Stan Korosi

Contemporary families are becoming more diverse, fluid, networked and narratively constituted. These changes create new possibilities for care, belonging and kinship, but they also expose children and parents to new forms of relational vulnerability. Parental alienation is a concentrated expression of this wider problem. It shows how family relationships can be reorganised through narratives of exclusion, danger, contempt and erasure, producing relational harm that is simultaneously psychological, social, legal and political. This white paper argues that the parental alienation field should move beyond a problem-saturated focus on diagnosis, proof and remediation, without abandoning those tasks. Its larger contribution is to help define the relational ethics of future families: safe connection, developmental continuity, non- violence, parental identity, family belonging and institutional responsibility. The future family need not be nuclear, traditional or fixed. But it must not become a network in which children’s relationships are rendered disposable by adult grievance, ideological capture or institutional indiUerence.

Alienation in families, commonly discussed as parental alienation, is usually treated as a clinical, forensic or family-law problem. That psycho-legal framing is necessary but insufficient. Parental alienating behaviours also constitute relational, social and public health harms. They reorganise children’s family relationships through narratives of fear, contempt, rejection and exclusion; undermine parental identity; impose economic and legal burdens on targeted and rejected parents; and may contribute to adverse mental health outcomes, including suicidality. This White Paper proposes a multidimensional social and public health policy framework for alienation in families, while retaining the necessary contribution of clinical and legal responses. It argues that policy should address interacting domains of relational power, child safety and development, human rights and family life, misinformation and evidentiary governance, socio-economic access to remediation, and anti-alienation and de-alienation practice. The paper does not replace clinical or legal responses. It situates them within a broader public policy framework capable of prevention, early identification, timely intervention, relational repair and institutional accountability.