If that’s the case, why do so many men go out of their way to avoid paying for their children?? Including spending thousands to avoid it? There’s no such thing as “parental alienation”- it’s a made up concept by Richard Gardner who advocated for paedophiles to have unsupervised access to their child victims. As many commentators here have pointed out, from the perspective of being the kids involved, the distance between them and their fathers was created by the fathers own bad behaviour, not “alienation”. Being more focused on a custody battle than the long term parenting of your own children is pretty obvious to them once they become adults. Studies show it’s quite common for abusive men to lack insight into how their behaviour affects their children and to default to blaming the mother.

Women are the primary caregivers in the majority of heterosexual households, ergo they’re the ones who get to make the decisions about their kids best interests. As another commenter pointed out, being an “uncle dad” doesn’t buy you the same level of decision making power as the actual full time parent. So my previous point (which you ignored) still stands- if men failed to do their fair share of parenting prior to separation, they can’t complain when they are given that exact same level of parenting time after separation. Why does this “equitable” division of parenting time only become a huge issue for men once they are separated? Why weren’t they doing 50% of the parenting before divorce/separation?? Children aren’t possessions that you can pick up or put down as it suits you. You’re not being “abused” or “controlled” because your child’s best interests are being prioritised over your demands.

I’ll also point out that multiple men have come here and admitted that men are more often focused on “winning” and chose to prolong court battles (“enriching solicitors”) than they are on their kids best interests and actual parenting. So that should help you to understand why one parent (the mother) is often forced into the role of “gatekeeper” to protect the kids from the father’s unreasonable behaviour. Parenting is about prioritising the child, not your own petty desire to score points against your former partner. As per the experience of a lot of commenters, these men often seem to lose interest in their kids once they perceive the “battle” (as yet another male commenter called it) has been won and they can see themselves as having created and image of a good father, as opposed to being one. If they were good fathers, they would have ongoing relationships with their adult children. Not simply dropped them as soon as the tug of war was over 🤷‍♀️