## Facts

- Five minor children, through a guardian ad litem, sued their mothers for money damages.
- The children alleged serious emotional and psychological injuries from the mothers’ failure to provide parental care, nurturance, affection, companionship, support, contact, and visitation.
- The complaints characterized the mothers’ conduct as intentional, willful, malicious, and in cruel disregard of consequences, including abandonment and neglect.
- The children relied in part on asserted violations of Oregon statutes addressing parental support duties and criminal desertion/abandonment, neglect, and nonsupport (ORS 109.010; ORS 163.535; ORS 163.545; ORS 163.555).
- At the time of suit, the children were in the custody of Oregon’s Children’s Services Division and were wards of the county juvenile court.
- The trial court sustained demurrers to the complaints; the children declined to replead, and the cases were dismissed.

## Issues

1. Whether Oregon tort law recognizes a cause of action by minor children against a parent for purely emotional and psychological injury based on the parent’s failure to perform parental duties (including abandonment, neglect, and nonsupport).
2. Whether the cited parental-duty and criminal statutes implied a private civil damages remedy in favor of children.
3. Whether allegations of malicious parental desertion could be treated as an independently recognized tort (including intentional infliction of emotional distress).

## Decision

- The Oregon Supreme Court affirmed the dismissals.
- The court held that children have no tort cause of action against a parent for purely emotional and psychological injuries arising from a parent’s failure to perform parental duties.
- The court declined to infer a private damages remedy from the cited statutes.
- The court declined to expand intra-family tort liability from physical-injury contexts to broad claims for relational and emotional harms grounded in deficient parenting.

## Legal Principles

- Oregon does not recognize a general tort claim by a child against a parent for emotional or psychological harm based solely on parental abandonment, neglect, nonsupport, or comparable failures of parental duty.
- Criminal and regulatory statutes defining parental duties or prohibiting abandonment, neglect, or nonsupport do not, without clear legislative direction, create an implied private right of action for damages.
- Where the legislature has established juvenile-court and child-welfare systems to address parental failure, courts may decline to create overlapping tort remedies that could interfere with those protective and remedial schemes.
- Expansion of intra-family tort liability may be limited when the alleged injury is purely emotional and the asserted duty would require courts to assess broad questions about parental affection, companionship, and visitation.

## Conclusion

The court refused to recognize a new tort allowing minor children to recover damages from a parent for emotional and psychological injuries attributed to abandonment, neglect, or nonsupport, and it treated the statutory child-welfare and criminal provisions as enforcement mechanisms that did not imply a private damages action.


Burnette v. Wahl, 588 P.2d 1105 (Or. 1978)