What is parental alienation? It is the deliberate or systematic turning of a child against one of their parents by the other. It is the weaponisation of a child. It is domestic abuse. The Family Justice Council has stated it should be treated as such — because it is an expression of coercive control, and it appears directly on the Power and Control Wheel as using the children.
It is not a disagreement between two parents who don’t get along. It is a pattern — sustained, calculated, and devastating — in which one parent uses the child as a means of maintaining power over the other. The child is not the target. The child is the weapon. And the targeted parent is left watching helplessly as the relationship they built with their child is dismantled piece by piece.
What are the signs of parental alienation?
This is one of the most common things people search for — and it matters, because recognising what is happening is the first step. The signs show up in the child’s behaviour, in the other parent’s behaviour, and in the overall pattern of contact.
In the child, you may see a sudden and unexplained rejection of a parent they previously had a normal or close relationship with. The language they use often doesn’t belong to them — it sounds borrowed, adult, rehearsed. They may express hatred or fear without being able to explain why, or give reasons that don’t match anything that actually happened. They take the alienating parent’s side without guilt or conflict. They treat one parent as entirely good and the other as entirely bad.
In the alienating parent, the signs are a pattern of behaviours: blocking or disrupting contact, calling or messaging the child during the other parent’s time, making false allegations, involving the child in adult conflict, presenting themselves as the victim, and systematically dismantling the child’s image of the other parent — through comments, reactions, and the emotional environment they create at home.
Behind those behaviours is a wider pattern of narcissistic and coercive control. Parental alienation does not happen in isolation.
Is parental alienation illegal in the UK?
The family courts in England and Wales have moved away from the term parental alienation because it is contested. What they do recognise — and what the Serious Crime Act 2015 already covers — are the specific, provable behaviours that make up this form of abuse: isolation, coercive control, false allegations, and the weaponisation of children.
So the short answer is: the label isn’t recognised, but the behaviours are. Focusing on the behaviours — not the term — is what opens up legal routes and gets results. The Power and Control Wheel maps every one of those behaviours, and that framework is something CAFCASS and the courts do work with.
In October 2025, the UK Government announced the repeal of the presumption of parental involvement from the Children Act 1989. For targeted parents who are not abusive and are being kept from their children by a controlling ex-partner, this is a painful development. The system is moving further away from you, not towards you. Knowing that does not make it better. But it does make clear why understanding the legal landscape — and getting the right support — matters.
The science is not as contested as it looks
Parental alienation has been politically contested. The science is less so. Professor Ben Hine of the University of West London and Professor Jennifer Harman of Colorado State University are among the leading researchers who have documented alienating behaviours as a recognised form of family violence. When applied to the 3.8 million children in the UK living in separated families, even conservative figures represent over 100,000 children who may be alienated from a parent.
Richard Gardner coined the term Parental Alienation Syndrome in the 1980s. The syndrome framing was dropped in the 1990s — not because the phenomenon wasn’t real, but because ‘syndrome’ implied a diagnosable condition in the child. What Gardner was observing is a genuine trauma response — the nervous system reacting to sustained emotional manipulation, loyalty conflicts, and the rupture of a primary attachment. Researchers including Amy Baker, William Bernet, and Dr Craig Childress have continued developing the framework.
This does not only happen to fathers
There is a widespread assumption that parental alienation is something that happens to fathers. Research using nationally representative samples has found no statistically significant gender difference in who becomes a targeted parent. When one parent has a narcissistic or controlling pathology, the targeting does not follow gender lines. It follows the logic of power and control. Mothers are targeted. Fathers are targeted. What they share is that they have left — or tried to leave — a relationship with someone who cannot tolerate losing control.
Fathers are unsupported. Mothers are unseen. Both are told, in different ways, that what is happening to them isn’t really happening.
The full weight of what it brings
Parental alienation does not arrive alone. It arrives with financial abuse, destroyed credit, homelessness. False accusations. Safeguarding reports. Non-molestation orders. A new person in the family — not always a safe one. Your children’s grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins — an entire side of a family, gone. Court orders being breached — late drop-offs, disrupted contact, phone calls during your time that create guilt or obligation in the child. You are being set up to fail at every turn, and the mechanism is disguised as circumstance.
A peer-reviewed study published in The Canadian Journal of Psychiatry found that losing a child through custody proceedings is associated with significantly worse mental health outcomes than experiencing the death of a child. The grief has no name, no ritual, no public acknowledgement. Your child is alive. You cannot mourn them. You cannot stop hoping. And the hope itself becomes another form of pain.
What is happening to your child
Your child’s primary attachment system has been ruptured. They are carrying an Adverse Childhood Experience that will not show up clearly in any tick-box assessment. They may appear fine — achieving, well-behaved, apparently functional. But something is happening inside that even they cannot articulate.
These children grow up. Some eventually see it — and the seeing comes with enormous loss, grief, and the agonising recognition of what was done to them and to the parent they were turned against. Without understanding, the pattern repeats across generations. It continues until someone in the family names it clearly and the cycle is broken.
Co-parenting with a narcissist
If your ex has a narcissistic pattern, co-parenting in the traditional sense is not possible. The concept of co-parenting assumes two people who can put the child’s needs above their own. That assumption doesn’t hold where one parent is using the child as an extension of their control. What is sometimes called co-parenting with a narcissist is, in practice, managing contact with someone who is actively working against you and using the child to do it.
That does not mean there is nothing you can do. It means the approach has to be different — boundaried, documented, focused on the child’s wellbeing rather than on achieving cooperation that isn’t coming.
Putting your oxygen mask on first
You cannot help your child from a position of collapse. The first and most important thing — as counterintuitive as it feels — is to stabilise yourself. To understand what has happened to you and what it has done to your nervous system. To find solid ground again, not for your sake alone, but because the most powerful thing you can offer your child — now, and when the time comes — is a parent who knows who they are and hasn’t been destroyed by what was done to them.
If you are a targeted parent and you don’t know where to start, start here. You don’t have to have it together. You just have to take one step.
If you are in crisis, Samaritans are available 24 hours a day on 116 123.
Kevin R Webb (MEd.L, BEd., BA Fd., QTS)
Somatic Trauma Informed Narcissistic Abuse Coach
