This Mother’s Day, some mothers are sitting in silence, having lost their children to a campaign they didn’t run. Others are being celebrated by children they’ve turned into weapons. The courts built both outcomes and answer for neither.
By Michael Phillips | Father & Co.
The brunch reservations are made. The cards were signed. The flowers arrived on time. None of it touches what is actually happening in a quiet but significant number of households across this country — where a parent who has been systematically erased from their child’s life sits with a phone that will not ring, or worse, answers it to a voice full of someone else’s accusations delivered in their own child’s voice.
Parental alienation has a well-documented early stage: the withheld visits, the hostile handoffs, the child coming home from the other parent’s house sullen and strange. It has a middle stage that family courts see and mostly ignore: the child starting to repeat phrases that don’t belong to a child, making adult allegations, refusing contact in terms that sound coached. What receives almost no sustained public attention is where that process ends.
The late stage looks like this: a teenager or young adult who has fully absorbed the alienating parent’s narrative as their own identity. Who tells others — family, friends, teachers, social media followers — that the targeted parent abandoned them, abused them, never loved them, gave up. Who, when the targeted parent finally reaches them, meets them not with ambivalence or distance but with something closer to hatred. Who has become, without fully understanding it, the instrument of a campaign they were recruited into as a child.
Every attempt at contact becomes new evidence of harassment. Every expression of love or grief gets reframed as manipulation. The system that was supposed to protect the relationship instead built the architecture of its destruction — and then held the targeted parent responsible for the rubble.
The parents in this position share a common experience that compounds the original loss: the harder they try, the worse it gets. Reaching out is weaponized. Persistence gets labeled as obsession. Grief gets labeled as instability. The child has been given, over the years, a coherent story in which the targeted parent’s every action confirms the alienating parent’s narrative. There is no move available that does not fit the frame.
I spoke with several parents currently living in this late stage. What follows is drawn from those conversations. In every case, the pattern is consistent enough that the details speak for themselves.
| Case Pattern — Late-Stage Contact |
|---|
| Jeff Reichert describes rare phone contact that arrives already adversarial — a call that begins not with his child’s voice but with a list of grievances that have been assembled over years, delivered with the confidence of someone who has rehearsed them. The accusations are not his child’s memories. They are someone else’s interpretation of events his child was too young to have formed independent conclusions about. |
| Case Pattern — The Public Smear |
|---|
| Brenna Gano learned what her child was saying about her not from her child, but from others — emails and messages from people in her child’s orbit relaying characterizations that bore no relationship to her actual conduct. Her child had become a source of reputational damage to her in communities where she had no ability to respond, no context to offer, no relationship with the people receiving the message. The alienation had gone public. |
| Case Pattern — State-Enforced Separation |
|---|
| Rhonda Reyna and Marc Fishman each describe a wall built not just by the other parent but by the court system itself. False protective orders — obtained without the evidentiary basis that any other legal proceeding would require — put police between them and their children. A phone call became legally impossible, then legally possible again, and then simply never came. The children are old enough now to reach out on their own. They don’t. What looks from the outside like a child’s choice is the residue of years of litigation in which the court kept inserting itself into the relationship until the relationship could no longer survive the interference. The protective order is the most effective tool in the alienating parent’s arsenal precisely because it converts a custody dispute into a law enforcement matter. The targeted parent is not just losing contact — they are, in the record, a person the state deemed dangerous. That designation outlasts the order itself. The child absorbed it. The court created it on someone else’s application and moved on. |
In each of these cases, the family court system had years of opportunity to intervene. In each case, it did not — or worse, it did intervene, and the intervention accelerated the outcome. The custody evaluators who validated the alienating parent’s framing. The guardians ad litem who treated the child’s stated preferences as independently formed rather than as data points requiring interrogation. The judges who read the targeted parent’s increasingly desperate attempts to maintain the relationship as evidence of instability rather than as the predictable response of a parent watching their child disappear in real time.
The system did not merely fail to stop this. In several of these cases, the system provided the architecture. A court order that reduced contact gave the alienating parent time and space to accelerate the process. A custody evaluator’s report that credited the child’s stated preferences — without examining how those preferences formed — handed the alienating parent a court-validated document to use. The courts moved on. The damage compounded on its own schedule.
The Mother’s Day framing matters because it cuts in two directions simultaneously, and both directions are worth holding at once.
Some of the targeted parents in these late-stage cases are mothers. Parental alienation is not a gendered phenomenon in its mechanics — it follows the contours of whoever holds more power in the post-separation dynamic, which is shaped by finances, legal access, and the degree to which the court system tilts. Rhonda Reyna is a mother. Brenna Gano is a mother. They will spend this Sunday the same way Jeff Reichert and Marc Fishman will spend it: without their children, having not chosen that outcome, having done everything available to them to prevent it.
The culture’s observance of Mother’s Day carries an implicit frame: that mothers who do not have their children must have done something to deserve it. That frame is part of what makes this form of abuse so effective, and so invisible. The alienating parent — who may themselves be the mother being celebrated today — benefits from a cultural presumption that motherhood is inherently protective and that the child’s rejection of the other parent must therefore reflect something real. Courts absorb that presumption. Evaluators absorb it. The child is handed it as context for interpreting everything they are told.
The institution of motherhood gets weaponized in both directions simultaneously — as cover for the abuse, and as explanation for why the targeted parent must have earned what they received.
Some of what these parents are experiencing is anticipatory grief — watching a process begin that they can already see the end of, without the ability to stop it. I have seen this from a proximity that makes the pattern impossible to ignore. A child is young. The early moves are already visible: the reframing of ordinary events, the subtle repositioning of who is reliable and who is not, the beginning of a narrative that, if left uninterrupted, will take years to fully install. The courts have seen none of this. The courts, if history is any guide, will see very little of it until the damage is done and then call the outcome complicated.
| I have covered this beat from the outside and from inside it simultaneously. My son is seven years old. I have not had my court-ordered visitation with him since January 2024. That is not a contested assertion — it is a date. The process I am describing in this piece did not spare my family because I knew how to document it. My son’s mother, Christina Avgerinos, is named in prior reporting on this publication. The court proceedings that produced this outcome are part of the public record. I am not a detached observer of what late-stage parental alienation produces. I am watching the middle stage run in real time, in a Montgomery County courtroom, with no indication that the system understands or intends to interrupt what it is building. The parents I spoke with for this piece are not cautionary tales. They are outcome data — the documented endpoint of a process that family courts across this country are currently permitting to run, case by case, without interruption. Their children do not yet know what was done to them. Some may never know. The courts that enabled it have long since moved on to other cases. |
There is a literature on this. Parental alienation syndrome was first formally described in the 1980s and has since been refined, debated, and documented across decades of peer-reviewed research. The debate in academic circles is largely about nomenclature and diagnostic precision. The phenomenon itself — the systematic destruction of a child’s relationship with a targeted parent, and the long-term psychological damage to the child — is not seriously disputed in the literature. It is disputed, routinely, in family courtrooms, where the alienating parent’s attorneys have learned to characterize the targeted parent’s attempts to document the process as themselves evidence of instability.
What the research also documents is the irreversibility problem. Interventions that might have interrupted the process in the early or middle stages become dramatically less effective as the child ages and the narrative calcifies into identity. The teenager who has organized their self-concept around the story of the absent or abusive parent is not a neutral observer who can be corrected with new information. They are a person who has built themselves around a set of beliefs, and revising those beliefs requires revising themselves. That is work that some do, eventually, as adults. Many do not.
The courts that declined to act when action was possible will not be present for that reckoning. They have no mechanism for looking back. There is no docket entry for “we contributed to this outcome.” The targeted parent carries the accountability that the system shed.
This Mother’s Day, some parents will receive that in silence. Others will receive it in a phone call that starts with someone else’s words in their child’s voice. The flowers, wherever they are going, do not know any of this. The courts do. That is the problem.
Sources & Background
Case accounts drawn from direct conversations with Jeff Reichert, Rhonda Reyna, Brenna Gano, and Marc Fishman, each currently navigating late-stage parental alienation. Research background draws on Gardner, R.A. (1985), “Recent Trends in Divorce and Custody Litigation,” Academy Forum; Harman, J.J., Kruk, E. & Hines, D.A. (2018), “Parental Alienating Behaviors: An Unacknowledged Form of Family Violence,” Psychological Bulletin; Baker, A.J.L. & Ben-Ami, N. (2011), “To Turn a Child Against a Parent Is to Turn a Child Against Himself,” Journal of Divorce & Remarriage; and Meier, J.S. (2020), “U.S. Child Custody Outcomes in Cases Involving Parental Alienation and Abuse Allegations,” Journal of Social Welfare and Family Law (GWU Law). Court system observations reflect the documented case patterns above and the broader accountability literature on family court evaluator bias.
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