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The Social and Parental Alienation Field Mapping the Future of Families into the Twenty-first Century
Preprint   Open access

The Social and Parental Alienation Field Mapping the Future of Families into the Twenty-first Century

Stan Korosi
Advance: a SAGE preprints community, Vol.8 October 2025
Sage Publishing
2025
DOI: https://doi.org/10.31124/advance.175992304.43103755/v1
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20251006_SK_PA_Mapping_Future_Families379.82 kBDownloadView
Preprint VersionCC BY V4.0,  Open Access

Abstract

Sociology of family and relationships Public health Health policy evaluation Public health (excl. specific population health) not elsewhere classified parental alienation social alienation sociology of the family
Parental alienation (PA) is a contested yet increasingly recognised phenomenon at the cutting edge of contemporary families. The PA field straddles the intersection of family dynamics, power, gender, and politics and significant social, economic and cultural change. Defined by behaviours one parent adopts to manipulate a child into rejecting the other parent without reasonable grounds, PA is a social dynamic driving family configuration and the family narratives that constitute the contemporary family. PA also drives adverse societal change as an alienation discourse. Family networks transcend national boundaries, geography and historical structural forms. They engage in a recursive process with profound changes in social expectations arising from PA and gendered policies and laws. PA, Family Law and Child Support provide succour to new and unsettling relational moralities. Historically, the PA field has a problematising focus developed in response to a psychosocial and legal presentation. This article argues that the PA field can shift from attempting to fix the vexing issue of PA to driving the dialogue on new family narratives and configurations that support children’s relational and developmental needs into the future. It concludes that PA can and should drive family policies and support diverse family configurations and networks by defining the discourse for relational narratives that help children and parents. Family discourse should adopt a child-centred, needs and rights-based framework, learning and adapting the key lessons from the PA field: that family relationships should again be the focus of our society into the twenty-first century.

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