Five

 We used to be five. A family, three boys and a mother and father.

Then the divorce was filed in a sneak move, using spring break to remove the children from the home and going to her father's compound 500 miles away and calling from there to tell him to move out or she wouldn't return with them and when the children flunked out of school for for non-attendance, it would be his fault.

That was the tenor of the bankrupting, time-sucking (years) court litigation that showed him that Mother Knows Best when the two contesting litigants showed up in American domestic law court. The first time the court-appointed psychologist speciously stripped the father of all visitation ex parte for no account (this charlatan clashed with him because the dad wouldn't kow-tow to this preening Captain Bligh with a cracker-jack-box prize degree), with the first opportunity to appear in court in response a long ten weeks later, the father thought that was a devastating and soul-sucking time (70 days!) to be unable to see or talk to his children (she and they didn't answer his calls), but now, thanks to her Parental Alienation machinations, over a dozen years without seeing or talking to them, makes that 70 days mere chump change.

Oh yeah, the dad got plain vanilla visitation and full joint legal custody of the kids at the end and the judge termed her actions "unconscionable," but law is the minimum of morality and she was the underlying floor, sunk eyeball deep in the swamp.

That's western domestic law. Any man is a phone call away from disaster, and the children are the dangling hostages for the basest of players.