There's good news and bad news here. The bad news is that we continue to lack long-term, large-population, high-quality research about children who resist contact with a parent after separation. The research currently available uses only small numbers of people, and is often confined to the people that psychologists see in their normal, day-to-day practices. We still don't have a definition of "alienation" that is widely accepted, although to my mind the way that Kelly and Johnston talk about alienation and estrangement seems to hit the mark the closest. We also don't have a lot of good research about the legal and therapeutic responses to children who resist seeing a parent that work best. While most writers on the subject suggest that courts assign judges to these cases early on, judges who continue to be involved in these cases as case managers, most courts don't have enough judges or enough court time to make case management a practical solution.