The family of the future need not be nuclear, traditional or fixed. But it must not become a social form in which children’s safe and meaningful relationships are made disposable.
Dialogue in Growth White Paper No. 1 argues that parental alienation is not only a post-separation family-law issue. It is a warning about what happens when children’s relationships become disposable.
Dialogue in Growth has released White Paper No. 1. The Alienated Society: Parental Alienation, Relational Harm and the Future of Families (available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=6732958)
The paper is a major conceptual and policy proposal that places parental alienation within a broader social question: what relational ethics will guide the families of the twenty-first century?
The paper argues that parental alienation should no longer be understood only as a contested clinical or family-law concept. It is also a concentrated expression of a wider problem: relational harm in increasingly diverse, fluid and narratively constituted family networks.
fContemporary families are changing. They are more likely to span separated households, blended families, step-relations, donor and surrogacy arrangements, kinship care, same-sex parenting, transnational ties and digitally mediated relationships. These shifts create new possibilities for care, belonging and family life. But they also create new vulnerabilities. Where relationships are held together less by fixed household form and more by narratives of recognition, memory, obligation and belonging, those narratives can be captured, narrowed and weaponised.
Parental alienation matters because it shows what happens when that process turns destructive.
Why parental alienation travels beyond the family court
Parental alienation is often discussed in the language of proof, diagnosis, expert evidence and remediation. Those matters remain important. But the White Paper argues that this problem-saturated focus is now too narrow.
Alienating behaviours do not merely obstruct contact or express conflict. They can reorganise a child’s moral map of the family. A parent may be recoded as unsafe, contemptible, unnecessary or no longer real as a parent. The child may come to experience love, memory and affiliation with that parent as disloyal, dangerous or forbidden.
In this sense, parental alienation is not only a post-separation dispute. It is a social mechanism of relational erasure. It reveals how family relationships can be made conditional, how parental identity can be cancelled, and how institutions may either interrupt or consolidate that process.
The paper therefore asks the parental alienation field to take up a larger task. It must continue to defend the reality of alienating behaviours where necessary. But its broader contribution is to help define the relational ethics of future families: safe connection, developmental continuity, non-violence, parental identity, family belonging and institutional responsibility.
Not nostalgia for the nuclear family
The White Paper does not argue for a return to one historical family form. It does not defend the nuclear family as the only legitimate model, nor does it treat family diversity as a problem.
Its claim is sharper and more future-oriented: as family forms become more diverse, it becomes more—not less—important to identify the relational conditions children need across all family configurations.
A child may flourish in a nuclear family, a separated family, a blended family, a same-sex-parented family, a kinship care arrangement, a transnational family network or another stable care arrangement. The question is not whether the family form satisfies an ideological preference. The question is whether the child’s safe and meaningful relationships are recognised, protected and allowed to develop.
The problem is not family diversity. The problem is relational disposability.
A future family policy worthy of children must hold two commitments together:
- openness to plural and evolving family configurations; and
- resistance to narratives, systems and adult projects that erase safe, developmentally important relationships.
The future family as a relational network
White Paper No. 1 proposes that families of the future are likely to be organised less as fixed household units and more as relational networks. These networks may include biological parents, social parents, step-parents, siblings, grandparents, donor relations, cultural communities and geographically dispersed kin. Some will be resilient and nurturing. Others will be vulnerable to instability, conflict or capture by a single adult’s account of who belongs and who does not.
In such families, the child’s relational map becomes a central developmental asset. That map tells the child:
- who they are connected to;
- who may be trusted;
- who matters;
- who may be loved;
- and who must be rejected for safety’s sake.
Alienating processes attack that map. They turn complexity into moral prohibition. They reduce a family relationship to a settled identity claim: this person is not your parent, not your family, not safe, not worthy, not part of you.
A future-oriented family policy should protect children from unsafe relationships. But it should also protect them from the avoidable erasure of safe and meaningful relationships through adult grievance, ideological presumption, institutional delay or economic incentive.
The politics of alienation and family policy
Family policy is never neutral. It carries assumptions about harm, power, autonomy, parental responsibility, gender, children’s needs and the proper role of the State.
The White Paper acknowledges the important contribution made by domestic-abuse and coercive-control frameworks in naming patterns of violence and structural inequality that were historically minimised. That contribution should not be dismissed.
But it also argues that policy becomes unsafe when any framework turns categorical rather than evidentiary—when it recognises only one kind of victim, one direction of coercion, one authorised narrative of harm or one morally approved account of family life. In that setting, policy stops investigating relational harm and begins to pre-classify it.
This critique applies not only to gendered domestic-abuse frameworks where they become doctrinaire. It applies equally to simplistic parental alienation advocacy. Not every child’s rejection of a parent is alienation. Some children resist contact for sound reasons, including violence, coercion, neglect, fear or accumulated relational injury.
The paper’s position is therefore deliberately symmetrical:
Future family policy must recognise domestic abuse without converting every resisted relationship into proof of danger. It must recognise parental alienation without treating every abuse allegation as tactical.
That is not a compromise between safety and relationship. It is a more complete account of child safety.
The risk of institutionalising relational erasure
The White Paper warns that laws, policies and professional frameworks may unintentionally help consolidate parent-child rupture when they are not sufficiently evidence-sensitive.
It discusses developments in the United Kingdom, Australia, the United States and Canada that seek to address family violence, domestic abuse and allegations of alienating behaviour, while noting that some approaches risk treating parent-child relationship repair with suspicion where alienation may in fact be present.
The issue is not whether family violence should be taken seriously. It must be. The issue is whether family policy can take violence seriously without losing the ability to recognise coercive relational harm when it presents through alienation, narrative foreclosure and the unnecessary destruction of a child’s relationship with a parent or family network.
If institutions accept exclusionary narratives too readily, delay timely intervention or fail to distinguish alienation from justified estrangement, they may become part of the alienating process. What begins as a private relational injury can then become institutionally validated family rupture.
Human rights and the child’s right to belong
The White Paper situates future family relationships within a human rights frame. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights recognises the family as a fundamental group unit of society. The Convention on the Rights of the Child recognises the importance of children’s family relationships and identity. European human rights jurisprudence has also affirmed that the State may have positive obligations to act in a timely way to preserve or restore parent-child relationships where this serves the child’s best interests.
Alienation matters in this context because it threatens more than contact. It threatens identity, belonging, memory and developmental continuity.
Where a child’s safe and meaningful relationship with a parent or family network is unnecessarily erased, the child loses more than time. They may lose access to part of their own social identity and family history.
The White Paper does not argue for forced reconciliation or contact at any cost. It argues that where restoration is safe, developmentally beneficial and evidence-supported, relationship repair should be treated as a legitimate responsibility of socio-legal institutions, not as a private luxury left to families who can afford it.
Call to Action: A relational ethics framework for future families
At the centre of White Paper No. 1 is a Relational Ethics Framework for Future Family Networks. This framework provides seven principles for policy, law, practice and public debate:
1. Children’s relational safety
Children must be protected from violence, coercion, abuse, intimidation, neglect and psychological harm. No claim for relational continuity can justify unsafe contact.
2. Relational continuity where safe
Safe, meaningful and developmentally important relationships with parents, siblings, grandparents and wider kin should not be treated as disposable because of adult grievance, ideology, institutional delay or adversarial advantage.
3. Evidence-sensitive assessment
Courts, services and professionals must be able to distinguish alienation, justified estrangement, domestic and family violence, coercive control, parent-child contact problems, ordinary conflict and hybrid cases.
4. Narrative accountability
Professionals should attend to the narratives children are asked to live within. Are children permitted to love both parents where safe? Or is love for one family member framed as betrayal of another?
5. Institutional timeliness
Delay should be treated as a harm amplifier. A system that waits until a child’s relationship has collapsed may then mistake the effects of delay for the child’s settled preference.
6. Symmetrical assessment of coercive control
Coercion should be assessed by behaviour, context and effect—not presumed from gender or parental role.
7. Relationship repair where safe and developmentally justified
Where relational harm has occurred, and repair serves the child’s safety and developmental needs, the State should support restoration, reunification or relational repair through proportionate, evidence-based pathways.
Taken together, these principles offer a framework that is neither nostalgic nor ideologically rigid. It does not restore the nuclear family as the only legitimate model. Nor does it abandon children to adult autonomy, grievance, institutional indifference or ideological capture. It argues that diverse family networks require a stronger relational ethic, not a weaker one.
Why this White Paper matters
Parental alienation has often been forced into a defensive posture: proving that it exists, rebutting claims that it is merely a litigation tactic, and contesting policy frameworks that dismiss it out of hand.
That defensive task remains necessary. But the White Paper argues that it is no longer enough.
The larger contribution of the parental alienation field is to reveal one of the central vulnerabilities of contemporary and future family life: the capacity for children’s relationships to be captured, narrowed and reorganised through narratives of exclusion.
That problem is not confined to separated heterosexual families. It is not confined to the family court. It is a broader problem of relational harm in a society where family relationships are more fluid, more negotiated and more vulnerable to social, political and institutional contestation.
The future family need not be nuclear, traditional or fixed. But it must not become a social form in which children’s relationships are rendered disposable by adult grievance, ideological doctrine or institutional failure.
The challenge is not to choose between safety and family relationships. The challenge is to build policy, law and practice capable of seeing both forms of harm at the same time.
Read the full White Paper
Korosi, S. (2026). The Alienated Society: Parental Alienation, Relational Harm and the Future of Families White Paper No 1. SSRN Preprint. https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.6732958. Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=6732958
Similar Posts:
- False Allegations and Parental Alienation in Australian Family Law
- Family Law Amendment Bill 2023: An Anti-Family and Anti-Child Law
- Response to UN Special Rapporteur’s Call for Input: Custody Cases, Violence against Women and Children
- Parental Alienation – Faster Than The Speed of Love
- Overturning The “Ban” on Overnight Stays for Alienated Toddlers
[…] new White Paper follows White Paper No. 1, The Alienated Society: Parental Alienation, Relational Harm and the Future of Fam… which situated parental alienation within the broader problem of relational harm in changing family […]