Stepparents and the court: the case pattern nobody is trained to see
This page is written for judges, custody evaluators, guardians ad litem, parenting coordinators and family lawyers, rather than for the families in front of them. It makes one argument: that a recognisable and common case pattern arrives in family court disguised as something simpler, and that the dynamic driving it is the one thing nobody in the room is trained to assess.
The account below is Dr Patricia Papernow’s, written to this site on 31 August 2026 and published with her permission. She is a clinical instructor in psychology at Harvard Medical School, has been teaching stepfamily work for almost five decades, and has been presenting this material to family law practitioners through the Association of Family and Conciliation Courts. We have added the research citations and the framing. Any errors in those are ours.
The case as it arrives
A mother petitions to change custody. The father says it is because she has been badmouthing him to the children. She has been badmouthing him. She may have been doing it for years. On the evidence in front of the court, the father is right.
And it is not the whole story, and the part that is missing is the part that started it.
The sequence underneath
Read step two carefully. It is the step that every intuitive account of this case gets backwards.
Mom’s house is very hang loose. No rules about cell phone usage, no structure, no clear bedtimes. This is not framed as a failing. It is a difference, and it is where the sequence starts.
Stepmom comes in and says these kids need structure, and she proceeds to provide it. Dr Papernow is explicit on this point: stepmom is likely correct. What follows is not caused by her being wrong.
Providing the structure pulls her smack into very active discipline, and it delivers far too much change too fast for the children. Dr Papernow cites the research linking a high number of family transitions to poorer wellbeing.
Kids resist. They even maybe start getting nasty. From the inside it feels like rejection of her as a person. It is a reaction to the speed and to the role.
Stepmom gets more frustrated and harsher, which pushes her toward authoritarian stepparenting. The research links authoritarian stepparenting very clearly to toxic stepparent and stepchild relationships. This is the hinge of the whole sequence.
A solidly grounded mother who puts her children first empathises with the feeling without joining the story. Dr Papernow gives the two scripts side by side: that sounds painful, rather than, she is a bitch.
Some are glad to join in about how awful stepmom and dad are, because they are eager for anything that pulls the children away from Dad. But sometimes the mother simply feels protective and does not know another way to support her child. Those two look identical from outside and they are not the same thing.
Neither household has any idea how to reach out to the other. There is no route back, and nobody whose job it is to build one.
Mom goes for a custody shift. Dad says it is because Mom is badmouthing. And Mom is badmouthing. She may have been badmouthing all along. But in these cases it is not the whole story, and the court is being asked to treat it as though it were.
Why the usual orders do not reach it
Dr Papernow’s account is blunt. Court processes still do not recognize stepparents. Family law professionals do not know how to assess stepparenting, and the huge majority do not know that effective stepparenting and effective parenting are different things. So a judge orders reconnection therapy for a parent and child, or an assessment of the parent’s parenting. Both leave out a major dynamic and a large educational job, and both of those involve the stepparent.
A case can be correctly decided on the evidence in front of it and still be decided on the wrong question. If the stepparent’s role set the sequence in motion, an assessment of the father’s parenting will not find it, and reconnection therapy aimed at father and child will not repair it.
Two specific mismatches
- Ordering reconnection or reunification therapy between the father and the children treats the rupture as being between them. If the rupture began with the stepmother’s role and the pace of change in her household, the therapy is aimed at the wrong dyad. It may also carry risks of its own, which we set out on the alienation page.
- Ordering an assessment of the father’s parenting will assess the father’s parenting. It is capable of returning an entirely accurate finding that he parents well, while the thing that produced the case goes unexamined, because the stepparent is not a party and there is no protocol for assessing her role.
The training gap
We asked Dr Papernow for a citation for this. She offered to be quoted directly, saying she has been teaching this for almost five decades and it is still happening, and pointed us to a new paper in which Todd Jensen assembled the numbers.
Published online. The publisher blocks automated reading, so we have not read the figures at source and are not quoting any of them here yet.
What would actually help
We are not in a position to tell a court what to order, and we are not going to pretend otherwise. What the material above supports is narrower and still useful:
- Ask whether there is a stepparent in the picture, and when they arrived. The timing relative to the deterioration is diagnostic and costs nothing to establish.
- Ask who has been doing the disciplining. A stepparent in an active disciplinary role early is a specific, researched risk factor, not a matter of taste.
- Treat a child refusing contact as a question rather than an answer. The resist-refuse framing exists precisely so that the multiple possible causes, including justified estrangement, can be distinguished instead of assumed.
- Recognize that badmouthing can be real and still not be the whole cause. Both findings can be true, and a court that has to choose between them will get one of them wrong.
The resist-refuse framing, and where it comes from
Resist/refuse dynamics (sometimes written resist-refuse dynamics, or RRD) is the term many family court professionals now use instead of parental alienation. It describes what is actually observable, a child resisting or refusing contact with a parent, without assuming up front why that is happening. The framing comes out of a 2020 special issue of Family Court Review titled Parent-Child Contact Problems: Concepts, Controversies, and Conundrums, and it was formally endorsed in a 2022 joint statement from the Association of Family and Conciliation Courts and the National Council of Juvenile and Family Court Judges. The core idea traces further back to a 2001 article by Janet Johnston and Joan Kelly that first laid out multiple, non-exclusive reasons a child might resist a parent. The programs marketed to fix severe cases, often called reunification camps or family bridges style workshops, have a thin and contested evidence base and have drawn real reporting on coercive practices.
The term resist/refuse dynamics comes from a dedicated 2020 special issue of Family Court Review.
Family Court Review, volume 58, issue 2 (2020), was a special issue titled Parent-Child Contact Problems: Concepts, Controversies, and Conundrums. It contains multiple articles examining why children resist or refuse contact with a parent after separation, including pieces on confirmatory bias in custody evaluations, trauma-informed intervention, and case management protocols for what several authors call resist-refuse dynamics or child resistance/refusal.
AFCC and the National Council of Juvenile and Family Court Judges jointly adopted a formal statement in 2022 rejecting single-cause labels for these cases.
The Association of Family and Conciliation Courts approved the statement on May 11, 2022, and the National Council of Juvenile and Family Court Judges approved it on June 15, 2022. It explicitly says there should be no immediate single label applied to parent-child contact problems, because multiple factors and dynamics can produce them, and it lists a long set of contributing factors rather than endorsing one cause.
There should be no immediate label used for parent-child contact problems as there are multiple factors and dynamics that may account for these issues.
The joint statement lists interparental conflict, litigation, third parties, poor co-parenting, child maltreatment, exposure to abuse, alienating behavior, and high-conflict alignment as factors that can all produce contact problems.
This is the multiple-causes list itself, drawn directly from the joint statement, and it is useful because it puts alienating behavior in the list as one possible factor among many rather than as the default explanation.
interparental conflict before and after the separation, sibling relationships, the adversarial process/litigation, third parties such as aligned professionals and extended family, a lack of functional co-parenting, poor or conflictual parental communication, child maltreatment, a response to a parent’s abusive behaviors, the direct or indirect exposure to intimate partner violence, parental alienating behaviors, an alignment with a parent in response to high conflict coparenting, or a combination of these factors
AFCC and NCJFCJ Joint Statement on Parent-Child Contact Problems (2022)
We could not verify a formally named AFCC task force report on parent-child contact problems, distinct from the joint statement.
Reported consistently, not settled
We searched specifically for an AFCC task force on parent-child contact problems with named members and a separate report. We only found the 2022 AFCC and NCJFCJ joint statement itself, which is a real, citable AFCC document, but we did not find and could not verify a separately titled task force report with named authors. The page should attribute the framing to the joint statement and the Family Court Review special issue rather than to an unnamed task force.
The foundational article behind the multiple-causes model is Kelly and Johnston’s 2001 reformulation of parental alienation syndrome.
Joan B. Kelly and Janet R. Johnston published The Alienated Child: A Reformulation of Parental Alienation Syndrome in Family Court Review in 2001. The article proposed moving away from Richard Gardner’s parental alienation syndrome, which treated alienation as a single diagnosable condition, toward a framework asking what is actually driving a child’s rejection of a parent in a given case. It set out a small set of non-exclusive categories: affinity, based on a child’s age, temperament, or shared interests with one parent; alignment, a loyalty response to high parental conflict that falls short of full rejection; realistic estrangement, a justified response to a parent’s own violence, abuse, or neglect; and alienation, an unjustified rejection driven mainly by the other parent’s undue influence. Later writers, including Kelly and Johnston’s own later work and Garber’s 2020 piece, expanded this into more granular, overlapping taxonomies rather than a single either-or diagnosis.
A 2020 article by Benjamin Garber argues that custody evaluators should reason inductively from evidence rather than starting from an alienation hypothesis and looking for confirming evidence.
Garber’s article, part of the Family Court Review special issue, sets out a 13-factor model of reasons a child might resist a parent, treats parental alienation as one factor among the 13 rather than the default explanation, and uses a case study to show how deductive reasoning toward either an alienation or an estrangement conclusion can cause evaluators to miss the real, sometimes mundane, cause of a child’s resistance.
It is a capital mistake to theorize before you have all the evidence. It biases the judgment.
Reunification programs such as Family Bridges have weak, contested evidence and have been the subject of reporting on coercive practices.
Contested — researchers disagree
The main published outcome study for Family Bridges is by Richard Warshak, the program’s own developer, published in the Journal of Divorce and Remarriage in 2019. It relies on before-and-after reports rather than a controlled study, has no independent long-term follow-up, and was conducted by a non-neutral observer with a financial and professional stake in the program’s success. Separately, an NBC Bay Area investigation found that Family Bridges operates as an unregulated educational workshop rather than a licensed clinical program, that courts sending children to it do not track outcomes, that costs run roughly $40,000 per case, and that several young adults who went through it described 90-day forced no-contact periods and fear-based tactics. The program’s founder, Randy Rand, had an inactive psychology license at the time of that reporting.
These programs the way they are right now do not, do not work.
Investigative reporting found reunification programs largely unregulated and untracked by the courts that order children into them.
NBC Bay Area’s investigative unit reported in November 2018 that Bay Area family courts did not know how many children they had sent to reunification programs like Family Bridges and did not track outcomes, because the programs are structured as educational rather than psychological services and so fall outside standard licensing oversight.
don’t know how many children they’ve sent to reunification programs like Family Bridges, nor do they track the outcomes
Courts and researchers who study this now recognize several distinct, non-exclusive reasons a child may resist a parent, including a justified response to that parent’s own abuse or neglect, a temporary alignment during high family conflict, a developmental preference or affinity, or genuine alienating behavior by the other parent. Treating alienation as the default explanation is exactly the confirmatory bias that current research warns against.
The main outcome study for the best-known program was conducted by the program’s own developer, used a before-and-after design with no control group and no independent long-term follow-up, and journalism has documented coercive practices and a lack of court oversight or outcome tracking.
Warshak (2019), Journal of Divorce and Remarriage 60(8); NBC Bay Area (2018)
What to actually do
- If a page discusses a child resisting contact with a parent, describe the behavior first and then note that clinicians and courts now recognize several possible causes rather than assuming alienation.
- Attribute the resist/refuse framing to the 2020 Family Court Review special issue and the 2022 AFCC and NCJFCJ joint statement, not to an unnamed AFCC task force.
- If mentioning reunification or family bridges style programs, note plainly that the main evidence comes from the program’s own developer and that independent reporting has raised real concerns about oversight and methods.
- Do not name or imply a specific formally chartered AFCC task force with named members. We could only verify the 2022 joint statement and the 2020 Family Court Review special issue.
- Do not present reunification or family bridges programs as evidence-based without noting the conflict of interest in the primary outcome study and the coercive-practices reporting.
We would like to be corrected by people who do this for a living. If something on this page is wrong, or reads as naive about how a courtroom actually works, tell us. Corrections on this site are published with a date and a description of what was wrong, not quietly edited in.