America’s Families Are Not Okay
"Some families are irretrievably broken, and nothing can repair the damage done.
April is 30 years old. She lives in New Hampshire, where she owns a small business with her brother. They have no family, other than a mother 3,000 miles away whom they never see.
Growing up in a religious community in Idaho, their home was chaos. April’s mother had bipolar disorder and her mood swings would cause fights—wild, physical brawls—with April’s father. They would scream and throw things. Sometimes, April’s mother would pull out a knife and hold it to her throat while telling the children she was going to kill herself in front of them. Then April’s father would tackle her and wrestle the knife away...
All of this has been a source of great sadness and embarrassment for April. For a decade, she avoided the topic altogether. But over the last couple of years something changed: When she confided in a few peers about her history, they were excited by it. Almost jealous.
“Writing off your parents used to be a big, shameful thing to do,” says April. “But lately, it’s almost like it’s bragging rights to estrange from your family. Now people want to talk to me because of it. Then they tell me about their parents and how terrible they were, how they’re going ‘no-contact,’ but they have these dumbass reasons. You find out they estranged because their dad denies climate change. I want to say, ‘Relationships take work. You actually have parents who love you. Don’t you care at all?’”
But family estrangement, once taboo, has become fashionable, a cause for both grief—as families mourn their missing loved ones—and celebration, with young adults seen as brave and empowered for casting off their elders.
Recent studies show more than one in four adult children in the United States are or have been estranged—defined as having no contact or a poor relationship with limited contact—from one or both parents. Over the summer, Cosmopolitan published a long article titled, “Why So Many Young People Are Cutting Off Their Parents.” Conversations about “going no contact” and estrangement are now mainstays on daytime talk shows and social media. Something is not only driving families apart but leading them to talk about it more openly.
Among Millennials and elder Gen Z (people aged roughly 20-38), estrangement has even become a banner of bravery in some circles. “Estranging Yourself from Family Can be Lifesaving,” proclaimed Men’s Health in October 2022. WikiHow has multiple entries with step-by-step, illustrated tutorials for going no-contact with family members. Literally thousands of YouTube and TikTok coaches offer advice for cutting “toxic” family out of your life. A Google search for “how to estrange from your parents” returns 370,000 results. Sociologist and researcher Karl Pillemar, author of Fault Lines: Fractured Families and How to Mend Them, estimates that currently in the United States, about 67 million people are estranged.
This nags at April. How could she spend three decades yearning for a real family—for Sunday dinners and a dad she could call when her car broke down—while all around her people were walking away from exactly that?
She tried joining an online support group for estranged adult children but it didn’t help. Most of the people there had the option to return to their families. They weren’t unhappy about their estrangement; in fact, they seemed to see it as a triumph, a step toward empowerment in a black-and-white world.
“Today most estrangement is about ‘individuating,’ which sounds like propaganda to me,” April says. “I mean sure, maybe you have a period in young adulthood where you don’t have a ton of contact with your parents. But the idea that you fully estrange and never speak to them again because they’re too interested in your life, or because they think something that’s different from you? I just don’t buy that. It’s very painful to be estranged from your family. Believe me, I know.”
Few estrangements have the clear-cut logic of April’s. In fact, many children of abjectly abusive parents grow up and find a way to protect themselves but stay in touch. The sins of estranged parents are usually squishier and vague. Toxicity, emotional neglect, wrong values. These offenses—defined by the zeitgeist—appear clear to estrangers. But often parents keep searching for a reason for the estrangement, even after their adult children have told them what they’ve done wrong...
In fairness to the estrangers, definitions of abuse do change over time...The question is whether society has swung too far the other way, in the direction of demonizing the benign. Today, irritating parental behaviors once seen as funny or ethnic—prying, overstepping, giving personal advice, meddling (think the stereotypical Greek or Italian moms of Y2K-era hits like “My Big Fat Greek Wedding” and “Everybody Loves Raymond”)—are viewed as “toxic.”
“Suddenly everyone is ‘toxic,’” declared an August 2022 essay in The Atlantic by Kaitlyn Tiffany, exploring the sudden dramatic rise in people online prescribing estrangement as the remedy. “Maybe #toxic posts are popular because relationship drama is good entertainment, especially on TikTok—an app for teenagers whose literal role in society is to explore the full spectrum of irrational behavior,” Tiffany speculated. But if it had started as drama and entertainment, she worried, it might not stay that way: “At a time when our most intimate relationships really do seem to be becoming more brittle, it’s hard to laugh off the possibility that some people are taking all of this to heart.”...
When Kiley moved away to college, Cynthia didn’t contact her by text or phone for a week...
They had a setback just a few days later when Cynthia suggested that Kiley use the library rather than buying all of her books.
“The fight that ensued over that was so huge,” Cynthia recalls. “She said ‘I don’t know if I can live with this family, we have very different value systems. I feel like I’m going through everything alone.’”
“But what you said, suggesting she go to the library, wasn’t so terrible,” I interrupt. “I can’t think of a mother who hasn’t said something similar.”
Cynthia disagrees politely. “No. I was trying to change her, instead of respecting her for who she is. So I apologized and told her I was still working to change how I interact with her. I’m the adult. I have to take ownership of what I did.”
These are the choices parents face, especially as they watch their friends lose adult children to estrangement. So far, the self-work approach is helping Cynthia maintain a connection with her daughter. But it threatens a sort of boomerang effect. One of the categories of parent that the Internet recommends cutting off is “emotionally immature”—including those that make their adult children feel lonely, responsible, or like they have to parent themselves. By choosing the path that defers to their child’s point of view, a parent risks being labeled weak or “codependent.” There’s just no clear way out...
After acting school, Natalie auditioned for a famous theater program and got in. “That’s when we started to see things like she’s a vegetarian, glucose-intolerant, going to the ER routinely for things like a sinus infection. Then she moved to San Francisco and things got bad.”
Once in California, Natalie realized she was the only person in her circle who wasn’t taking antidepressants, and carrying Xanax for panic attacks. In 2018, she told Marilyn she was going to a gynecologist for devastating PMS. “I told her to come back home and get a doctor who would diagnose, not just prescribe,” Marilyn recalls. “We fought.”
After switching doctors several times, Natalie was told she had a hormonal condition—and, unrelated, she also needed maxillofacial surgery for a dental problem that braces had failed to fix. Natalie moved back to Dallas, to prepare for a surgery that would saw through the bones of her face. The procedure was scheduled for June 2020.
“I was in her apartment one day in March,” says Marilyn. “She came out of her bedroom and told me Governor Abbott was locking down the state. I said, ‘Oh, that’s going to hurt a lot of people.’ She threw me out.”
Their relationship worsened during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic. Marilyn joined friends for dinner—outdoors—as soon as it was permitted. As a result, Natalie wore a mask when visiting her parents and would speak only to her father, but not her mother, on the grounds that Marilyn wasn’t taking appropriate precautions.
“What was the point if my husband was exposed to my germs at home?” Marilyn asks. “Everyone was playing along with this absolute bullshit that made no sense.”...
Robert Shulman, chair of the department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at Rush University Medical Center, believes that part of the problem comes down to the very thing Marilyn cites: that unstinting devotion.
“Millennials were never supposed to feel bad,” Shulman says. “Everyone got a participation trophy. The parent would help make the diorama for science. So the child was denied competence. When the child grows up and hits a barrier they lack the skills to cope with it, so they turn on the parent.”
Theories like Shulman’s explain some but not all of the no-contact trend. Like many estranged mothers, Marilyn has a close, loving relationship with her other adult child. She’s articulate and funny, willing to set clear boundaries and hold firm. She has never abused or exploited her daughter and sends occasional messages expressing unconditional love—which is what the therapeutic community recommends.
Joshua Coleman—arguably the country’s leading estrangement expert and author of Rules of Estrangement: Why Adult Children Cut Contact and How to Heal the Conflict—conducted a study that found divorce was a driving factor in two-thirds of parent/child estrangements. But Marilyn and her husband have worked hard on their sometimes difficult marriage—specifically to maintain an intact home for their kids.
For some children, especially those with means who don’t fear suffering financial hardship due to cutting off their parents, it seems estrangement is an option. Between three siblings, where one estranges and the other two do not, the outcome may have more to do with the children’s temperaments than any profound difference in how they were treated by their parents.
Given the sudden rise in “toxic” and “no contact” discourse, it’s tempting to imagine that something fundamental has changed in the nature of parents and children. But when you boil it down, it seems that what has really changed is the view of estrangement itself, with more people choosing it simply because it’s a socially-endorsed choice.
Last year, Hila Blum’s superb novel, How To Love Your Daughter, won the Sapir Prize—Israel’s most prestigious literary award. It was published in the United States in fall 2023...
Over years, a story began to develop of a mistake that would cleave the relationship between mother and daughter. But even then, Blum did not know which one it was. Reading the book, it’s impossible to be sure.
How to Love Your Daughter became a hot book club pick and Blum attended several groups. She was unprepared, she says, for the fiery reader response. Every club she joined split more or less down the middle and debated—fiercely—who was to blame. There were readers who found Leah spoiled, petulant and ungrateful, others who said Yoella was toxic, domineering and narcissistic. There was little conversation about the form, story or themes of the novel; the discussion always centered around which woman was at fault.
This surprised Blum, who had grown to love and understand both of her main characters. She didn’t think in terms of blame, but rather of human error and redemption. To the author, nothing about the split between Yoella and Leah was black and white.
“Writing this novel, I was struck by the impossibility of predicting the long-term effects of small daily decisions,” Blum says. “We as parents are driven by emotions that we think of as love and intentions that we perceive to be good and well-meaning and reasons we think of as right, but we can still arrive at terrible decisions. So the broad theme of this novel was not so much estrangement but the damage that can be done to our children, even when we strive to do our best.”
In other words, every parent makes mistakes. But these days, it’s unclear which mistakes are forgivable and which will result in all but losing your child...
One thing seems certain: Estrangement is passed down through generations. A 2015 British study found that 54% of estranged respondents agreed with the statement “estrangement or relationship breakdown is common in our family.” I’ve heard from two momfluencers who claim they estranged from their own parents in order to have better, closer relationships with their kids. But rarely is this how it works out. The reality of family estrangement is that once you start, it spreads."
It's interesting how college-aged children are not seen as adults, and giving a suggestion is seen as trying to change someone and disrespecting him
It's easier to blame your parents for everything that's wrong in your life (e.g. Larkin) than to take responsibility