Calling Out Bad Research on Parental Alienation

August 20, 2021

National Parents Organization is proud to collaborate with 17 other organizations in the U.S. and abroad to challenge some very bad research on parental alienation that is, unfortunately, being cited in efforts to question the reality of parental alienation. The flawed research in question was paid for by your tax dollars!

In 2015 Joan Meier, Professor of Clinical Law at George Washington Law School, and four collaborators, received a grant of more than $500,000 from the National Institute of Justice, which is part of the Department of Justice, to do research premised on the presumption that parental alienation is a “pseudo-scientific theory” that is used to suggest that “when mothers allege that a child is not safe with the father, they are doing so illegitimately, to alienate the child from the father.”

Those familiar with parental alienation and aware of the more than 1,000 books, book chapters, and peer-reviewed articles on the topic, know that parental alienation is a well-researched phenomenon that is not gender-based in the way that Meier suggests. This research was done, in fact, by highly respected scientists, including psychologists and psychiatrists.  Many know, as well, from painful personal experience how damaging parental alienation can be to the children and targeted parents—fathers and mothers—who are the victims of it.

It’s not surprising that research that begins with such flawed assumptions and is clearly designed from the outset to come to a preconceived result in fact arrives precisely where it aimed to arrive. Charges of parental alienation are concluded by Meier and company to be merely tools used by abusive fathers to wrest control of children from the mothers who are trying to protect them. Courts should not listen to Guardians ad Litem or custody evaluators about parental alienation, the authors argue, because these professionals “tend to benefit fathers accused of abuse.”

The half-million dollar research is, though, horribly flawed. In an important paper, ““Allegations of Family Violence in Court: How Parental Alienation Affects Judicial Outcomes,” Professor Jennifer Harman and Dr. Demosthenes Lorandos identify “at least 30 conceptual and methodological problems with the design and analyses of the [Meier et al., 2019] study that make the results and the conclusions drawn dubious at best.”

Nevertheless, Meier’s flawed research is being used in the U.S. and other countries to try to undermine the research on parental alienation and to bar courts for arriving at findings that a parent has, without grounds, alienated a child from the other parent.

NPO has joined with many other organizations here and abroad to counteract the harm that is being done by Meier’s work and those who are using it to achieve their ends. This Parental Alienation Consortium has written a detailed letter to Dr. Jennifer Scherer, Acting Director of the National Institute of Justice challenging the research done by Meier and her colleagues and calling for the NIJ to mitigate the damage caused by this flawed research. (You can read the letter here[1] .)

NPO will continue to work with its partners in the Parental Alienation Consortium to push back against flawed, agenda-driven research that is harmful to children and their parents.