The heartbreak of parent-child estrangement, and how to cope

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Parent-child estrangement is heartbreaking, but with empathy and amends, there’s a path towards healing and reconnection. Photo / 123rf
Descriptions of abuse or neglect are common in an estrangement between an adult child and a parent. Many parents are baffled and hurt by this perception.

When one of my patients thinks about
her daughter, she remembers sitting with her in the neonatal intensive care unit for five weeks after her birth, praying she would survive. She recalls the fun they had touring colleges and later helping her set up her dorm room. She remembers them travelling to Europe two years ago laughing at each other’s feeble attempts to ask for directions in French.

She tearfully recounts these memories while describing how shocked she was when her daughter told her that she no longer wanted her in her life.
Her daughter, now 25, said that she learned in therapy that her mother was “emotionally abusive” when she was young, and that it was bad for her mental health to be around her. “I’m so confused,” my patient told me, reaching for a box of tissues. “We were always so close. I gave everything to that child.”
Descriptions of abuse or neglect are common in adult children’s decision to cut off contact with a parent. Like my patient, many parents are baffled and hurt by this perception.
At the centre of this parental confusion is a generational divide over what constitutes psychological harm.
This disparity exists in part because the threshold for what gets labelled abusive, traumatising, harmful or neglectful has been both lowered and expanded over the past three decades. From this perspective, adult children view childhood and parenting with a far more analytical and critical eye than the generations before them.
Their assessment of the parent and the past are bolstered by innumerous online sources offering information or misinformation about who’s toxic, narcissistic, borderline and why you might be better served giving that person the boot. Younger generations are also more likely to be in therapy than were their parents, which furthers the confidence and authority in their views.
While sometimes parents initiate estrangements, studies show that it’s more often their offspring who terminate the relationship. For the parent, there is no upside to an estrangement: it’s all shame, loss, regret and fear. However, estrangement from the adult child’s perspective offers an opportunity to demonstrate greater authority and autonomy in the relationship with the parent, set limits on hurtful behaviour, express aspects of their individuality such as gender identity or sexuality, or enforce stronger boundaries.
Conversations can go poorly with such different orientations.
I often see parents struggling to navigate what they experience as a sea change in today’s diminished expectations of family obligations. Today’s adult children have far more power to set the terms of the relationship than did those of earlier generations when “Honour thy mother and thy father” and “Respect thy elders” were the guiding lights. Given this relatively new arrangement, nothing compels an adult child to have a relationship with the parent beyond their desire to be in contact.
This means that parents must be more psychological and active in maintaining their connection to their adult children if a close relationship is the goal.
As a practising psychologist who also researches estrangement, I’ve found that one of the most important predictors of reconciliation is the parent’s ability to make amends to their adult child. Parents are often confused by this recommendation, believing that making amends is the same as completely endorsing the child’s perspective. While sometimes that is required, more often amends should be viewed as a starting point; a frank recognition that there is something deeply wrong in the relationship with the parent that needs addressing.
Some of the estranged parents in my practice are blocked from accessing their child through cellphone or social media. Many are bewildered and afraid, no longer knowing where their children or grandchildren live – cut out, perhaps forever – from the rituals of family that gave their lives purpose and meaning.
However, if they do have the ability to contact their child, I encourage them to write a letter stating, “I know you wouldn’t have cut off contact unless you felt like it was the healthiest thing for you to do.” I say this because it’s true from the adult child’s perspective – even if not from the parent’s – and because it communicates the parent’s wish to understand and heal the distance.
Like some parents in my practice, my patient didn’t love that recommendation: “I’m not going to beg for forgiveness when I didn’t do anything wrong,” she told me. “I would’ve killed for a childhood like hers and now I’m supposed to apologise in order to get her back? I have no idea what she’s even talking about.”
If you don’t know, you should ask.
Say, “It’s clear that I have blind spots as a parent that I didn’t realise you experienced me as abusive (or gaslighting, boundary crossing, narcissistic) but I’m glad you’re letting me know.” Ask if other memories or experiences led your child to that conclusion. Ask that, not to defend yourself or explain it away, but to show empathy and deepen your understanding of your child.
But I understand my patient’s reluctance. While most people assume that an adult child wouldn’t cut off contact unless the parent had done something terrible, that’s not always the case. Sometimes the rupture originates more in the child. For example, if the child suffers from addictions or mental illness; or they’ve been alienated from one parent by the other after a divorce, or they’re married to a troubled person who asks your child to choose between their parent or spouse, or they’re under the influence of an untrained therapist or social media influencer who assumes all adult unhappiness has a traumatising parent at its helm.
Sadly, there are many pathways to estrangement, and in today’s tribal and fractured culture, it doesn’t take a lot to trigger one.
Yet, even if the cause of the estrangement lies more in the child than the parent, amends are still necessary from the parent to begin a conversation of repair. You don’t have to agree with your child to make amends. It’s about humility, not humiliation. While I don’t presume that a child’s perspective on their parent is accurate, I also don’t assume that a parent’s perspective on their child is either. We all have our blind spots.
Not every child responds or responds well to an amends letter. Fortunately, my patient’s daughter did, thanking her for her openness and agreeing to go to therapy with her to work on their relationship. My patient worries it could happen again. Perhaps it will. The most she or any parent can do is to use the estrangement or reconciliation as an opportunity to better understand their child and the ways that led them to turn away.
Cultural anthropologist Mary Catherine Bateson wrote that marriage demands a continuous rhythm of adaptation between two evolving individuals. The same can be said of relationships between parents and their offspring.
Children can change dramatically over the course of their lives, but so can a parent. There will inevitably be aspects that the other finds challenging or difficult. In family, our task is to ensure that love and support remain the guiding principles; to find ways to communicate that foster closeness and reduce hurt; and to hope for patience – theirs and ours -­ as we navigate these new and uncharted territories of parent-adult child relationships.
Joshua Coleman, PhD, is a clinical psychologist in the Bay Area and senior fellow with the Council on Contemporary Families. His newest book is “Rules of Estrangement: Why Adult Children Cut Ties and How to Heal the Conflict.”
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