PAKISTAN is facing a quiet but rather devastating child welfare crisis, one that unfolds daily in family and guardian courts, but remains largely invisible in public discourse. Across the country, an estimated one million children, including several hundred thousand in the province of Punjab alone, are caught in prolonged custody and visitation disputes.

For most of them, meaningful relation-ship with one parent is reduced to token encounters: one or two hours, once or twice a month, often within court premises. This is not parenting. It is institutionalised emotional distancing.

Such arrangements, in fact, are neither child-centric nor aligned with modern understanding of child psychology. Decades of research has consistently demonstrated that children tend to fare significantly better socially, emotionally, and psychologically when both parents remain meaningfully involved in their lives, barring situations of proven harm or abuse. Our child custody framework continues to operate on dated and flawed assumptions that inadvertently reward conflict, prolong litigation and always normalise parental alienation.

Institutional data exposes the scale of the problem. In Lahore alone, there are 37 family courts, five guardian courts and an evening court, each carrying an average pendency of 2,200 to 2,500 cases. This translates into nearly 100,000 pending family and guardianship matters at any given time. Punjab has 37 judicial districts, and each district has about three tehsils hosting four to five family courts each.

Even conservative estimates suggest that the total number of pending family cases ranges between 660,000 and 1.11 million. Judicial experience suggests that at least one-third of these cases relate to custody, visitation or parental access disputes. Even if one assumes just one child per custody case, a deliberately conser-vative assumption, there are between 200,000 and 330,000 children in Punjab alone who are currently growing up amid active custody litigation. These figures exclude execution proceedings for denied visitation, informal separations outside the court system, and cases abandoned due to litigation fatigue. The true scale is almost certainly higher.

Behind all these numbers are children living through years of uncertainty, emotional manipulation and fractured identity. Many are exposed to parental alienation, a recognised form of emotional abuse where one parent systematically erodes the child’s bond with the other. Courts, lacking adequate psychological support, often misinterpret alienation-driven resistance as ‘child preference’, thereby reinforcing the very harm they are meant to prevent.

Pakistan’s family justice system is over-burdened, under-resourced and insuffi-ciently equipped to address the emotional and developmental needs of such children. Following the 18th Amendment, family law falls squarely within provincial legislative competence. A measured and targeted amendment to the West Pakistan Family Courts Act, 1964, introducing a statutory presumption in favour of shared parenting and meaningful interim access can yield immediate and tangible results.

Legislative reform alone, however, is not enough. It must be complemented by administrative and policy measures: structured judicial training in child psychology, integration of psychologists and mediators in family courts, standard-ised child-friendly visitation protocols, digitisation of case management, and pilot reform programmes with measurable outcomes.

At its core, this is not a debate about fathers’ rights or mothers’ rights. It is about children’s rights, the right to love and be loved by both parents, the right to emotional stability, and the right to grow up without being weaponised in adult conflict. We have to show our will and act before another generation pays the price.

Fahad Ahmad Siddiqi
Lahore

Published in Dawn, February 12th, 2026