Parental Alienation Legislation Tracker
This page is general information about pending legislation, not legal advice. Bills change quickly. For how a law applies to a specific case, consult an attorney licensed in that state.
A small but growing set of US bills would, for the first time, write parental alienation into statute and tell family courts how to handle it. This page tracks the bills that can directly change how parental alienation is defined, proven, weighed, or remedied, and it is updated on the 15th of each month as those bills move.
Estrangement caused by genuine abuse is not parental alienation. Several of the bills below include carve-outs meant to protect a parent who is legitimately shielding a child from harm. Tracking a bill here is not a claim that alienation explains any particular family’s situation.
What counts as a tracked bill
A bill earns its own page here only if, enacted, it would do at least one of these: define parental alienation in statute, require courts to consider it in custody decisions, set evidence or procedure rules specific to alienation claims, attach remedies to an alienation finding, or restrict how alienation theory is used. Symbolic measures, advocacy petitions with no filed bill, interim study work, and bills that cannot be confirmed on an official source are listed on the watch list instead, not given a page.
Bills being tracked
| Bill | State | What it would do | Status (June 2026) | |—|—|—|—| | HB1323 | New Hampshire | First state law to define parental alienation; requires courts to weigh it; includes a good-faith protective-parent carve-out | Passed both chambers; would take effect Jan 1, 2027 if enacted | | H.4651 | South Carolina | Makes a parent found to have alienated reimburse the other parent’s legal and therapy costs | In committee (House Judiciary) | | HB2124 | Arizona | Requires on-record court findings on every alienation claim | In committee (House Judiciary) | | HB693 | Ohio | Defines parental alienation in statute, inside a broader contested bill | In committee (House Judiciary) | | HB5176 | Illinois | Defines parental alienation, “safe parent,” and “high conflict,” tying alienation to harm of a safe parent with broad abuse carve-outs | In committee (House Rules) | | H.4017 | Massachusetts | Would make courts recognize alienation as psychological child abuse, with criteria, training, remedies, and state programs (no explicit abuse carve-out) | Sent to study March 2026 (shelved for the session) |
Two directions in the law
Bills in this area do not all push the same way, and an honest tracker has to show both directions.
One group treats parental alienation as serious harm to a child and gives courts more tools to respond. New Hampshire’s HB1323 would make courts weigh it. South Carolina’s H.4651 would shift the resulting costs onto a parent found responsible. Ohio’s HB693 and Arizona’s HB2124 would define it or require findings. Massachusetts H.4017 goes furthest of all, declaring alienation a form of psychological child abuse that courts must recognize, with criteria, training, remedies, and state programs. H.4017 is also the clearest case of the tension in this group: its text contains no explicit carve-out for a parent acting in good faith to protect a child, which is exactly what critics worry about.
A second group moves the other way. These bills, and the advocates behind them, worry that alienation theory can be used to discredit a parent or child who is reporting real abuse, especially in domestic-violence cases. New York is one example: an earlier bill there, S7425A from the 2021-2022 session, sought to limit how courts rely on “parental alienation” and “friendly parent” concepts and to scrutinize court-ordered reunification programs where abuse is alleged. Illinois HB5176 is another, and a more recent one: it does define parental alienation, but only as conduct aimed at a “safe parent,” and it writes abuse carve-outs into each of its definitions so that a protective parent or a child reacting to abuse is not labeled alienating or high conflict. That concern also explains why several of the pro-recognition bills, including New Hampshire’s, now include a written carve-out for a parent acting in good faith to protect a child.
Both directions share a real problem: telling engineered alienation apart from a child’s justified estrangement from a parent who harmed them. The law is still working out how to do that, which is why this page reports what each bill says rather than taking a side.
Watch list
These came up in research but do not currently qualify for their own page. They are re-checked each month. Several are included because secondary roundups list them as active or as parental-alienation bills, and the note records what the official source actually shows.
- Massachusetts H.3338, a Parental Alienation Awareness Day is symbolic only and does not meet the direct-impact bar.
- New York S512 (2025-2026) is listed in some practitioner roundups as a parental-alienation bill. The official text shows it is about the timing of custody and visitation orders (requiring determinations within set deadlines), with no parental-alienation provisions. It is therefore not tracked here as an alienation bill. New York’s actual alienation-relevant history sits in the restrictive line described above (S7425A).
- Florida (adding alienation to the child-abuse definition) circulates in advocacy petitions that reference amending sections 39.01 and 61.13, but no numbered Florida bill has been filed for the 2026 session; the language traces to an earlier proposal that died in committee. It stays on the watch list as advocacy, not legislation, until a bill is actually filed.
- Federal: a bill to revise Adoption and Safe Families Act termination timelines (reintroduced in Congress in 2024, not enacted) would lengthen the time before states must move to terminate parental rights. It does not mention parental alienation. It matters only indirectly, by giving more time for reunification in high-conflict cases, so it is logged here as context rather than as an alienation bill.
- Montana interim study by the Law and Justice Committee (2023-2024) produced a research summary on whether and how to define parental alienation in statute, sometimes discussed alongside a “Brody’s Law” proposal. This is pre-bill study work, not a filed statute.
- North Dakota Child Custody Review Task Force heard testimony urging the state to address parental alienation. Agenda-setting, not yet a bill.
A note on searching for these bills
Most bills that touch alienation do not use the words “parental alienation” in their titles. The same conduct shows up under “child psychological abuse,” “coercive control,” “interference with custody or parenting time,” “high-conflict custody,” and “equal parenting.” A search for “parental alienation” alone will miss many of them, which is one reason roundups disagree about what is active.
How to read a bill page
Each page opens with a status line and a short, plain-language answer, explains what the bill would do and why it matters for parental alienation, then keeps a dated Updates log so the whole arc of the bill is visible at a glance. The newest update is always at the top.
Monitoring between updates
Status here is verified against official state legislature pages. Between monthly checks, LegiScan lets anyone search “parental alienation” by state and follow status changes directly. Because state calendars move quickly, treat any status line as a snapshot and confirm the current step on the official bill page before relying on it.
If you are struggling right now
- 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline: call or text 988
- Childhelp National Child Abuse Hotline: 1-800-422-4453
- NAMI HelpLine: 1-800-950-6264
Author: Alex Buckles (PAC Founder) Last reviewed: June 7, 2026 • Updated monthly on the 15th
