A Shift in American Family Values Is Fueling Estrangement
Both parents and adult children often fail to recognize how profoundly the rules of family life have changed over the past half-century.
Sometimes my work feels more like ministry than therapy. As a psychologist specializing in family estrangement, my days are spent sitting with parents who are struggling with profound feelings of grief and uncertainty. “If I get sick during the pandemic, will my son break his four years of silence and contact me? Or will I just die alone?” “How am I supposed to live with this kind of pain if I never see my daughter again?” “My grandchildren and I were so close and this estrangement has nothing to do with them. Do they think I abandoned them?”
Since I wrote my book When Parents Hurt, my practice has filled with mothers and fathers who want help healing the distance with their adult children and learning how to cope with the pain of losing them. I also treat adult children who are estranged from their parents. Some of those adult children want no contact because their parents behaved in ways that were clearly abusive or rejecting. To make matters worse for their children and themselves, some parents are unable to repair or empathize with the damage they caused or continue to inflict. However, my recent research—and my clinical work over the past four decades—has shown me that you can be a conscientious parent and your kid may still want nothing to do with you when they’re older.
However they arrive at estrangement, parents and adult children seem to be looking at the past and present through very different eyes. Estranged parents often tell me that their adult child is rewriting the history of their childhood, accusing them of things they didn’t do, and/or failing to acknowledge the ways the parent demonstrated their love and commitment. Adult children frequently say the parent is gaslighting them by not acknowledging the harm they caused or are still causing, failing to respect their boundaries, and/or being unwilling to accept the adult child’s requirements for a healthy relationship.
Both sides often fail to recognize how profoundly the rules of family life have changed over the past half-century. “Never before have family relationships been seen as so interwoven with the search for personal growth, the pursuit of happiness, and the need to confront and overcome psychological obstacles,” the historian Stephanie Coontz, the director of education and research for the Council on Contemporary Families, told me in an email. “For most of history, family relationships were based on mutual obligations rather than on mutual understanding. Parents or children might reproach the other for failing to honor/acknowledge their duty, but the idea that a relative could be faulted for failing to honor/acknowledge one’s ‘identity’ would have been incomprehensible.”
The historian Steven Mintz, the author of Huck’s Raft: A History of American Childhood, made a similar observation in an email: “Families in the past fought over tangible resources—land, inheritances, family property. They still do, but all this is aggravated and intensified by a mindset that does seem to be distinctive to our time. Our conflicts are often psychological rather than material—and therefore even harder to resolve.”
In The Marriage-Go-Round, the Johns Hopkins University sociologist Andrew Cherlin wrote that starting in the late 19th century, traditional sources of identity such as class, religion, and community slowly began to be replaced with an emphasis on personal growth and happiness. By the second half of the 20th century, American families had gone through changes that, Cherlin said, were “unlike anything that previous generations of Americans have ever seen.”
Deciding which people to keep in or out of one’s life has become an important strategy to achieve that happiness. While there’s nothing especially modern about family conflict or a desire to feel insulated from it, conceptualizing the estrangement of a family member as an expression of personal growth as it is commonly done today is almost certainly new.
Of course, not all individuals base their ideas of family on these more individualized principles. “Most immigrant families, especially those in the first generation, still value interdependence and filial duty,” Mintz noted. “However, in recent decades the majority of American families have experienced weakening [extended] kin ties and high rates of mobility and dispersion. I would argue that these factors have made the opportunities for familial alienation greater than in the past.”
Estrangement seems to affect a small but significant portion of families in the United States, and it is happening today against a backdrop of record-high parental investment. During the past 50 years, people across the classes have been working harder than ever to be good parents. They have given up hobbies, sleep, and time with their friends in the hope of slingshotting their offspring into successful adulthood.
On the positive side, this increased investment of time and affection has meant that parents and adult children are in more consistent and positive contact than in prior generations. Due to the likelihood of divorce, many parents in the past half century have had reason to believe that the relationship with their child might be the one connection they can count on—the one most likely to be there in the future. Yet, in the same way that unrealistically high expectations of fulfillment from marriage sometimes increase the risk of divorce, unrealistically high expectations of families as providers of happiness and meaning might increase the risk of estrangement.
Studies on parental estrangement have grown rapidly in the past decade, perhaps reflecting the increasing number of families who are affected. Most estrangements between a parent and an adult child are initiated by the child, according to a 2015 survey of more than 800 people. A survey of mothers from 65 to 75 years old with at least two living adult children found that about 11 percent were estranged from a child. Of those, 62 percent reported contact less than once a month with at least one child, and the remaining 38 percent reported zero contact in the past year.
In these and other studies, common reasons given by the estranged adult children were emotional, physical, or sexual abuse in childhood by the parent, “toxic” behaviors such as disrespect or hurtfulness, feeling unsupported, and clashes in values. Parents are more likely to blame the estrangement on their divorce, their child’s spouse, or what they perceive as their child’s “entitlement.”
While estrangement can occur for many reasons, divorce appears to heighten the risk for both mothers and fathers—especially fathers. Fathers are also at greater risk of being estranged from their kids if they were never married to the mother, and might have more distant relationships with their children if they remarry later in life. In my survey of more than 1,600 estranged parents summarized in my forthcoming book, Rules of Estrangement, more than 70 percent of respondents were divorced from the estranged child’s other biological parent.
Why would divorce increase the risk? In my clinical work I have seen how divorce can create a radical realignment of long-held bonds of loyalty, gratitude, and obligation in a family. It can tempt one parent to poison the child against the other. It can cause children to reexamine their lives prior to divorce and shift their perspective so they now support one parent and oppose the other. It can bring in new people—stepparents or stepsiblings—to compete with the child for emotional or material resources. Divorce—as well as the separation of parents who never married—can alter the gravitational trajectories of a family so that, over time, members spin further and further out of one another’s reach. And when they do, they might not feel compelled to return.
But in other cases, estrangement is born from love. One of the downsides of the careful, conscientious, anxious parenting that has become common in the United States is that our children sometimes get too much of us—not only our time and dedication, but our worry, our concern. Sometimes the steady current of our movement toward children creates a wave so powerful that it threatens to push them off their own moorings; it leaves them unable to find their footing until they’re safely beyond the parent’s reach. Sometimes they need to leave the parent to find themselves.
And sometimes children feel too much responsibility for their parents’ happiness. I often hear estranged adult children request better boundaries from their parents as a condition of reconciliation. As Andrew Solomon wrote in Far From the Tree, “There is no contradiction between loving someone and feeling burdened by that person. Indeed, love tends to magnify the burden.”
Many fathers and mothers tell me they feel betrayed by their children’s lack of availability or responsivity, especially those who provided their children with a life they see as enviable compared with their own childhoods. As the University of Virginia sociologist Joseph E. Davis told me, parents expect a “reciprocal bond of kinship” in which their years of parenting will be repaid with later closeness. The University of Chicago philosophy professor Agnes Callard told me in an interview that this expectation of reciprocity is fraught because “today, the boundary of parenting is unclear. If receiving shelter, food, and clothing is enough, then most of us should be grateful to our parents, irrespective of how our lives go.” However, if parents are supposed to produce happy adults, then, fairly or not, adult children might hold parents responsible for their unhappiness.
In my experience, part of what confuses today’s parents of adult children is how little power they have when their child decides to end contact. From the adult child’s perspective, there might be much to gain from an estrangement: the liberation from those perceived as hurtful or oppressive, the claiming of authority in a relationship, and the sense of control over which people to keep in one’s life. For the mother or father, there is little benefit when their child cuts off contact. Parents instead describe profound feelings of loss, shame, and regret.
While most of the research focuses on parents and adult children, estrangements among other family members might not be uncommon. The University of Washington communications professor Kristina Scharp found that estrangements between parents and adult children often ripple out to create other types of family schisms. In a forthcoming study of sibling estrangement, the Edge Hill University lecturer Lucy Blake found that arguments over caregiving for aging parents were a common cause of these rifts, as was sibling abuse. She also found that estranged siblings often reported having been treated worse by their parents than their other siblings.
After becoming estranged from her own parents, the journalist and researcher Becca Bland started Stand Alone, a charitable organization in the U.K. that provides education and support for people estranged from their families. (I’m also starting a training program on estrangement with Bland this year.) She notes that before considering estrangement, it is vital to let the parent know more about what is creating the conflict. “While an estrangement may be very necessary, it’s important that you give your parents time and opportunity to hear your perspective and what you want them to change,” Bland said in an email. To those who are open to reconciliation, I would also propose working with a family therapist or mediator to talk through sensitive or painful subjects with your parents.
Because the adult child typically initiates the estrangement, parents are often the ones who must take the first steps toward reconciliation. In my practice and in the survey I conducted, I have seen that when reconciliations happen, parents often attribute successful reconnection to efforts on their part to make amends, such as taking responsibility for past harms; showing empathy for the adult child’s perspective and feelings; expressing willingness to change problematic behaviors; and accepting their child’s request for better boundaries around privacy, amount of contact, and time spent with grandchildren. It’s also crucial to avoid discussions about “right” and “wrong,” instead assuming that there is at least a kernel of truth in the child’s perspective, however at odds that is with the parent’s viewpoint.
Fathers often seem less willing to accept those conditions than mothers. Mothers’ willingness to empathize or work to understand the child’s perspective might result from the ways in which women are held to a higher standard of responsibility for maintaining family relationships than men are. Fathers are deeply wounded by estrangements too, but men’s tendency to cover depression with anger, social withdrawal, and compartmentalization might make them look less affected than they actually are. They might also feel that pushing back on the child’s requests is more in line with their ideals of masculinity and maintaining authority in the relationship.
There are good and bad features of modern family life, in which relations are often based more on ties of affection than on duty or obedience. In these times, the people we choose to be close to represent not only a preference, but a profound statement of our identities. We are freed to surround ourselves with those who reflect our deepest values—parents included. We feel empowered to call on loved ones to be more sensitive to our needs, our emotions, and our aspirations. This freedom enables us to become untethered and protected from hurtful or abusive family members.
Yet in less grave scenarios our American love affair with the needs and rights of the individual conceals how much sorrow we create for those we leave behind. We may see cutting off family members as courageous rather than avoidant or selfish. We can convince ourselves that it’s better to go it alone than to do the work it takes to resolve conflict. Some problems may be irresolvable, but there are also relationships that don’t need to be lost forever.
It is sometimes tempting to see family members as one more burden in an already demanding life. It can be hard to see their awkward attempts to care for us, the confounding nature of their struggles, and the history they carry stumbling into the present. It can be difficult to apologize to those we’ve hurt and hard to forgive those who have hurt us. But sometimes the benefits outweigh the costs. Tara Westover wrote in her memoir, Educated, “I know only this: that when my mother told me she had not been the mother to me that she wished she’d been, she became that mother for the first time.”
We are all flawed. We should have that at the forefront of our minds when deciding who to keep in or out of our lives—and how to respond to those who no longer want us in theirs.
Dear Therapist: My Daughter Hasn’t Wanted a Relationship With Me for 25 Years
I want to reestablish our connection, but she won’t even acknowledge me at family events.
Dear Therapist,
My oldest daughter (from my first marriage) hasn’t wanted a relationship with me for more than 25 years. I remarried about 28 years ago and have two children, both daughters, with my current wife. My oldest daughter was a bridesmaid at the second wedding and seemed accepting of the new family dynamic. Her mother had also remarried, a few years earlier.
My daughter is now 48 years old, and her sisters are 27 and 28. Although we have encountered one another at extended-family events (christenings, graduations, her brothers’ weddings, etc.), she does not acknowledge me, my wife, or her sisters. I want to reestablish a connection, and my younger daughters are disappointed that she doesn’t want to get to know them.
Over the years, I have tried various overtures to reconcile: I’ve been sending Christmas and birthday cards every year, and once or twice I’ve written notes inquiring about her life and interests and concerns—but no response.
I’m 70 years old now and a cancer survivor, and I hurt every day about this situation. I so want to have her back in my life, connecting with her sisters. What can I do?
Mike
Philadelphia
Dear Mike,
Being estranged from your daughter is understandably painful—your love for her comes across in your letter—and you should know that many parents are living with a similar kind of heartbreak. If you want to reconnect with your daughter, though, you’ll need to get curious about her pain—the pain that has made the idea of contact with you so hard for her.
I don’t know how your divorce and subsequent remarriage affected your daughter, but in ways you may not have realized, she got hurt. Although she was a bridesmaid at your wedding and “seemed accepting” of the situation, there’s a good chance that her feelings ran deeper. Often in these situations, parents want so badly for their kids to be okay with what’s going on (because, let’s face it, for you, your new marriage was a happy event) that they don’t see what’s happening beneath the surface with their children. Your daughter likely tried, in her college-age way, to let you know she was upset about something, and if she didn’t feel heard then, you’re going to have to hear her now.
To hear her, you’ll need to acknowledge that the two of you have what therapists call separate realities. Parents, for example, tend to believe that they acted in the best interests of their children, while the children may feel that their parents failed to do just that. Both “realities” are valid because they’re simply two perspectives on the same situation. Separate realities are a normal part of any relationship—including between spouses or siblings or friends—and relationships go more smoothly when each person can see some truth in the other’s reality. But there’s a caveat: When it comes to children who are hurting—including adult children such as your daughter—it’s a parent’s job to make the effort to see the child’s reality first.
That’s why your contact with your daughter over the years, though well meaning, has probably felt a bit tone-deaf to her. By sending annual holiday cards and asking “once or twice” in the course of two decades about her interests and concerns, you’ve shown that you’re thinking about her; but by giving short shrift to the elephant in the room—directly acknowledging that you’ve hurt her—you’ve created the impression that you don’t care about her inner world (a perception that likely led her to cut off contact in the first place). Of course, it’s hard for most parents to hear how they disappointed their kids, especially if they tried their absolute best, but unless you can see how you contributed to her feelings of anger or hurt, nothing will change between you. Right now the only way she can communicate her pain to you is by inflicting it on you in return—with her distance. But once you’re able to receive this message by other means—by understanding what she’s gone through—the indirect message becomes unnecessary.
You can start with a sincere apology. A sincere apology is heartfelt and empathic and entirely about the person receiving it. A letter in this spirit might go something like this: “I owe you an apology, and I wish I’d offered it much sooner. I know that I’ve hurt you deeply, and I’m truly sorry for that. I would like to know more about your experience, because I’ve come to realize that I failed to see earlier that I put you through a lot of pain. You may be so hurt and distrusting of me that you don’t want to open up lines of communication, but I want you to know that I love you deeply and I’m committed to really listening to you and hearing you in a way I should have long ago. One idea I have is that maybe we could talk about some of this, at least initially, with a therapist of your choice. Of course, I love and miss you very much, but I also want to respect where you are. I hope that at some point you’ll be willing to talk with me about this. Whatever you decide, I want you to know that I’m starting to see my role in your pain, and am so sorry for it.”
Notice that the apology doesn’t ask for her forgiveness, something that would lessen your pain. It doesn’t offer reasons or justifications for why you may have made certain choices that affected her. It doesn’t imply that she’s overly sensitive. (“I’m sorry if I hurt you” is different from “I’m sorry that I hurt you.”) It doesn’t manipulate her with your age or health status. It doesn’t say that you’d like her to befriend your daughters, who are 20 years younger and from another marriage, and who may have made her feel like less of a priority to you at a time when she needed you most. (Asking her to alleviate your younger daughters’ pain will simply reinforce her belief that you can’t see hers.)
Of course, she might not respond at first—or ever. If she doesn’t, you might consider replacing your holiday cards with another invitation to understand her pain. If she does eventually respond, remember that you’re there only to listen and come to understand her better, and that you’ll need to start slowly, giving her all the space she needs. Let her decide on what she’s comfortable with—she may, for instance, feel comfortable establishing email communication but not be interested in phone conversations or meeting in person.
Whatever the outcome, you’ll have a lot of feelings about what’s happening. Because you don’t want to burden your daughter with them or respond poorly to her because you’re struggling with your own pain, seeing a therapist can help you navigate this process in a way that’s healthy for both you and your daughter. In talking with a therapist, you may even discover more about what led to the estrangement, leaving you less in the dark about the distance. At the very least, you’ll develop coping strategies for what is a difficult and protracted process that has the potential to be immensely gratifying for each of you.
‘Intensive’ Parenting Is Now the Norm in America
The style of child-rearing that most aspire to takes a lot of time and money, and many families can’t pull it off.
Supervised, enriching playtime. Frequent conversations about thoughts and feelings. Patient, well-reasoned explanations of household rules. And extracurriculars. Lots and lots of extracurriculars.
These are the oft-stereotyped hallmarks of a parenting style that has been common in upper-middle-class households for at least a generation. But according to a recent survey, this child-rearing philosophy now has a much broader appeal, one that holds across race and class. The survey, which polled roughly 3,600 parents of children ages 8 to 10 who were demographically and economically representative of the national population, found evidence that hands-on parenting is not just what the well-off practice—it’s what everyone aspires to.
Intensive is the adjective that researchers, including Patrick Ishizuka, a postdoctoral fellow at Cornell University who published the survey results late last year, use to describe this model of raising kids. It’s difficult to nail down precisely when it became the standard that so many American parents hold themselves to, but its approach seems built for an era of widening economic inequality, in which the downsides of a child falling behind economically are the largest they’ve been in generations.
[Read: How well-intentioned white families can perpetuate racism]
Intensive parenting was first identified as a middle-class phenomenon, most notably by the sociologists Sharon Hays and Annette Lareau in the 1990s and 2000s, respectively. Lareau in particular called the approach “concerted cultivation” and contrasted it with a vision of parenting she labeled “the accomplishment of natural growth,” which entails much less parental involvement and which she found to be more common among working-class and poorer parents. A big lingering question since then has been why these class differences exist: Did poorer families have different notions of what makes for good parenting, or did they simply lack the resources to practice the parenting styles they believed would be better?
What’s useful about Ishizuka’s survey data is they suggest that even if parenting style differs by class, parenting attitudes—what parents think they should do—currently don’t. Jessica McCrory Calarco, a sociologist at Indiana University who studies parenting and has written about it for The Atlantic, explained in an email why she thinks this new study (which she was not involved in) is significant: “If parents from different social class backgrounds are engaging in different parenting practices … it’s not because those parents value different parenting practices,” she wrote. “Instead, there must be some other reason.”
Because intensive parenting requires an abundance of time and money, the reason is likely that some families have more resources than others. “Poverty not only limits parents’ ability to pay for music lessons, for example, but is also a major source of stress that can influence parents’ energy, attention, and patience when interacting with children,” Ishizuka told me.
Academic researchers have traced the origins of intensive parenting to the mid-20th century. But the timing of how it spread is somewhat uncertain: Ishizuka said there unfortunately aren’t historical survey data showing “how pervasive cultural norms of intensive parenting were among parents of different social classes and when they may have diffused.”
A plausible history of the past couple decades of American parenting, though, is that a critical mass of families with sufficient means started engaging in intensive parenting, and then everyone else followed. “That would be consistent with prior research on cultural shifts, which have shown that elite culture gradually becomes mass culture,” Calarco explained.
Intensive parenting is a style of child-rearing fit for an age of inequality, indicative of a stratified past, present, and future. The past: As some social scientists have theorized, the tilt toward intensive parenting originated at least in part from parents’ anxieties about their children competing for education and jobs. (The more extracurriculars, the logic of intensive parenting goes, the better the odds of getting into an excellent college and of securing one of the high-paying jobs that America cordons off for the best-credentialed.) The present: As Ishizuka described, intensive parenting is an ideal that’s currently out of reach for many families. And the future: Practiced as it is by some families but not others, it might replicate—or even widen—inequities in future generations.
Many children surely benefit from being raised like this—concerted cultivation can serve them well later in life, teaching them how to manage their time and assert their individuality. But heavily involved parenting can at the same time stunt kids’ sense of self-reliance, and overcommitted after-school schedules can leave them exhausted. Also, there is some evidence that parents who overdo it increase the risk that their children will grow up to be depressed and less satisfied with life. And on the parents’ side, the intensive ideal can lead parents—particularly mothers—to fear that they aren’t doing enough to give their child the best future possible.
In part because of the strain that intensive child-rearing puts on parents and kids, some parents have started moving away from the practice and toward free-range parenting, a hands-off child-rearing philosophy that recommends against constant monitoring (and that isn’t unlike “the accomplishment of natural growth”).
But as Calarco has pointed out, free-range parenting comes with a double standard: When whiter, more affluent parents practice it, it’s welcomed as a corrective to more overbearing approaches, but when poorer parents and parents of color practice it, it can be viewed as neglectful. Which means free-range parenting might be rooted in inequality, just like the philosophy that it’s a reaction to.
