.
The first is rule of law. An order that is not enforced is not law. It is theater. If courts are going to issue custody orders, those orders must carry the same weight as any other court directive. A legal system that selectively enforces its own orders — based on the discretion of individual judges with no accountability metrics — is not a legal system. It is a preference system. That is corrosive to the foundational conservative commitment to law as a stable, predictable, and equally applied framework.
The second is limited government that does what it says. The government entered these families’ lives when it issued custody orders. It took on an obligation. The conservative argument is not that government should stay out of families — the court already entered. The argument is that when government makes a promise, it should keep it. Issuing an unenforceable order and then declining to enforce it is not limited government. It is government that expands its reach and then abdicates its responsibility.
The third is protection of the family as the foundational social institution. The argument that parental rights deserve institutional protection is not a progressive argument. It is a traditionally conservative one. The family — and specifically the parent-child relationship — is the primary institution through which values, stability, and civic capacity are transmitted across generations. A court system that tolerates the systematic destruction of that relationship through non-enforcement is not protecting the family. It is presiding over its erosion.
The accountability framework this requires is not expansive government. It is government doing its job: documenting non-compliance, creating enforceable standards for when courts must act on contempt petitions, and building the data infrastructure that makes patterns of non-enforcement visible to the appellate review that already exists.
None of this requires new bureaucracy. It requires existing institutions to mean what they say.
The Three-Day Argument
Over three days, this series has made a single argument from three directions.
Part One established that the family court system lacks the enforcement infrastructure that every other legal system takes for granted — and that targeted parents bear the full economic cost of that gap.
Part Two documented how the intersection of disability, Medicaid coverage, and custody proceedings creates a specific class of government-created harm — perverse incentives that destroy families not through malice but through policy design that was never made to account for these consequences.
Part Three makes the scale plain: over 22 million Americans are living inside a system that issued a legal order on their behalf and has declined to enforce it. The economic costs are documented. The downstream harms to children are documented. The institutional mechanism for stopping it exists and is not being used.
The labor movement’s contribution to American civic life was not that it invented worker protections. It was that it made those protections enforceable. It built the infrastructure that turned rights on paper into rights in practice.
That is what the parental rights movement needs to build next.
The family court system has had the legal authority to act for decades. It has been choosing not to. May Day is a reminder that when institutions choose not to act, the people they are failing have the right — and the obligation — to say so loudly.
This is Part Three of a three-part May Day series from Father & Co. Part One: “The Unpaid Shift.” Part Two: “Medicaid, Disability, and Custody.”
Sources and background: Prevalence data: Harman, J.J., Leder-Elder, S., & Biringen, Z. (2019). “Prevalence of adults who are the targets of parental alienating behaviors and their impact.” Children and Youth Services Review, 106. DOI: 10.1016/j.childyouth.2019.104471. Psychological and economic impacts: Harman, J.J., Kruk, E., & Hines, D.A. (2018). “Parental alienating behaviors: An unacknowledged form of family violence.” Psychological Bulletin, 144(12), 1275–1299. Intergenerational transmission: Holt, S. et al. (2022). “The impact of parental alienating behaviors on the mental health of adults alienated in childhood.” PMC9026878. Long-term child outcomes: Maturana et al. (2018) via Current Psychology, Springer (DOI: 10.1007/s12144-021-02537-2). Court prevalence data: Bala, Hunt & McCarney (2010), cited in Joshi Attorneys review of parental alienation incidence. Gardner follow-up findings: Gardner, R.A. (2001), Therapeutic Interventions for Children with Parental Alienation Syndrome.
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