When the Same Alienating Behaviours Hit the Grandparents — Bounds and Matthewson (2023)

Love Over Exile is a plain-language research and policy archive on parental alienation, written by Malcolm Smith — an alienated parent and author of the forthcoming book Love Over Exile — for non-specialist readers (other alienated parents, grandparents, family members, therapists, lawyers) who want to understand the UK and US legal and evidence base without a law degree, a psychology qualification or a journal subscription. This page is one entry in that archive.

What did Bounds and Matthewson actually find?

The headline is one sentence, and it is the sentence that justifies a research article on this paper. Alienated grandparents experience the same alienating behaviours as targeted parents and adult alienated children describe.

The verbatim claim, from the paper’s abstract: “Alienated grandparents reported being exposed to 13 parental alienating behaviours used by the alienating parent. These behaviours are consistent with those reported by targeted parents and adult alienated children in other studies.”

That second sentence is the load-bearing analytical contribution. The first establishes a count; the second establishes an equivalence — the alienating-behaviour repertoire is not a parent-to-parent phenomenon. It is a family-system phenomenon, deployed by an alienating parent against multiple relational targets in parallel. Targeted parent, child, grandparent — different roles, same playbook.

Bounds and Matthewson (2023) is the paper that nails that equivalence down empirically for the grandparent role. Before it, the grandparent-alienation literature was patchy — Kruk (1995) had documented contact loss, Avieli and Levy (2023) had captured an Israeli erasure narrative, advocacy organisations had collected testimony. After Bounds and Matthewson, the field has a peer-reviewed, qualitative, lab-grounded behaviour-map for what alienating parents do to grandparents.

That is the contribution. It is narrower than the popular framing suggests — and that narrowness is part of what this article tries to make honest.

Who took part in the study?

The recruitment criterion is one phrase, taken verbatim from the abstract: grandparents with limited or no contact with their grandchildren. Twelve of them sat for semi-structured interviews. The data was analysed using inductive thematic analysis (Braun and Clarke, 2006) in the Family and Interpersonal Relationships Lab at the University of Tasmania School of Psychological Science.

Two notes on the sample worth flagging upfront for honest readers.

First, limited or no contact is a spectrum, not a binary. Some participants had partial residual contact — a phone call here, a brief visit there, a mediated grandchild-message — others had nothing. The sample sits across the alienation-severity spectrum, not at the extreme. That matters because secondary summaries sometimes describe Bounds and Matthewson’s participants as “fully alienated grandparents”, which is broader than the recruitment criterion and not what the abstract states.

Second, the demographic detail — country of residence, age range, gender breakdown, maternal versus paternal grandparent split, whether the participant’s own child was the alienator or the alienated parent — is behind the SAGE paywall and could not be verified for this article. The research team is at the University of Tasmania; whether the participants are Australian, Tasmanian, or international is not stated in publicly available materials. UK readers in particular should not assume the sample is Australian; that detail sits in the unread methods section.

The methodology follows the standard apparatus for credible qualitative interview research — Braun and Clarke (2006) on thematic analysis, Ando, Cousins and Young (2014) on codebook development, Guest, Bunce and Johnson (2006) on saturation, Forero et al. (2018) on rigour. The reference list also cites Morgan (2014) on pragmatism as a paradigm — suggesting the authors framed the analysis in a pragmatist epistemology rather than a critical-realist or interpretive-phenomenological one. The full apparatus is paywalled; the apparatus the reference list signals is the field-standard one.

What are the 13 alienating behaviours grandparents experience?

The 13-behaviour count is verified verbatim from the abstract. The exact wording of each label, however, sits behind the SAGE paywall. This article uses the labels Suzanne Degges-White set out in her April 2023 Psychology Today summary of the paper — labels that closely track the abstract’s framing but are not, strictly, the authors’ own analytical labels.

Treated honestly, the 13-behaviour list is the alienating parent’s catalogue, applied to the grandparent target.

#	Alienating behaviour grandparents reported	Parallel reported by targeted parents
1	Brainwashing the grandchild — sustained narrative that grandparents are bad, unfit, unloving, uncaring	Sustained narrative that the targeted parent is dangerous, unfit, uncaring (Lee-Maturana et al., 2022)
2	Controlling contact and visitation — rigid restrictions on timing, gifts, calls, video	Contact obstruction and gatekeeping (Harman, Kruk and Hines, 2018)
3	Emotional manipulation — systematic erasure of positive memories of the grandparent	Erasure of positive parent-child memory (Bentley and Matthewson, 2020)
4	Information banning and withholding — health, school, relocations, milestones	Withholding child’s school, health, milestone information from targeted parent
5	Denigration through public lies — sustained reputational attack	Denigration in front of the child and the wider community
6	Interrogating the grandchild after grandparent contact — intense questioning about the visit	Interrogating the child after time with the targeted parent
7	Threatening correspondence demanding distance and threatening legal action	Cease-and-desist style threats to the targeted parent
8	Secret-keeping — drawing the child into withholding information from the grandparent	Drawing the child into secrets against the targeted parent
9	Social-media blackout — blocking grandparents from accounts and feeds	Blocking the targeted parent on the child’s accounts
10	Encouraging disrespect — modelling and rewarding disrespectful behaviour toward grandparents	Modelling and rewarding contempt toward the targeted parent
11	Rejecting gifts and cards — returning, refusing, or hiding offerings from grandparents	Rejecting or hiding gifts from the targeted parent
12	Subtle manipulation in still-intact families — beginning before estrangement is overt	Subtle alienation tactics in still-married families (Baker, 2007)
13	False allegations — accusations of abuse, harassment, or stalking against the grandparent	False allegations of abuse against the targeted parent (Sharples, Harman and Lorandos, 2025)

The right column is the contribution Bounds and Matthewson (2023) make explicit — the consistency claim. Every behaviour on the grandparent side has a documented counterpart in the targeted-parent literature. The alienating parent’s repertoire is consistent. What changes is the relational target, not the catalogue.

A practical translation: when a grandparent experiences one or more of these 13 behaviours, that is not a separate “grandparent alienation problem” calling for a separate clinical or legal framework. It is the same alienating-behaviour problem that the targeted parent’s case describes, observed from a different angle of the family system.

How do the grandparent-aimed behaviours travel beyond the dyad?

This is the question the Matthewson-lab programme has now answered three times — once for each of the principal relational targets in alienating behaviour.

Lee-Maturana, Matthewson and Dwan (2022, 10.1177/0192513X211032664) interviewed 54 targeted parents and identified ten consolidated findings about the targeted-parent experience — including the alienating-behaviour repertoire from the parent’s vantage. Bentley and Matthewson (2020, 10.1080/01926187.2020.1775531) interviewed adult alienated children and described their experience of having been the child end of that repertoire. Bounds and Matthewson (2023, 10.1177/0192513X221126753) now adds the grandparent vantage. Each paper is a different angle on the same family-system phenomenon.

Harman, Matthewson and Baker (2022) in Current Opinion in Psychology sits alongside this trio as the synthesis paper on the cascade of losses children experience when alienated — including the loss of the wider family, the loss of grandparents, the loss of cousins, the loss of the family home and family rituals. Bounds and Matthewson’s grandparent-side mapping fits neatly onto the Harman/Matthewson/Baker child-side cascade — what the child loses, the grandparents are also losing, from their side of the relationship.

A small but important caveat on the cluster narrative: Bounds and Matthewson (2023) does not cite Bentley and Matthewson (2020) in its reference list. These are sister studies — same lab, same senior author, same broad qualitative method, published in different journals — but they are not a citation chain. The cluster claim made in this article is empirical (the behaviour repertoire is consistent across roles) and programme-level (one lab has now mapped three roles), not bibliographic.

What does this paper not say?

This is the part of the article most readers will need most. The mid-2020s online discourse on grandparent alienation includes a powerful framing — “some grandparents may never see their grandchildren again before they die … they sacrifice their retirement savings … they experience the double grief of losing their grandchildren and losing their own children as they knew them” — that is widely attributed to Bounds and Matthewson’s research programme.

That framing is not in the published Bounds and Matthewson (2023) paper.

Mandy Matthewson’s own foundation, Eeny Meeny Miney Mo, describes the wider research programme in two parts. The published paper — Study 1 — is the behaviour-mapping paper this article is about. Study 2, the impact paper, is described on the foundation site as “not yet published” and is where the mental-health, ambiguous-loss, double-grief, and chronic-grief findings sit. As of this article’s publication date in 2026, Study 2 is forthcoming, not published.

Practically, this means three things for readers, solicitors, and clinicians citing the work.

First, if you need the behaviour map — what the alienating parent does to grandparents — Bounds and Matthewson (2023) is the citation. The 13-behaviour list and the consistency-with-targeted-parents claim are both verbatim from the abstract and load-bearing in the paper.

Second, if you need the impact — what alienation does to grandparents’ mental health, financial security, life satisfaction, ambiguous-loss profile, suicidality risk — the relevant peer-reviewed literature is not Bounds and Matthewson (2023). It is Boss (2002) on ambiguous loss; Kruk (1995, 10.1017/S0714980800002488) on grandparent-grandchild contact loss; Avieli and Levy (2023) on grandparent erasure (Family Relations); Degges-White et al. (2024) on life satisfaction and help-seeking among alienated grandparents (The Family Journal); and the forthcoming Matthewson-lab Study 2 when it is published. Cite those for the impact picture; cite Bounds and Matthewson for the behaviour-map picture; do not conflate.

Third, the popular “second-most-affected role in any alienating-behaviour case” framing — including in earlier drafts of this article’s working brief — is editorial framing applied by readers and synthesisers. It is not a claim the authors of Bounds and Matthewson (2023) make. The authors’ own analytic claim is the consistency claim, not a severity-ranking claim. This article uses the consistency claim, not the ranking claim.

Reading the paper that way is more honest than the popular online narrative — and the more-honest reading is also the analytically richer one. The behaviour-repertoire-travels-beyond-the-dyad finding is the structurally important contribution. It supports both the targeted parent’s case (“the alienator’s pattern is recognisable across the wider family”) and the alienated grandparent’s case (“you are seeing the same playbook your child’s other parent is”).

What does this mean for UK family-court practice?

The UK grandparent route is structurally different to the parent route — and the difference matters when applying Bounds and Matthewson’s behaviour-map in the UK.

Children Act 1989 s.10(9) — leave to apply

Grandparents in England and Wales do not have automatic standing to apply for a child-arrangements order. They must first apply for leave under section 10(9) of the Children Act 1989, unless they fall within the section’s exceptions (the most common being where the child has been living with the grandparent for at least three years, or where everyone with parental responsibility consents).

When the court considers a leave application, section 10(9) directs particular attention to the nature of the proposed application, the applicant’s connection with the child, and any risk that the proposed application might disrupt the child’s life to such an extent that they would be harmed.

This is a gateway application. The grandparent’s behaviour-evidence — the 13-behaviour map deployed against them — is relevant at the gateway stage as evidence of the connection that exists, the disruption that the alienating behaviours are already causing, and the welfare-justified reasons to proceed.

Re J (Leave to Issue Application for Residence Order) [2003] 1 FLR 114

The canonical Court of Appeal authority on s.10(9) for grandparents is Re J (Leave to Issue Application for Residence Order) [2003] 1 FLR 114. The Court of Appeal in that case rejected the argument that a leave applicant must establish a “good arguable case”. Per Thorpe LJ: “it is important that trial judges should recognise the greater appreciation that has developed of the value of what grandparents have to offer, particularly to children of disabled parents.” The threshold for leave is therefore lower than the parent threshold — an applicant grandparent does not need to satisfy a merits filter at the gateway stage.

For practitioners, Re J is the authority to cite when an alienating parent’s solicitor argues that the grandparent’s leave application should be filtered out at threshold. Re J does not let it be filtered.

The FJC December 2024 guidance is parent-to-parent

Here is the most important UK-relevance point in this whole article. The Family Justice Council’s December 2024 guidance on responding to allegations of alienating behaviour defines alienating behaviour as “psychologically manipulative behaviours, intended or otherwise, by a parent towards a child which have resulted in the child’s reluctance, resistance or refusal to spend time with the other parent.”

That definition is parent-to-parent. It is structured around two parents and a child. The principal definition does not directly cover behaviour by a parent against a grandparent.

This means UK courts, when addressing grandparent contact cases involving alienating behaviour by the parent, do not run the FJC three-element test (RRR is established; not appropriate justified rejection; not attachment / affinity / alignment) against the grandparent target. The FJC framework is not the operative legal vehicle for grandparent alienation in the UK. The s.10(9) leave route, with the welfare paramountcy test under s.1 of the Children Act 1989, is.

Cafcass July 2025 acknowledges wider-family damage but does not name grandparents specifically

The Cafcass July 2025 guide on RRR acknowledges that alienating behaviour “can also damage the child’s connection with the ‘other side’ of their wider family” — wider-family damage is on the radar. But the guide does not address grandparents specifically, does not run the Four As model against grandparent targets, and operates within the FJC parent-to-parent framing. Cafcass’s role in a UK grandparent case is therefore typically through the Section 7 welfare report ordered after the s.10(9) leave application is granted — addressing the welfare implications of restoring or restricting grandparent contact — rather than as the primary alienating-behaviour assessor.

For a grandparent applicant, the practical UK pipeline is therefore: section 10(9) leave application → leave granted (citing Re J) → application for child-arrangements order → Section 7 welfare report (where the FCA assesses the child’s wishes and feelings, the wider family context, and any safeguarding concerns) → final hearing on the welfare merits.

Bounds and Matthewson’s 13-behaviour map is most useful at three points in that pipeline. At the leave stage, as evidence of the connection and the disruption justifying leave under s.10(9). In the FCA’s welfare assessment, as the peer-reviewed reference frame for what the grandparent has been experiencing. And in the welfare-merits hearing, as the citation that reframes “this is a difficult family dispute” into “this is a recognisable alienating-behaviour pattern in the wider family system.”

What are the limitations of this evidence?

Three limitations are visible without paywall access, and they matter for honest citation.

First, the sample is small. Twelve grandparents is a typical qualitative-study size — appropriate for inductive thematic analysis, sufficient to surface the behaviour repertoire, and structurally inappropriate for statistical generalisation. Bounds and Matthewson (2023) does not claim that all alienated grandparents experience all thirteen behaviours, or that population-level prevalence of grandparent alienation can be inferred from this work; the paper itself, in the abstract’s only forward-looking sentence, states “further research is needed to better understand the impact of parental alienation on grandparents and the wider family system”. The 13-behaviour list is rich qualitative description, not a population-level prevalence claim.

Second, the design is single-informant. Only the grandparent’s perspective is captured; there is no triangulation against the alienating parent (who would predictably disagree with the framing), the targeted parent (who could corroborate), or the alienated grandchild (who is the subject of the contested contact). The 13-behaviour map is what grandparents reported experiencing — whether each behaviour was, in factual terms, deliberate and severable from the family conflict is a question this paper’s design cannot answer. Cafcass / Cafcass Cymru are not arbiters of fact, as the FJC December 2024 guidance puts it; neither is a qualitative interview study, and the factual matrix in any individual case is ultimately for the court.

Third — and this is the limitation most easily missed — the published paper is the behaviour-mapping paper. It is not the impact paper. Reasoning honestly from this study about what grandparent alienation does to grandparents requires either reading the wider literature (Boss, 1999; Kruk, 1995; Avieli and Levy, 2023; Degges-White et al., 2024) or waiting for the forthcoming Matthewson-lab Study 2. This article does not infer impact from a behaviour-mapping study, and citations to “grandparents’ devastating mental-health outcomes (Bounds and Matthewson, 2023)” are stretching the paper’s contribution beyond what it documents.

Reasonable inferred limitations — the kinds the authors’ own paywalled limitations section may state — include the recruitment route (likely a convenience or snowball sample via lab and advocacy networks, typical for the Matthewson lab), the national context (not stated in publicly accessible material), and the retrospective self-report inherent to interview research. The lab itself, citing Haeffel and Howard (2010), uses the phrase “self-report: psychology’s four-letter word” as a methodological self-disclosure in this very paper’s reference list — a sign the authors themselves take retrospective bias seriously.

None of these limitations make the 13-behaviour map less useful. They make it useful in the way honest qualitative research is useful: rich case-level texture, programme-level convergence with sister studies, and a peer-reviewed citation a clinician, lawyer or grandparent can point at when describing what they have been experiencing.

Why this matters — for grandparents, clinicians, and the UK family courts

Grandparent alienation is sometimes described as the second-most-affected role in any alienating-behaviour case. That description is editorial framing, not a Bounds and Matthewson finding. But the framing has support in the wider literature — the cascade-of-losses synthesis (Harman, Matthewson and Baker, 2022) makes it clear that what the alienated child loses, the wider family also loses. The grandparent is on the receiving end of the same loss the child experiences, but observed from a different vantage and across a different generational arc.

For grandparents reading this page, the practical implications are three.

First, the experience has a peer-reviewed name. Parental alienating behaviours experienced by alienated grandparents (Bounds and Matthewson, 2023) is now a citation a grandparent can hand to a sceptical solicitor, GP, therapist or family member. The behaviours are not a private complaint; they are a documented repertoire identifiable across an interview cohort and consistent with the targeted-parent and adult-alienated-child literatures.

Second, in the UK family courts, the route runs through Children Act 1989 s.10(9) and Re J [2003] — not through the FJC December 2024 framework directly. Reading the Cafcass and FJC documents is still useful for context and for understanding what your child’s other parent is being measured against, but the structural pathway for the grandparent application itself is the s.10(9) leave route into a child-arrangements-order application, with welfare-paramountcy under s.1 as the operative test and a Section 7 welfare report likely as the FCA’s mechanism for assessment.

Third, the impact is real, peer-reviewed, and increasingly well-documented — but not in this paper. Cite Boss (1999) for ambiguous loss; Kruk (1995) for grandparent contact loss; Avieli and Levy (2023) for grandparent erasure; Degges-White and colleagues (2024) for help-seeking; and the forthcoming Matthewson-lab Study 2 once it is published. Cite Bounds and Matthewson (2023) for the behaviour map. Honest citation does the cause more good than overcitation does.

For clinicians and family-court professionals, the operational value of Bounds and Matthewson (2023) is the consistency claim. Grandparent alienation is not a separate clinical or legal phenomenon requiring a separate framework. It is the same alienating-behaviour pattern, observed from a different relational vantage. Treat it as such — same vocabulary, same evidence base, same ethical posture, adjusted only for the different legal route the wider family takes through the UK courts.

Primary Sources Cited

The peer-reviewed and policy sources directly anchoring this article — every citation in the body links here, and every link below is the primary text or the primary court / policy document, not a secondary summary.

• Bounds, O., & Matthewson, M. (2023). Parental Alienating Behaviours Experienced by Alienated Grandparents. Journal of Family Issues 44(12), 3250–3272. DOI 10.1177/0192513X221126753.
• Bentley, C., & Matthewson, M. (2020). The Not-Forgotten Child: Alienated Adult Children’s Experience of Parental Alienation. American Journal of Family Therapy 48(5), 509–529. DOI 10.1080/01926187.2020.1775531.
• Lee-Maturana, S., Matthewson, M., & Dwan, C. (2022). Ten Key Findings on Targeted Parents’ Experiences. Journal of Family Issues 43(10), 2672–2700. DOI 10.1177/0192513X211032664.
• Harman, J. J., Matthewson, M. L., & Baker, A. J. L. (2022). Losses Experienced by Children Alienated From a Parent. Current Opinion in Psychology 43, 7–12. DOI 10.1016/j.copsyc.2021.05.003.
• Harman, J. J., Kruk, E., & Hines, D. A. (2018). Parental Alienating Behaviors: An Unacknowledged Form of Family Violence. Psychological Bulletin 144(12), 1275–1299. DOI 10.1037/bul0000175.
• Boss, P. (1999). Ambiguous Loss: Learning to Live with Unresolved Grief. Harvard University Press. Publisher.
• Kruk, E. (1995). Grandparent-grandchild Contact Loss: Findings from a Pilot Study. Canadian Journal on Aging 14(4), 737–754. DOI 10.1017/S0714980800002488.
• Avieli, H., & Levy, I. (2023). I Feel Erased — Older Israeli Jewish Grandparents Cut Off From Their Grandchildren. Family Relations 72(5). DOI 10.1111/fare.12704.
• Degges-White, S., Hermann-Turner, K., Kepic, M., Randolph, A., & Killam, W. (2024). Grandparent Alienation: Life Satisfaction and Help-Seeking Experiences. The Family Journal 32(4). DOI 10.1177/10664807241282432.
• Children Act 1989, section 10(9) — UK Parliament. legislation.gov.uk.
• In re J (Leave to Issue Application for Residence Order) [2003] 1 FLR 114 — Court of Appeal. swarb.co.uk summary.
• Family Justice Council (December 2024) — Guidance on responding to allegations of alienating behaviour. judiciary.uk PDF.
• Cafcass (July 2025) — Understanding why a child does not want to spend family time with a parent. cafcass.gov.uk PDF.
• Eeny Meeny Miney Mo Foundation — Grandparents page (Matthewson’s foundation; describes Study 1 / Study 2 split). emmm.org.au.