What this site does and doesn’t claim

Parental alienation is not a medical or psychiatric diagnosis. What is recognised is that some parents behave in ways that damage a child’s relationship with their other parent, and that this can seriously harm children — and equally, that a child may refuse contact for good reasons, including abuse. Nothing on this site is a diagnosis or legal advice.

Why this matters as much as it does

Every route into this site’s content risks reading as if a child’s refusal of contact is always manufactured by the other parent. It isn’t. A meaningful share of people who describe themselves as alienated are parents whose children are justifiably rejecting them — and a site that treats every refusal as manufactured is a safeguarding failure, not a neutral resource.

What professional bodies actually require

England and Wales’s Family Justice Council (December 2024) requires appropriate justified rejection, attachment, and affinity/alignment to be ruled out — with domestic abuse examined first — before alienating behaviours can be found. The AFCC/NCJFCJ joint statement (2022) requires safety screening before attributing a contact problem to any single cause. Johnston & Sullivan (2020) find that hybrid cases — a mixture of causes, not one clean explanation — are the norm, not the exception.

Sources: Family Justice Council (England and Wales), guidance on alienating behaviour, December 2024 · AFCC/NCJFCJ joint statement on parent-child contact problems, 2022 · Johnston, J.R. & Sullivan, M.J. (2020). Parental Alienation: In Search of Common Ground for a More Differentiated Theory. Family Court Review 58(2), 270-292.