Well, the point of the OP goes further than that. Two Big Questions are (a) what to do with the non-owning back references (such as backref going up the owning tree) - for this 'soft' pointers are proposed (I _hate_ shared_ptr-like ref-counted stuff, in large projects they tend to cause much more trouble then they're worth, especially memory leaks due to shared_ptr loops are troublesome, causing both syntactic and semantic memory leaks, ouch!), and (b) how to formalize the use of those non-owning ('naked') pointers/references and how to prevent them from being dereferenced when they're pointing to already-deallocated memory locations (and saying "don't use naked pointers/refs, ever" is not really practical IMNSHO).