Why the Revision of HB 1082 Must Go Beyond Equal Parenting Time and Measure What Is Happening to the Child
One of the easiest mistakes we can make in family-law reform is believing that fairness between parents automatically creates well-being for children.
It does not. Equal access matters.
A child’s relationship with both fit and safe parents matters enormously. Fathers should not be marginalized because they are fathers, and mothers should not be marginalized because they are mothers.
A family court should not begin with an assumption that one parent is more psychologically significant simply because of gender. However, there is another truth that must be held alongside that one:
A child is not a percentage to be divided between two adults.
A fifty-fifty calendar can tell us where a child sleeps.
It cannot tell us whether that child feels safe. It cannot tell us whether the child is anxious every Sunday before an exchange. It cannot tell us whether the child is carrying secrets between households, being recruited into adult conflict, living under coercive control, becoming depressed, losing attachment security, or learning to survive by aligning with whichever parent possesses the greatest emotional power.
That is where I believe the next evolution of HB 1082 must occur.
The official legislative record identifies HB 1082 as an Oklahoma marriage-and-family measure concerning child-custody agreements. Senator Dana Prieto previously served as its principal Senate author and remains listed as a Senate coauthor after the authorship changed in 2026.
As I have discussed revisions to this legislation with Senator Prieto, my concern has increasingly centered on a simple question:
Are we reforming custody law primarily to make parenting time more equal, or are we reforming custody law to make childhood healthier?
Those goals often overlap, but they are not always the same. However, as I examined the language clinically, I believed the concept needed to be developed further. It must be about children.
If we build family-law reform primarily around the rights of the injured parent, we risk repeating one of the problems we are attempting to correct: the child becomes secondary to the adult dispute.
A mother can interfere with the relationship between a child and father. A father can interfere with the relationship between a child and mother. Either parent can manipulate, intimidate, exert coercive control, and make false allegations.
I have witnessed either parent becoming consumed by their own injury that they fail to recognize what the conflict is doing to the child standing between them.
The law should therefore not be designed around protecting mothers from fathers or fathers from mothers.
It should be designed around preserving children from harmful relational systems.
That became the foundation of what I wanted to bring into the revision of HB 1082.
Why I Want to Move Away From “Parental Alienation”
One of the most significant changes I am advocating is moving away from the term parental alienation. This is not simply changing terminology. It is changing the object of our attention.
“Parental alienation” can easily direct the courtroom toward the experience of the rejected parent:
My child does not want to see me.
The other parent turned my child against me.
My relationship with my child has been taken from me.
Those experiences can be devastating, and deliberate interference with a healthy parent-child relationship can cause tremendous harm.
Yet, the central clinical question should not begin with:
What happened to the rejected parent?
It should begin with:
What is happening inside the child?
That distinction matters because the term parental alienation remains professionally contested. The World Health Organization does not recognize parental alienation as a health-care diagnosis in ICD-11 and instead points clinicians toward broader caregiver-child relationship problems when appropriate.
The American Professional Society on the Abuse of Children has similarly warned professionals not to infer psychological abuse merely because a child avoids one parent. APSAC emphasizes examining multiple possible explanations and looking for direct evidence of behaviors that undermine the parent-child relationship.
That clinical caution is important.
A child may reject a parent because another parent has manipulated the child, or the child may reject a parent because of fear, loyalty conflict, developmental factors, unresolved attachment injuries, exposure to domestic violence, parental behavior, family instability, or several of these things occurring simultaneously.
Calling all of those situations “parental alienation” can prematurely answer the very question the evaluator is supposed to investigate.
That is why I have been developing a different framework:
Disruptive Parental Attachment
I call it Disruptive Parental Attachment, or DPA (Piece by Piece My Blended Experience of a Mosaic Family, Hudgins 2025).
DPA is not intended to be another psychiatric diagnosis.
It is a child-centered framework for examining behaviors and family-system dynamics that disrupt, damage, manipulate, interfere with, or unnecessarily destabilize a child’s attachment to a parent.
The difference is subtle in language but profound in application.
Parental alienation asks us to look at the parent who lost the relationship. Disruptive Parental Attachment asks us to look at the child whose attachment system is being affected.
The goal is not to prove that Mom is alienating Dad or to prove that Dad is alienating Mom. The goal is to determine whether adult behavior is unnecessarily damaging a child’s ability to maintain a safe, healthy attachment to either parent.
That means looking at behaviors.
Is a parent repeatedly denigrating the other parent? Is the child being placed in the role of messenger, spy, confidant, protector, or judge?
Is affection being made contingent upon loyalty? Is legitimate abuse being ignored?
Those questions move us away from labels and toward observable behavior, context, patterns, and impact. This brings us directly to coercive control.
You Do Not Have to Hit Someone to Control Them
One of the concepts I have discussed with Senator Prieto is the need to understand coercive control as a pattern rather than merely searching for a violent incident.
I believe courts should examine the history, pattern, context, purpose, and effect of behavior. The important question is not simply:
“What happened that afternoon?”
It is also:
“What larger pattern does that afternoon belong to?”
At the same time, safeguards are essential. Ordinary disagreements are not coercive control. Setting a healthy boundary is not coercive control.
Lawfully advocating for yourself in court is not coercive control.
A law that recognizes psychological control must be sophisticated enough to distinguish protection from manipulation and conflict from domination.
Another important part of this process of family court is to reform the language, which I had already been developing and using in my books concerning the physical, mental, emotional, and moral well-being of the child.
Those four words matter to me because they begin changing “best interests of the child” from an abstract phrase into something we can actually examine.
For decades, “best interests” has often operated as a legal conclusion.
Title 43 of Oklahoma family statutes uses best interests. What does “best” mean?
Best according to whom? Based upon what observations? Measured by what indicators? Compared with what alternatives?
Those questions become more important when two intelligent attorneys can look at the same family and construct completely different narratives about what is supposedly in the child’s best interests.
I want us to move toward something more disciplined; not mechanical, not reductionistic, but measurable. This helps judges with facts, findings, and conclusions of the law based on measurable methods and patterns of behavior.
Stop Guessing About the Child’s Well-Being
Mental-health professionals already know how to examine functioning through multiple sources of information. We have clinical interviews and validated psychological and behavioral instruments. The instruments can measure depression, anxiety, trauma symptoms, emotional regulation, behavioral functioning, parent-child relationships, and other dimensions of psychological health.
Adverse Childhood Experiences are associated with long-term effects on health and well-being and can involve violence, abuse, neglect, household instability, and circumstances that undermine children’s safety, stability, and bonding.
For adolescents, instruments such as the PHQ-A can help identify and quantify depressive symptoms and functional impairment. Other validated instruments may be appropriate depending upon the child’s age, developmental level, presenting concerns, and the questions being evaluated.
None of these instruments should become a custody calculator. An ACE score should never say, “Dad receives forty percent.” A depression score should never say, “Mom receives sixty percent.” That would replace one form of oversimplification with another.
Instead, these measures can provide objective pieces of evidence within a much larger clinical picture.
If a child’s depression worsens dramatically during prolonged family conflict, that matters. If anxiety increases around exchanges, that matters. If school functioning deteriorates, that matters. If trauma symptoms emerge, that matters. If a child demonstrates increasing emotional stability, secure attachment, improved functioning, and reduced distress when particular family dynamics change, that matters too.
We should be asking: What is happening to this child over time?
That is a very different question from:
Which parent made the more persuasive argument in court?
Equal Parenting Should Never Mean Equal Exposure to Harm
I support preserving children’s relationships with both parents whenever those relationships are safe and healthy. However, equal parenting time cannot mean equal exposure to dysfunction.
If both parents are fit, safe, engaged, and psychologically capable of supporting the child’s relationship with the other parent, then meaningful access to both parents should be protected.
If coercive control, domestic violence, psychological maltreatment, manipulation, severe substance abuse, chronic instability, or deliberate disruption of attachment is occurring, the court needs language capable of recognizing it. The purpose of child-custody law cannot merely be balancing parental rights.
The purpose must include protecting childhood itself.
This is where I believe HB 1082 has the opportunity to become something much more significant than an equal-parenting bill.
It can help move Oklahoma from an adult-centered custody model toward a child-centered well-being model, which is why I have rewritten some of the language to protect our children.
We Have Spent Too Much Time Measuring Parents and Too Little Time Measuring Children
Family court naturally asks questions about adults. Those questions have their place. Yet, somewhere beneath all of those arguments is a child whose nervous system does not understand statutes.
The child understands safety, fear, whether home feels predictable.
The child understands whether speaking honestly is dangerous and whether the adults are asking the child to carry emotional responsibilities that belong to adults. Eventually, the child’s mind and body begin recording those experiences.
That is why the words physical, mental, emotional, and moral well-being matter so deeply to me.
They force us to ask what our decisions are actually producing in the life of the child.
This Is Bigger Than Fathers’ Rights or Mothers’ Rights
I understand why family-law reform movements sometimes begin with injured parents. Pain creates movements.
A father loses meaningful access to his children and begins fighting for fathers.
A mother survives domestic violence and begins fighting for survivors.
A grandparent watches grandchildren disappear into litigation and begins fighting for grandparents.
Every reform movement has a story underneath it.
Yet, legislation eventually has to become larger than the wound that created the movement. That is what I have tried to bring into my conversations concerning this legislation.
Preserve access where access is healthy. Protect attachment rather than adult ownership. Recognize coercive control without weaponizing the concept. Replace vague accusations of parental alienation with careful examination of behaviors that disrupt a child’s attachment. Use qualified mental-health professionals and validated assessment tools where appropriate.
Examine history.
Examine patterns.
Examine context.
Above all, measure outcomes in the human being whose voice is so easily lost beneath the litigation. Because perhaps the most important question a family court can ask is not:
“Did we divide the time fairly?”
It is:
“What is this family arrangement doing to the child?”
That is the standard I hope we continue developing as HB 1082 is reconsidered. Let Oklahoma lead the way to the nation in protecting the overall well-being of a child.
A child deserves meaningful relationships with both safe and capable parents.
A child deserves protection from being recruited into adult wounds.
A child deserves a legal system capable of recognizing psychological harm before that harm becomes a diagnosis, a crisis, or another generation’s inheritance.
Equal access may divide the calendar. Child well-being must determine whether we have actually served the child. – Dr. Steve Hudgins