Baker's 17 Strategies of Parental Alienation: The Complete Research Guide

Love Over Exile is a plain-language research archive on parental alienation, written by Malcolm Smith — an alienated parent and author of the forthcoming book Love Over Exile — for non-specialist readers (other alienated parents, family members, therapists, lawyers) who want to understand the evidence base without a psychology degree or a journal subscription. This page is one entry in that archive.

What the Researchers Asked

What does an alienating parent actually do?

It sounds like a question someone should have answered fifty years ago, but for most of the twentieth century parental alienation was discussed in terms of symptoms in the child, not behaviours of the parent. Richard Gardner’s 1985 Parental Alienation Syndrome listed eight things to look for in the child — a campaign of denigration, weak rationalisations, lack of ambivalence, the independent-thinker phenomenon, reflexive support, absence of guilt, borrowed scenarios, spread to extended family. What was missing was a parallel catalogue of what the alienating parent was doing to produce those symptoms.

Amy Baker’s contribution, beginning with her 2005 American Journal of Family Therapy paper and culminating in her 2007 W. W. Norton book Adult Children of Parental Alienation Syndrome, was to invert the unit of observation. Instead of asking what does an alienated child look like?, she asked what did the alienating parent actually do, in the child’s recollection, day after day, year after year?

She did it by interviewing forty adults — twenty-five women, fifteen men, ages nineteen to sixty-seven — who self-identified as having been alienated from a parent during their childhood. The interviews ran roughly an hour each, were audio-recorded and transcribed verbatim, and were content-analysed for recurring patterns. What emerged was not a list of clinical guesses. It was a catalogue of seventeen specific behaviours that the participants — independently of one another — had described.

The 2011 follow-up paper with Jaclyn Chambers in Journal of Divorce & Remarriage turned the typology into a measurable instrument. The 2007 book gave the field its language; the 2011 paper gave the field a research tool.

Behind those narrow research questions sat a broader reframing. If parental alienation is a pattern of behaviours, not a syndrome of symptoms, then it can be observed, recorded, measured, and replicated. That is a different epistemological footing — and it is the footing the post-2010 parental-alienation research literature has stood on.

What They Did — Methods in Plain English

The Baker framework rests on three sources, each contributing a different piece of the picture.

The seventeen strategies were not invented in 2007 out of thin air. They emerged from a sequence of work that ran from 2005 to 2011, with each stage adding what the previous stage could not.

Source	Year & venue	Sample	Method	Primary contribution
Baker (2005)	American Journal of Family Therapy 33(4):289-302	N=38 adults, self-identified as alienated in childhood	Semi-structured interviews, content analysis	The seven impact themes: low self-esteem, depression, substance abuse, lack of trust, alienation from one’s own children, divorce, and other
Baker (2007)	Adult Children of Parental Alienation Syndrome (Norton, book)	N=40 (same dataset + 2 added cases)	Same interviews, expanded thematic exposition	The seventeen strategies typology + three patterns of alienator personality + recovery themes
Baker & Chambers (2011)	Journal of Divorce & Remarriage 52(1):55-76	N≈105 college / graduate students (general population, not pre-screened)	Cross-sectional self-report; Baker Strategies Questionnaire (BSQ), 19 items, 5-point Likert	A measurable instrument for the strategies; first quantitative prevalence in a non-clinical sample (80% reporting some exposure)

The 2007 book is the centre of gravity for the seventeen strategies. The 2005 paper introduced the impact side — what alienation does to people. The 2007 book added the strategies side — what alienating parents do. The 2011 paper closed the circle by giving the strategies a measurable form.

Recruitment for the qualitative work was self-selected, via internet posting and word-of-mouth. Interview participants identified themselves as having been alienated in childhood, agreed to a one-hour semi-structured interview, and were audio-recorded and transcribed verbatim. The strategy list was content-analysed bottom-up: each transcript was coded for recurring behaviour patterns; the seventeen strategies are the categories that emerged with sufficient frequency across participants to constitute a stable pattern.

The 2011 quantitative work drew a different sample for a different purpose. About 105 undergraduate and graduate students at a single US university completed the Baker Strategies Questionnaire — the BSQ — a nineteen-item instrument covering the seventeen strategies plus two general items, scored on a 5-point Likert scale of frequency of childhood exposure. The result was an empirical handle on prevalence in a general young-adult sample: 80% of the students reported some childhood exposure to alienation behaviours, with significantly higher rates among children of divorced parents.

The 34-mothers-to-6-fathers distribution in the 2007 book is recruitment artefact, not population estimate. Baker is explicit on this point — the gendered breakdown reflects who responded to her recruitment, not a generalisable statistic. The article and the practitioner literature that followed should not — and Baker herself does not — infer “alienating parents are usually mothers” from the qualitative sample. For population-level gender data, the reference is the separate Harman, Matthewson & Baker (2019) paper in Journal of Family Violence, which finds both mothers and fathers engage in alienating behaviours with different stylistic emphasis.

The 2011 paper is conservative about what the BSQ can and cannot do. It is a research instrument; its psychometric portfolio has been added to over the subsequent decade — Cronbach’s α=0.93 in Verhaar et al. (2022), validation in Italian samples up to N=470 by Verrocchio and colleagues (2014-2018), and confirmation in Baker & Eichler (2014, N=157 US college students). It is not a forensic test; it cannot diagnose alienation in a custody case. It can — and has — produced reliable research on what the seventeen strategies look like at scale.

The seventeen strategies, grouped by Baker’s five categories

The figure below is the seventeen strategies as Baker organises them in Adult Children of Parental Alienation Syndrome and the popular companion Beyond the High Road — five canonical categories, with each strategy named in Baker’s own wording. Plain-language reorganisations into three or six broader buckets exist (this site’s own overview page groups them into three categories for readability) — the five-category structure shown here is the research-grade framing.

What They Found — The Five Categories of Alienating Behaviour

Walking through the five categories in turn — naming the strategies inside each, and what each one actually looks like in a household — is the closest a written summary can get to what Baker’s interviewees described.

1. Poisonous messages — the targeted parent is unloving, unsafe, unavailable

The first category is the one most readers recognise on first reading. It is the running narrative the alienating parent constructs about the targeted parent — repeated, amplified, and filtered into the child’s daily life until the child internalises it as truth.

Strategy 1 — Badmouthing. The most explicit form: direct verbal denigration of the targeted parent in front of the child. Sometimes overt (“Your father is a liar”), sometimes coded (“We all know what your father is like”). Often delivered in passing, in moments the alienating parent will later deny.

Strategy 6 — Telling the child the targeted parent does not love them. The deepest cut. The child is told — in words, by implication, or by selective interpretation of the targeted parent’s actions — that the targeted parent does not actually want them.

A missed phone call becomes “see, he doesn’t care”; a short visit becomes “he was glad to be rid of you”. The child’s natural attachment is reinterpreted as foolish or unrequited.

Strategy 8 — Creating the impression that the targeted parent is dangerous. Manufactured fear. The targeted parent’s home, behaviour, partner, or simply presence is recast as threatening. This sits at the most consequential end of the category — it is also the strategy most likely to bleed into formal allegations and family-court proceedings.

A fourth recurring pattern in this category — distorting shared family history — is treated less as a numbered strategy and more as the connective tissue across the others. Memories the child has of warmth with the targeted parent are rewritten (“you only think you remember that”); shared events are reframed; the past is edited to support the new narrative.

2. Limiting contact and communication

The second category is structural. Where category 1 controls what the child thinks about the targeted parent, category 2 controls how much of the targeted parent the child can actually have.

Strategy 2 — Limiting contact. Direct reduction of in-person time: cancelled visits, delayed handovers, last-minute conflicts that displace planned contact, geographic moves that make contact impractical. Each individual instance can be explained away. The pattern across months is the indicator.

Strategy 3 — Interfering with communication. Phone calls intercepted, texts deleted, letters not delivered, video calls “not working” with suspicious frequency. The targeted parent finds themselves trying to maintain a relationship through a channel the alienating parent controls.

Strategy 4 — Interfering with symbolic communication. Photographs of the targeted parent removed from the child’s bedroom; gifts thrown out; mementos labelled “rubbish”; the targeted parent’s name discouraged or forbidden in the home. The parent’s symbolic presence — the trace they leave even when not physically there — is removed alongside the physical contact.

The combination is what does the work. A child can endure missed visits if the symbolic presence is preserved; a child can endure a removed photograph if contact remains regular. The simultaneous compression of physical, verbal, and symbolic contact channels is what makes the category cumulative.

3. Erasing and replacing

The third category goes further than reducing the targeted parent’s presence — it actively replaces them.

Strategy 5 — Withdrawal of love. When the child shows affection for the targeted parent, the alienating parent responds with coldness, disapproval, or punishment. The child learns, over time, that loving the targeted parent costs them their primary attachment relationship.

Strategy 13 — Referring to the targeted parent by first name. A small intervention with a structural effect. Calling “Dad” by his first name in front of the child gradually re-positions him as one adult among many, not a parent.

Strategy 14 — Referring to a stepparent as “Mom” or “Dad”. The replacement is made literal. The stepparent — sometimes consciously, sometimes not — is moved into the linguistic slot the targeted parent used to hold.

Strategy 15 — Withholding medical and academic information. The targeted parent is removed from the institutional record of the child’s life. School notifications, doctor’s appointments, parents’ evenings, sports fixtures — the targeted parent is not informed; emergency contact is the alienating parent only; the targeted parent’s name is taken off documents.

Strategy 16 — Changing the child’s name. The most overt form: the child’s surname is changed to the alienating parent’s, or to a stepparent’s, removing the linguistic association with the targeted parent. In jurisdictions where this requires the targeted parent’s consent, it becomes a contested point; in jurisdictions where it does not, it is sometimes done unilaterally.

This category is where readers most often recognise their own situation in retrospect. The strategies are individually bureaucratic — a name on a form, a misdirected school notification — and cumulatively erasive.

4. Encouraging the child to betray the targeted parent’s trust

The fourth category is the most psychologically corrosive for the child. It recruits the child as an active participant in the alienation, eroding their relationship with both parents at once — by aligning them with the alienating parent against the targeted parent, while training them in the disloyalty patterns that will damage their future attachments.

Strategy 9 — Confiding inappropriately. The alienating parent shares with the child information the child should not be carrying — adult conflicts, financial distress, the targeted parent’s sexual history, court proceedings. The child becomes a confidant rather than a child; the targeted parent becomes the subject of the conversation, not a co-parent.

Strategy 11 — Asking the child to spy. The child is asked to report on the targeted parent’s home, partner, finances, or behaviour. The visit is structured around extraction of information. The child learns that loyalty to the alienating parent requires surveillance of the targeted parent.

Strategy 12 — Asking the child to keep secrets from the targeted parent. Sometimes about innocuous matters, sometimes about substantive ones. The pattern is what counts. A child who is taught to hold secrets from one parent is being taught that the parent-child relationship has limits the alienating parent sets — and that loyalty operates as a one-directional flow.

The damage in this category is not only to the targeted parent’s relationship with the child. It is to the child’s capacity to hold honest, mutual relationships with anyone in adulthood — a finding the outcome literature (Ben-Ami & Baker 2012; Verrocchio et al. 2014-2018; Verhaar et al. 2022) repeatedly confirms.

5. Undermining the targeted parent’s authority

The fifth category is the most direct attack on the targeted parent’s role. It dismantles their parental status, both in the child’s eyes and in the institutional context the family operates inside.

Strategy 7 — Forcing the child to choose. Explicit or implicit demands that the child pick between the two parents. “If you go to your father this weekend, don’t bother coming back.” “If you call your mother, you don’t love me.” A child placed in this position cannot win — and the alienating parent’s position is structurally stronger because they are the gatekeeper of the child’s primary residence.

Strategy 10 — Forcing the child to reject the targeted parent. A more advanced version of strategy 7. The child is required to actively refuse contact, refuse gifts, refuse phone calls, refuse a relationship — and is rewarded for the rejection.

Strategy 17 — Cultivating dependency, undermining authority. Baker treats this as a single combined strategy in Beyond the High Road. The alienating parent positions themselves as the child’s only reliable source of care, while simultaneously framing the targeted parent as incompetent, unsafe, or absent. The targeted parent’s reasonable parenting decisions — discipline, rules, expectations — are openly contradicted or ridiculed by the alienating parent in the child’s presence. The targeted parent loses the authority to parent.

This last category is what produces the picture the family courts most often see — a child who refuses contact, says they hate the targeted parent, articulates loyalty to the alienating parent in adult-sounding language, and presents as if their resistance was their own decision. Bernet & Greenhill’s Five-Factor Model takes this presentation as the diagnostic threshold for full parental alienation. Baker’s framework explains how the presentation was produced.

Why This Matters

Baker’s framework matters because it shifted parental alienation from a clinician’s category to an empirical research object.

Before 2007, the dominant framework was Gardner’s eight-symptoms-in-the-child syndrome model, which had two practical limitations. First, it was clinician-described — Gardner identified the symptoms from his own custody-evaluation practice, not from data. Second, it was about the child, not the parent — there was no parallel catalogue of what the alienating parent was doing to produce the symptoms.

Baker’s 2007 typology fixed both. The strategies were derived from forty independent adult-recall narratives — bottom-up from data, not top-down from clinical theory. And they named the alienating parent’s behaviour, not the alienated child’s symptom. Both moves were the foundation of everything the post-2010 research literature built.

The framework’s influence has played out in three overlapping ways.

First, it became the empirical floor of the family-violence classification. Harman, Kruk and Hines’ 2018 Psychological Bulletin paper — the paper that classified parental alienating behaviours as a form of family violence — uses Baker’s seventeen strategies (with adjacent contributions from Clawar & Rivlin and Warshak) as its behavioural inventory. The classification argument requires a behaviour list that meets the social-science threshold of family violence; Baker’s strategies are that list.

Second, it produced the instrument that opened the outcome literature. Without the BSQ — the Baker Strategies Questionnaire from the 2011 paper — the post-2011 research on what alienation does to people would not exist in its current form. Ben-Ami & Baker (2012) on depression, low self-esteem, and insecure attachment; Verrocchio and colleagues (2014-2018) on Italian samples up to N=470; Baker & Eichler (2014) on psychological maltreatment overlap; Verhaar, Matthewson and Bentley (2022) on adult mental health, including 30% suicidal ideation and 50% generational transmission — every one of these studies uses or builds on the BSQ. The strategies framework did not just describe a problem; it gave researchers a way to count it.

Third, it sharpened what gets measured at the population level. The behavioural item-set in Harman, Leder-Elder & Biringen’s 2019 prevalence paper — the paper that produced the “22 million targeted parents in the US” figure — draws conceptually on Baker’s seventeen-strategies framework. Hine et al.’s 2025 UK paper does the same. When advocacy work cites the 22-million figure, they are leaning on Baker’s typology, whether the citation chain makes that visible or not.

For readers of this site, the framework matters because it converts a confusing pattern into a checkable list. If you can name the seventeen strategies — and recognise the ones operating in your own situation — you have moved from the position of I think something is wrong to the position of here, with dates and witnesses, are the documented behaviours that constitute it. That is the difference between an unwinnable argument and the start of an evidence record.

What This Means for You

The seventeen strategies are not abstract academic vocabulary. They are a recognition tool, and the value of a recognition tool depends on what you do with it.

If you are a targeted parent. The framework gives you a vocabulary that family-court professionals, therapists, and academic readers recognise. Saying “my ex is turning my child against me” is easy to dismiss; saying “the other parent is engaging in five of Baker’s seventeen documented strategies — strategies 1, 2, 3, 6, and 17 — and here are the dates, witnesses, and evidence for each” is much harder to dismiss. The seventeen-strategy list is also a brake on the gaslighting most targeted parents encounter — the suggestion that what they are seeing is unusual, exaggerated, or imagined. It is none of those things; it is a documented pattern eighty percent of a college-student sample reported some childhood exposure to.

If you are a lawyer or therapist reading this. Baker’s framework is the closest thing the field has to a shared behavioural taxonomy. Custody evaluators, family-court judges, and reunification therapists who take parental alienation seriously generally know — and increasingly use — the seventeen-strategies vocabulary. The BSQ itself is not a forensic instrument and should not be presented as one in court; the strategies framework is a clinical-record tool that helps you describe what you are seeing in language with empirical backing. Mental-health practitioners working with adult survivors will find Ben-Ami & Baker (2012) and Verrocchio’s Italian work the most clinically useful citations for outcome correlates.

If you are a family member, friend, or colleague of an alienated parent. The seventeen strategies are a way to take the targeted parent’s experience seriously without requiring them to relive every detail. Reading the list — and seeing whichever subset matches what you have observed in their situation — is faster, more accurate, and less emotionally costly to them than asking them to describe each behaviour from scratch. Recognise the pattern before you offer advice; do not ask the targeted parent to make a research-grade case to convince you of their reality.

If you are the alienating parent reading this with discomfort. Baker’s framework is a mirror, not a verdict. The strategies are observable behaviours — they describe what is being done, not what is in any single person’s heart.

Recognising one or more of them in your own conduct is not a moral indictment; it is information. Some alienating behaviour is unconscious — driven by post-separation pain, by the fear of losing the child to the other parent, or by attachment patterns from your own childhood.

The question the framework asks is not whose account of the relationship is correct. It is whether your behaviour, over the small daily decisions of post-separation parenting, is on the seventeen-strategies list — and if it is, what you might do differently.

The post-2007 literature includes practical resources for reversing course, including Baker & Fine’s Beyond the High Road and Warshak’s Divorce Poison counter-strategies.

Limitations — What the Framework Doesn’t Tell Us

The seventeen-strategies framework is the foundation of the modern PA research literature. That does not mean it is beyond critique; it means it has earned the kind of careful critique a foundational framework needs. Five honest limitations, named plainly.

First, the qualitative sample is small and self-selected. Forty adults who volunteered to talk about their childhood alienation experience, recruited via internet posting and word-of-mouth, are not a generalisable population. The participants knew they were being interviewed about parental alienation; their narratives are reconstructed adult memory, not real-time observation. Baker is explicit on this point. The 2011 Baker & Chambers paper addresses the limitation by drawing a non-pre-screened college-student sample of around 105, where 80% reported some exposure to the strategies — a converging line of evidence, but not on its own a refutation of the qualitative-sample concern.

Second, the 2011 sample is one US university. The BSQ has since been validated in Italian samples up to N=470 (Verrocchio et al. 2014-2018) and other US samples (Baker & Eichler 2014, N=157), but the original 2011 quantitative work was a single convenience sample at one institution. UK-specific BSQ data is limited; the field’s UK reference is Hine et al. (2025), which uses a different sampling frame and measure. International generalisation requires cumulative replication.

Third, the 34-mothers-to-6-fathers distribution is recruitment artefact, not population data. This bears repeating because it is the single most-misread feature of the 2007 book. Baker’s qualitative sample over-represents alienating mothers because of who responded to her recruitment, not because mothers alienate more. Population-level gender data lives in the separate Harman, Matthewson and Baker (2019) gender-differences paper in Journal of Family Violence, which finds both mothers and fathers engage in alienating behaviours with different stylistic emphasis — men more often direct aggression, women more often indirect tactics, but no simple “mothers alienate more” pattern.

Fourth, the syndrome framing in the 2007 book title is contested. The book uses Gardner’s term Parental Alienation Syndrome (PAS) for historical continuity. By the 2010s the field had largely moved to parental alienation or parental alienating behaviours, because DSM-5 (2013) and ICD-11 (2018, updated 2024) do not list PAS as a discrete disorder.

Critics including Mercer (2021, 2022) and Drew (2022) read the absence as evidence the syndrome label is unsupported. Defenders — Bernet, Harman, the Parental Alienation Study Group — accept that the label is contested while arguing the behavioural pattern is well evidenced.

The seventeen strategies survive both readings; they describe observable behaviours, not a diagnosis. The article should engage the semantic question once and move on.

Fifth, Mercer and Drew’s Challenging Parental Alienation (Routledge 2022) is the strongest book-length critique. Their substantive arguments deserve engagement:

• PA writers rely heavily on small qualitative samples and self-selected respondents.
• The strategies framework is open to confirmation bias once alienation is suspected.
• PA findings are sometimes used in custody court in ways that exceed what the underlying research can support.
• The citation network among PA researchers can look closed.

Bernet (2023, Behavioral Sciences & the Law, “Scholarly Rumors”) published a counter-citation analysis arguing the closed-loop runs the other way. Lorandos (2020, Parental Alienation: Science and Law) provides the most comprehensive defender’s reply.

No formal published reply by Baker herself to Mercer and Drew has appeared in the open literature as of April 2026. A responsible reader of the seventeen-strategies framework keeps both the framework and its critics in view — the strategies are well-evidenced behavioural descriptions; how confidently they translate into individual diagnoses, and how they are used in court, remain open methodological questions.

None of these limitations is a reason to discard the framework. They are reasons to cite it precisely — Baker (2007) for the typology, Baker & Chambers (2011) for the BSQ, Ben-Ami & Baker (2012) and the Italian / Verhaar replications for the outcome correlations — without the casual conflations that have accumulated around the work in the years since publication. The seventeen strategies are well-described, well-replicated, and well-used. They are also one piece of a larger picture, and the larger picture is the field’s collective output, not any single author’s.