Estrangement from an adult child
A parent and an adult son or daughter with little or no contact, and a relationship at least one of them lives as broken. In most studies the adult child is the one who ends or reduces contact, and the parent is left with a loss that has no funeral and may not be final, since many estrangements come and go.
What drives it
The two sides usually hold different accounts of why. Adult children in these studies speak of abuse, poor parenting, betrayal or clashing values, and parents more often point to a divorce, the child’s partner or the child’s mental health. Useful for identification because the parent’s grief is real and rarely recognized, and because the distance between the two accounts may itself keep the silence going. Pillemer found that people who reconciled had mostly stopped needing the other to accept their version of the past.
How it shows
Work
Dreading the Monday question about the holidays. A colleague’s story about her grandchildren landing harder than anything said in the meeting. Keeping the photo on the desk and changing the subject when someone asks about it.
Relationships
Learning of a wedding or a grandchild’s birth through a cousin or a social media post. Birthday cards that go unanswered year after year. One parent in contact and the other cut off, or brothers and sisters caught between.
Self
Notice the account you give of why it happened, and whether it puts the cause entirely outside you or entirely on you. Notice what you check for: a read receipt, a new photo, a name in a mutual friend’s post.
What tells it apart
Emotional cutoff: Emotional cutoff is Bowen’s name for managing unresolved family ties through distance, and it is usually described from the side of the person who leaves. Estrangement from an adult child more likely names what the parent on the other side is living with, whatever the reasons.
Ambiguous loss (Boss): The child is alive and absent, which is one form of ambiguous loss. That lens may fit better when the hardest part is not knowing whether to grieve or to keep hoping.
Parental alienation (a contested concept): Parental alienation is a contested claim that one parent turned a child against the other, argued mostly in custody disputes. Most estranged mothers in Coleman’s survey said someone had turned their child against them, while adult children in other studies more often name what happened between them and that parent, so the claim may be part of the picture and is unlikely to be all of it.
A test
Ask the parent to write the reason their child would give, in the child’s own words, next to their own. If the two accounts barely touch, the estrangement may be held in place by two different histories as much as by any one event.
Questions to carry
- What was the last exchange between my child and me before the silence?
- Which part of my own account of it do I hold most tightly?
How strong the research is
moderate. In a national survey of more than 1,300 Americans for Karl Pillemer’s Fault Lines (2020), 27% had cut off contact with a relative and 10% were estranged from a parent or a child. In the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (Reczek, Stacey and Thomeer, Journal of Marriage and Family), 6% of adult children reported estrangement from their mother and 26% from their father, and most of these estrangements later ended (81% with mothers, 69% with fathers). Estimates move a great deal with how estrangement is defined. In 566 families with mothers aged 65 to 75 (Gilligan, Suitor and Pillemer, 2015), about one in ten had an estranged child, a gap in values as the mother saw it predicted estrangement, and the child’s drug use or trouble with the law did not. The two sides explain it differently. In 26 Australian adult children reporting 40 estrangements (Agllias, Australian Social Work, 2016), 23 were begun by the adult child, and the reasons given were abuse, poor parenting and betrayal. In 1,035 estranged mothers recruited from a support email list (Schoppe-Sullivan, Coleman and colleagues, 2021), 79% said family members had turned the child against them, 62% named the child’s mental health and 18% saw themselves at fault. Joshua Coleman, who surveyed 1,632 estranged parents for Rules of Estrangement (2021), writes that 70% of the parents who contacted him had a divorce in their past. Most of this work uses self-selected samples and hears from one side only.
Where it comes from
Kylie Agllias, The gendered experience of family estrangement in later life, Affilia, 2013, and Family Estrangement: A Matter of Perspective. Karl Pillemer, Fault Lines: Fractured Families and How to Mend Them, 2020. Joshua Coleman, Rules of Estrangement: Why Adult Children Cut Ties and How to Heal the Conflict, 2021