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Courts have been dealing with alienating behaviors in high conflict family litigation for hundreds of years. Experts in the behavioral sciences have been writing about mothers and fathers manipulating their children to disparage the other parent for more than seventy years. But in the last two decades some social scientists and legal professionals have questioned the legitimacy of parental alienation as a concept and its admissibility in child abuse and child custody litigation. This study was designed to examine the extent to which courts in the United States have found the concept of parental alienation material, probative, relevant and admissible. Thirty‐four years of cases were found with a WESTLAW query and analyzed. Cases were selected for study only if the record reflected that a judge or an independent expert found the concept of parental alienation to be of value in the litigation. Results illustrate increasing awareness of the concept and document its admissibility in every one of the United States. The numbers, sex of the alienating parent and prevalence of significant custody changes are discussed. Limitations inherent in this form of quantitative analysis are also discussed with recommendations for future research.

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Theory and research have described developmental processes leading to damaged parent-child relationships, such as those that occur during a divorce. However, scholars dispute the scientific status of the literature on children who form unhealthy alliances with one parent against the other-termed parental alienation (PA). This comprehensive literature review tests competing descriptions of the PA literature. Accessing four electronic databases, we identified 213 documents with empirical data on PA published in 10 languages through December 2020. The results confirmed that the current state of PA scholarship meets three criteria of a maturing field of scientific inquiry: an expanding literature, a shift toward quantitative studies, and a growing body of research that tests theory-generated hypotheses. Nearly 40% of the PA literature has been published since 2016, establishing that PA research has moved beyond an early stage of scientific development and has produced a scientifically trustworthy knowledge base. This literature review documents the value of multiple research methodologies to this knowledge base. In addition, the growing body of research described in this review enhances our understanding of the association between interparental conflict and the breakdown of parent-child relationships in families where conflict differentially affects children's relationship with and behavior toward each parent.

We tested a set of findings reported by Meier et al. (2019) related to the use of parental alienation as a legal defense in cases in which there are allegations of domestic violence and child abuse. A total of 967 appellate reports in which PA was found or alleged were sequentially selected from a legal database search. Nineteen research assistants blind to the study's hypotheses coded the reports for the variables used to test six preregistered hypotheses using a series of logistic and linear regression models. We failed to find any support for the conclusions made by Meier et al. Parents found (vs. alleged) to have alienated their children, regardless of their gender, had greater odds of losing parenting time, losing custody of their children, and losing their case. These findings held even when the accusing parent had been found to have been abusive. Losses or decreases in custody were not found when the (alleged) alienated parent was found to have been abusive. Results indicate that the majority of courts carefully weigh allegations of all forms of family violence in their determinations about the best interests of children. These findings, along with several others, raise concerns that the methodological, analytical, and statistical problems we detail about Meier's report that make her conclusions untrustworthy. Discussion focuses on the importance of using open science practices for transparent and rigorous empirical testing of hypotheses and the dangers of misusing scientific findings to mislead influential professionals who affect the well-being of millions of families.