Feb. 17, 2026

Why Young Adults Cut Off Their Parents, with Dr Joshua Coleman

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Ask Rachel anything When Brooklyn Beckham publicly announced he didn't want to reconcile with his parents he was joining a painful catalogue of family stories that have gone wrong. Estrangement is reportedly on the rise in Western societies but what's behind it? Dr Joshua Coleman spends his life working with estranged parents so he sees, first hand, the main factors that can lead to it. He highlights that while emotional abuse is often cited as a cause, it's often a matter of unme...

Ask Rachel anything

When Brooklyn Beckham publicly announced he didn't want to reconcile with his parents he was joining a painful catalogue of family stories that have gone wrong.

Estrangement is reportedly on the rise in Western societies but what's behind it?

Dr Joshua Coleman spends his life working with estranged parents so he sees, first hand, the main factors that can lead to it. He highlights that while emotional abuse is often cited as a cause, it's often a matter of unmet expectations and generational differences.

Some of the core drivers are divorce, children marrying someone who doesn't get on with your family, social media ideals, therapy culture and individualism.

Given that estrangement can be emotionally devastating for parents, leading to feelings of isolation and loss, he advises parents to take their children's complaints seriously and to be open to therapy and family discussions.

Dr Joshua Coleman:

Family Troubles: https://joshuacolemanphd.substack.com/

https://joshuacolemanphd.substack.com/p/how-to-not-become-estranged

https://www.drjoshuacoleman.com/

Teenagers Untangled Community Substack:

https://teenagersuntangled.substack.com/

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You can reach Susie at www.amindful-life.co.uk

00:00 - Intro: Why Estrangement Is Rising (and Why It Matters for Parents)

01:49 - Is Estrangement a Western Problem? Individualism vs Family Loyalty

03:24 - Is Family Estrangement Really Increasing? Data, Divorce & Social Media

04:47 - Is It Really Abuse? Generational Clashes Over ‘Emotional Harm

07:42 - When ‘Good’ Parenting Backfires: Over-Involvement, Phones & Surveillance

09:29 - Culture, Sexuality and Coming Back: A Story of Temporary Estrangement

10:06 - How Divorce Fuels Estrangement (Especially from Dads)

11:30 - Should Adult Children Ever Go No Contact? Josh’s Advice to Them

14:03 - What Parents Should (and Shouldn’t) Do When Kids Confront Them

16:36 - Giving Space vs Giving Up: ‘Parenting at a Distance’

17:36 - Have Parents Lost Too Much Authority? Finding the Authoritative Middle

19:13 - Discomfort vs Harm: Are We Over-Pathologising Normal Feelings?

23:21 - Trauma Talk, Therapy Culture and Blaming Parents for Everything

23:37 - Are Young People Worse at Repairing Relationships?

23:42 - Early Warning Signs: How to Spot Estrangement Risk in Teens & Adults

25:29 - What Estrangement Feels Like for Parents: The Hidden Grief

26:36 - Ambiguous Loss: When Your Child Is Alive But Not in Your Life

28:43 - ‘Kids Don’t Cut Off Parents for No Reason’—But It’s Not Always Abuse

28:51 - How to Reduce Estrangement Risk in Tweens and Teens Now

31:05 - A New Moral Order: From ‘Honour Thy Parents’ to ‘Protect My Mental Health’

33:30 - One Thing Every Parent Should Do to Protect the Relationship

WEBVTT

00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:31.820
Hello and welcome to teenagers untangled the audio hug for everyone supporting anyone going through the tween and teen years. I'm Rachel Richards, journalist, mother of two teenagers and two bonus daughters. Now, one of the UK's most famous families had a deeply personal conflict exposed in the public eye recently, and it's opened up a cultural conversation about something parents fear and few actually talk about Brooklyn. Beckham, the eldest son of David and Victoria Beckham, has publicly said he does not want to reconcile with his parents after a long reported family rift.

00:00:32.479 --> 00:01:03.299
This isn't about celebrity gossip. This is human pain, and what's happening with the Beckhams reflects something I'm getting quite a few emails about. So I think understanding estrangement and what leads to it may be one of the most important things we can do, both to protect our future relationships with our own children and support families who are going through it. Today, we're going to explore estrangement, what's driving it, whether it's genuinely helpful or harmful, and what the rise of no contact culture teaches us about how we can better parent our kids to unpack all of this.

00:01:03.359 --> 00:01:19.739
I'm joined by the incredible Dr Joshua Coleman, psychologist, author of the book roles of engagement, Senior Fellow of the Council of contemporary families, and one of the world's leading experts on parent child estrangement. Welcome to teenagers. Untangled, Josh.

00:01:16.140 --> 00:01:47.379
Thank you for having me. It's great be back. I just want to say before we move on, you have the most amazing sub stack. And I really urge people who are affected by any of this to come and onto sub stack and read your software that the link will be in the in the notes. So let's start with that. Wanted to ask you what you think has changed in modern parenting that might be fueling estrangement. And then, when I looked at the figures, there doesn't seem to be an awful lot before 2000 so it's not like divorce figures, where we can see a definite trend. What? What are your thoughts about this, the sparsity of the data?

00:01:49.599 --> 00:01:57.159
Yeah, I think it's, it's, you know, the sort of a debate in my field about, well, there's always been estrangements, and, you know, not because of social media.

00:01:57.159 --> 00:02:27.979
People feel more comfortable being out there. I don't think that that's accurate, I think that there's been a rise in estrangements Over the past several decades, as a result of many things. Divorce is certainly a big cause of estrangement for a variety of reasons. Social media is a big amplifier. Instagram social media influencers in particular, who advise the value of cutting off family toxic parents has something like her toxic family, something like 2 billion hashtag views on Tiktok.

00:02:29.060 --> 00:02:51.039
That's that's huge. The increasing influence of therapy and therapists younger Thera, younger generations are much more likely to be in therapy. So the Council of therapists, therapists who say, Well, your parents are borderline or narcissist or sociopath, you'd be better off not having a relationship with them, even though they've never met the parent. That's an influence.

00:02:47.199 --> 00:03:12.300
Rising rates of mental illness, both for parents and adult children, can be, can be a cause. There's, there's a variety of in the United States, political differences is a big cost of estrangement. So the lot of things that have occurred in the course of the half century, rising rates of individualism, but in particular in the last few decades, in terms of the amplifying effects of social media that I think have contributed to this.

00:03:13.379 --> 00:03:23.900
I'm very interested, because I know you wrote a piece recently about the difference in cultures, and how actually you consider this to be possibly more of a Western phenomenon. Can you expand on that?

00:03:24.919 --> 00:04:46.899
Yeah, in the West, we're very oriented towards the individual. United States, for example, has the highest rates of individualism than any other society. And what is individualism? Individualism is a preoccupation with one's own personal happiness, one's own personal growth, one's own identity, and so we prioritize that above everything. The research on that really shows that people who are particularly oriented towards that tend to be less happy than those who have more of a identity based around relationships and the like. So in other cultures, really, we're the minority of the way that we sort of think about identity and selfhood. So you know, the Joseph Heinrich, the cultural anthropologist, wrote the book, the weirdest people in the world. He says Westerners are the weirdest people in the world. And we weird is a acronym for Western, educated, industrialized, rich democracies. And what he said is that, you know, in our countries, we look at we look at relationships in a completely different way than in more communitarian societies, which is really more true. I mean, even the United States, Latin American families are less prone to estrangement because they have more of a familial prioritization. Black mothers are sort of the least likely to be estranged of anybody. So even within the US, there are kind of these subcultural differences that matter as well. So cultures, cultures are very big determinant of how we think about family relationships.

00:04:47.379 --> 00:05:08.939
That is absolutely fascinating. And when you when you deal with people, to what extent do you find that the reasons for estrangement are to. Do with actual abuse compared with perhaps an emotional mismatch of unmet expectations and this western viewpoint of what what they deserve, right?

00:05:08.939 --> 00:05:32.540
Yeah, I mean, in general, from the adult child's perspective, there, they feel like the parent deserves to be estranged, and so most of the time when adult children cut off a parent, they say it's because of emotional abuse. But even there, it's very complicated, because in the past three decades, we've really lowered the threshold of what we get, what we label as emotional abuse, trauma, harm and neglect.

00:05:32.720 --> 00:05:54.579
So the generations are often talking past each other. Older generations who grew up with a very, you know, much higher bar for what constitutes abuse or neglect their younger generation, adult children are coming to them and saying, you emotionally abused me, you neglected me, you traumatized me. And the parents like, I would have killed for your childhood. What are you even talking about? Absolutely right?

00:05:54.579 --> 00:07:28.459
And so there's this, you know, and that doesn't put the conversation on a very good footing, because then the adult child feels like, we'll see that's very invalidating, which is part of, part of what my therapist said you do. So, so you can see why estrangement is can get so easily, easily triggered. So from the adult child's perspective, it's much more likely to be explained by abuse from that kind of perspective. But just, you know, I think it's important to emphasize that there are multiple pathways to estrangement. There are, you know, there's divorce, there is abuse. Clearly, I don't think it's the research shows that it's child abuse. Is not the most common cause of estrangement, but it's in there, right? Sometimes, when it's the adult child gets married. In my survey of 1600 estranged parents, 70% of them didn't become estranged until the child married. So we know that the parents relationship to the new spouse, or the spouse's feelings about the parents, is hugely determinative of whether there's an estrangement. Again, mental illness, addictions, therapy, and sometimes you know it's just because, getting back to The Parenting aspect, the downside of kind of the close, conscientious, anxious, guilt ridden parenting we've been doing for the past, you know, three or four decades, is that sometimes our children get too much of us and they don't know any other way to feel separate from us than to cut us off. So for the longest time, yeah, for the longest time, I've wanted to write an article with the title something like, you know, how can I have a rebellious adolescence when my parents are so nice?

00:07:28.459 --> 00:07:30.860
I love that.

00:07:28.459 --> 00:07:41.560
That's a really important that's a really, really interesting point. So you're saying that actually our incredible sort of emotional openness and kindness to our children can actually feel like too much

00:07:42.459 --> 00:07:44.319
well, right?

00:07:42.459 --> 00:08:26.120
Because play has moved indoors in the past, you know, two, two decades or so, you have smaller family sizes. Often you've got a divorced parent, and so it creates this kind of a hot house in terms of the environment, where the kid just sort of gets too much of mom and dad, and there's this kind of surveilling that can happen now with cell phones, and then they leave home, and the parent can still reach them from anywhere in the world within seconds, and then feel hurt or upset, if they don't, you know, text them back right away. So all of this really intensifies the parent adult child relationship. I mean, in many ways, it's a good news, bad news. And you know, a lot of the surveys today show that today's parents feel closer to their adult children than them. They believe their parents felt to them at a similar age.

00:08:26.120 --> 00:08:41.379
So so the good news is that this much more conscientious, psychological involved, intensive parenting that we've been doing over the past few decades generally does result in a positive relationship. So I don't want to scare anybody, but I think that there are a subset.

00:08:38.059 --> 00:09:29.360
I think there are a subset of adult children who just can't organically separate. Like, when I moved to San Francisco from Dayton, Ohio, in my early 20s, I didn't have some way of, like, sending my picture, you know, pictures from my phone to my parents, because the phone wasn't even, you know, maybe I called them two weeks later because we took a long time to drive out of here, you know, call them collect when I got there, and that was it. So, so it's sort of easier to just become a separate adult through very low contact, but a lot of adult children don't have that luxury. So when they go low contact or no contact, it's because they just want less of that parent in their life, not necessarily. They may explain it by saying, Oh, it's because the parent was so toxic or abusive or whatever, but sometimes it's just a rationalization for just wanting the parent to just back the hell up.

00:09:29.419 --> 00:10:01.740
It's absolutely a fascinating point. And I actually had a lovely woman that I interviewed who's Desi, which is an Indian origin, and she's she's gay, and so she ended up having to completely separate from her parents, and she was estranged for a while, just to sort of remodel who she was in their eyes, and slowly they came back together. But I think underpinning that was the fact that she came from a culture where it was really important for a family to continue relationship. You know, it was far too painful. And are you one of the things you've. Mentioned, which I think is fascinating.

00:10:01.740 --> 00:10:05.220
You've mentioned a few times, divorce. Why does that cause more estrangement?

00:10:06.059 --> 00:11:06.659
Sure, there's. There's four different reasons why it causes it. One is it can cause one parent to poison the child against the other parent. And that can happen whether the children are young or they're grown. You know, the so called gray divorces. Second of all, the child may blame one parent more than the other parent, even if it isn't that parents fault and even if the other parent is doing a reasonable job of not aligning that parent. Third, remarriage, we know is a huge risk of a stranger, particularly for dads. Typically, if dads remarry, when the kids are adults, they're much more like kids are much more likely to ally with mom, not always, but they're more likely to fourth in a highly individualistic culture like ours, once a divorce happens, children are much more likely to see the parent, more as individuals with their own kind of relative assets and liabilities, and less like a family unit that they're a part of. And fifth, you know, when parents do remarry or recouple, they may not like the person that mom or dad married, and that person may not like them, or they may resent having to share emotional, material resources with the new children.

00:11:06.840 --> 00:11:11.039
So divorce is just a hotbed of potential causes of estrangement.

00:11:11.700 --> 00:11:18.779
Fascinating, yes, and I have seen that personally with people I know.

00:11:13.799 --> 00:11:30.139
And so if you have a child who is cutting off one parent in that situation. What would be your advice? You know, because for some of these kids, they say, well, I need this. I need to not talk to that person. I don't like them. I don't, you know, I don't want to align myself with them.

00:11:30.740 --> 00:11:48.460
Yeah, what's my advice to the child you're saying? I mean, in general, you know, it isn't my position that people should never estranged because there are truly abusive parents and family members, where you just may not be able to be in relationship with them.

00:11:44.379 --> 00:11:57.279
But I do think it's important to give people a lot of runway if you're considering it, particularly for an adult child, and considering cutting off a path, because the consequence of that parent are so devastating.

00:11:57.279 --> 00:13:39.620
You know, to have your child not talk to you, particularly to be cut off from your grandchildren, is typically, if an adult child cuts off the parents, they typically cut off access to the grandchildren for the parent, it's kind of a double loss. So my my wish for adult children are considering it when I say give a parent a lot of runways to really let them know what you want them and need them to work on in order to be in relationship with you. And then if they're not able to do it to let them know that you're not sure that you can actually stay in relationship with them if they can't change and then you may need to stop contact. But my other hope is that people, when they do go no contact, or that they leave the door open to revisit it in a year, because sometimes people don't really get how bad things are. You know, until that until they've been left by the child, and that year may give them time to really do a deeper dive, you know, reach out to a professional really think much more deeply about why their adult child needed to do this, so that when the adult child comes back, then they're kind of willing and able to reconcile and know a healthy way. So I'm no thank you. Yeah, I'm just, I'm not a fan of permanent strangers, because people, you know, even the most seemingly hopeless people, are often capable of change with the right care in the right direction. And the big tragedy about these estrangements Is that the people who are the least able to are often the people who are the most traumatized themselves, you know. And sometimes I'll hear adult child say, well, the cycle of trauma stops with me by and I'm going to cut you out. It's like, well, guess what? No, you're it's actually not stopping with you. You're actually perpetuating the trauma, because you're traumatizing your parent by cutting off access to them and their grandchildren. So you can say that you're the cycle of trauma stopping with you. It's actually not you're perpetuating it. You can say you need to do this for your own mental health.

00:13:39.620 --> 00:13:44.980
Fine. I buy that, maybe. But you know the idea that you're ending the cycle of trauma bullshit? I call bullshit on that.

00:13:45.279 --> 00:14:01.860
Oh, that's fascinating. Yes, very good point. And wait with parents. So let's say you're a parent and you've got a child who's now saying they want to estranged from you, and perhaps they are remembering events differently from the way you remember them.

00:13:58.539 --> 00:14:02.340
How should a parent deal with this

00:14:03.659 --> 00:14:59.919
as a parent, if when your kid comes to you and complains about how you raise them, or how you hurt them, or whatever, it's human nature to be defensive, to feel defensive, to try to explain it away, to say if the kid misunderstood you, or they're mischaracterizing you or you, you're remembering it wrong, that you shouldn't do any of that, that always backfires the thing for parents to have adult children to know is that nothing compels your adult child to have a relationship with you beyond that adult child's desire to have that relationship. And so, you know, if you live in a culture like ours, you're not, you don't have the culture of saying, Well, you have to talk to your parents, or, you know, you got to get isolated by the rest of the family, or so you might anyway, but, but it's not typically the culture that's kind of enforcing this in the way that other cultures do, and what that means is that parents have to be much more psychological and sensitive and responsive. And so I always tell parents, you know, try to find the kernel, if not the bushel, of truth in the child's complaints about you know that if your child is raising it, they're probably raising it to have a better relationship with you or to heal something that's.

00:15:00.000 --> 00:16:03.360
Important about them and themselves, that they need your help with. So defending yourself, explaining yourself, blaming the child, it's only going to work against you. I think that those are the most, really the most important principles. And be open to do family therapy. Be open to doing individual therapy if there's a need for that. So again, this highlights the way that the culture of family has shifted in the past half century away from Honor thy mother and thy father, respect thy elders, families forever, to this much more identitarian personal, you know, growth protect my mental health perspective, and that just means that parents, they just have to work much harder than than our generation of parents had to work with us. I mean, I mean, I talk about this with my peers and my clients, and, you know, everybody says, Well, you know, we wouldn't have cut off our parents. It just wasn't really an option. You know, how, no matter how bad they were, and it's not like any of us were telling our parents to make amends to us, you know, bad parenting. So it's a totally new and different family dynamic that has to be navigated in a different way.

00:16:03.720 --> 00:16:25.340
Yeah, and I find it really interesting, because I did have problems with my parents parenting of me, but through actually spending more time analyzing what they did, the way they grew up, the relationship they had with each other and with myself, it gave me much more perspective. And I think that's the problem. When you sort of cut it off, you don't get the chance to get that insight, which is problematic.

00:16:26.000 --> 00:16:36.259
It's very problematic. As a parent, I think, Oh, God, if I had to give my child a year, that would be really painful for me. How can we tell the difference between giving them space and giving up?

00:16:36.259 --> 00:17:21.980
Yeah, that's a hard word, particularly for mothers, because sometimes I will tell a parent, you need to just go, you know, just not, not even try for a year. Because sometimes it's the trying that's is the part that's triggering to the adult child, if they really need and want the space for the parent to keep pursuing them, feels disrespectful to the adult child, or intrusive or like they're not really honoring the request. Whereas for mothers, it just feels so unmaterial. A lot of dads have an easier time of that, but for a mom to just feel so unmaternal To do that, it feels like I don't want my kid to feel like I don't care, like I'm neglecting them. I call it parenting at a distance. You're actually still being a parent, but you're doing it by giving your child something that they say that they really want or need, which is the time and the space. So No, it isn't it isn't easy for any parent to do. It's torturous for most

00:17:23.420 --> 00:17:30.559
and how does that, that fear of upsetting children, shape the way that we parent and increase that risk?

00:17:30.559 --> 00:17:35.839
Because you talked about that, what to what extent is, is this actually causing problems? Well, I

00:17:36.259 --> 00:18:10.980
think that parents have given up too much of their authority in the past few decades. I think there's a place for because I said so and so. I don't think every parental decision has to be litigated or understood. You know, the research on parenting shows that the parents have the best outcomes with their children or those who are authoritative, meaning that they're, yeah, it's a mix of being very comfortable with their authority, but also very affectionate and involved, versus authoritarian, which is, completely do it my way or the highway. I don't care how you feel, or, you know, neglectful, which is kind of like, do whatever you want. I don't care.

00:18:11.099 --> 00:18:44.259
Authoritative is you're very involved, but it's also you're clear and comfortable with your own authority. I think part of the problem with social media and kind of, you know how much information that was about there about problematic parenting is that parents are so worried today that they're going to screw up their kid, that they do it wrong, they're going to end up estranged. And so it's really taken away their authority, and it's given kids much more authority to kind of get what they want, not what they need, but what they want from the parent in ways that I think are really problematic.

00:18:45.460 --> 00:19:11.339
I agree with you, and I have found with my older daughters, because they're my bonus daughters, that when they've thrown some things at me, and I've pushed back and said, Yes, but this is actually been much healthier. You know, they've responded well to it, because I think they needed someone to give them a different viewpoint, that's and it's difficult. It's difficult to do, but I agree with you, and to what extent do adult children sometimes confuse emotional discomfort with emotional harm?

00:19:08.279 --> 00:19:12.059
Because there's so much mental health talk, I think

00:19:13.440 --> 00:19:31.160
it's a huge problem. I think that it's partly our problem as parents, because we have become so surveilling and conscientious and worried about our children, and that's probably an economic phenomenon. You know, I always get annoyed when people are critical of helicopter parents, because we had to become helicopter parents in the past.

00:19:31.519 --> 00:19:37.819
For decades because of the way that government and businesses has shifted the responsibility of family life onto parents.

00:19:37.819 --> 00:19:59.920
It's what the political scientist Jacob Hacker calls the great risk shift that prior to the 1980s and the development of the neoliberal economy in the United States and in England, for example, under Maggie ours, under Ronald Reagan and Milton Friedman in the UK, under Maggie Thatcher, there was a huge withdrawal of the state and businesses in terms of supporting supporting parents.

00:19:56.559 --> 00:19:59.920
So parents have had to become.

00:20:00.000 --> 00:20:19.319
Much more helicoptering, intensive, even intrusive, because that was the only way to make sure that their kids are going to kind of get up through the narrow bottleneck into a successful life and career. In other countries, Scandinavian societies, for example, where there's enormous social supports, both in businesses and in the government, parents don't have to be so worried about it.

00:20:17.099 --> 00:20:53.500
So parents are more laissez fair. They're more relaxed. So part of the downside of the way that we become much more intensive and conscientious and anxious. I mean, parents city is kind of like, oh my god, does my kid had ADD do they have voting disabilities? Do they need a tutor? No. Do they need a therapist? Do they need to be on medication? Because we're so worried that if we don't give them every single opportunity, they're not going to kind of get it through the narrow bottleneck into a successful life. So we become much more surveilling and thoughtful about their thoughts and feelings in ways that doesn't necessarily serve them, because it kind of gives makes us much more loud and, you know, in front of their consciousness.

00:20:50.680 --> 00:21:46.900
So for example, I think about in terms of my own childhood, like when I was a kid, I used to have this fear of getting lost, but no, but I wasn't diagnosed with that anxiety disorder, and if I had, it would have been much worse, because then I would have it would have had a disorder, as opposed to this kind of just localized sort of phobia. And my father, to his credit, he would take me, like, to a hockey game or some places when I was young, because he knew about it, and he said, Okay, we're gonna go, I'm gonna go up into the stands and you want to give you money to go buy the popcorn, which is all the way down the aisles, and you're gonna find your way back up, which initially was very it was very it was kind of its own version of exposure therapy. He also, he wasn't perfect. He also teased me about my fears of getting lost, but anyway, but having a label isn't necessarily a good thing. It may help you with your feelings of shame, kind of like, well, that's my ADD, or that's my OCD, or that's my PTSD or whatever. But it doesn't. It actually becomes much more part of your consciousness in ways that doesn't necessarily serve you.

00:21:46.900 --> 00:22:13.740
So one study said that something like 40% of Gen Z that was born between 1995 and 2012 have a diagnosis, and a high percentage of them say that that's one of the most important parts of them is their diagnosis. That's not a good thing. It's not a good thing to have your identity oriented around your diagnosis, because you're constantly thinking about whether something is going to inflame your diagnosis or make you feel worse, and that kind of thing.

00:22:11.099 --> 00:23:20.480
So that's also a part of estrangement, is that people also blame their parents way too much for their outcomes. So again, if you look at Gen Z, they have the highest rates of depression, anxiety, suicidal ideation and suicide that any any other generation that preceded them. And it's not because parents have suddenly become bad parents. It's parents fault. It's because of the role of social media and the downward comparison effects of social media and being raised with the cell phone where they're constantly being exposed to other people who supposedly are prettier, happier, smarter, more popular, etc. It's a very corrosive environment, but a lot of them are going to get into so called trauma informed therapies, who were therapists who are, you know, dumb asses, and assume that every problem in adulthood has an Australia, you know, a dysfunctional family at its heart. And then they're going to encourage them to, you know, cut off their toxic family members, and really not be aware of the fact that, no, it's actually the fact that your client, your your adolescent client, or your 20 something client, spends six to eight hours a day on their cell phone, not because they had a deception apparent. These things really matter a lot, right?

00:23:21.140 --> 00:23:26.299
Also, we used to have a word for this overthinking everything, which was navel gazing, and we don't.

00:23:26.299 --> 00:23:31.819
Nobody seems to mention that anymore, but I remember it being a bit, you know, navel gazing.

00:23:29.180 --> 00:23:34.640
Get your head out of that. Get on, just go and do something.

00:23:31.819 --> 00:23:40.960
Right? Coming back to estrangement, and thinking about parents who might be struggling with this, what should a parent be asking themselves,

00:23:42.160 --> 00:23:46.240
Well, you're not usually given a choice about it. I was just interviewed.

00:23:44.019 --> 00:24:08.279
There's a column out today where I was interviewed by the Wall Street Journal about how to avoid an estrangement. So I would encourage your listeners to read that, because we kind of go through, go through everything, but typically, you're not given a choice, but you may be given kind of the ramp up. Your kid may have been complaining more and more. They may be talking about what they're learning in therapy, which you may not be able to relate to or identify with at all. You know, I learned in therapy that you're a narcissist or you're emotionally mature.

00:24:08.519 --> 00:24:50.079
You know, where you neglected me. These are hard things for parents to hear, but parents are always better off, kind of taking it seriously rather than defending themselves. So if there's a ramp up, it's usually starts looking like that. Or if you have a conflict avoidant kid, maybe they're not telling you anything. They're just becoming less and less available, less and less willing to talk to you, less and less willing to to get together. And in that case, you might have to show leadership and just say, Look, I don't I'm aware that you're you seem more distant, and maybe I haven't made it clear that, or made it feel safe to you to be able to complain about me. But if you do have complaints about me or how I'm interacting with you, or the things that happened in the past, I would welcome that conversation. So I don't want you to feel, yeah, I wouldn't.

00:24:47.920 --> 00:25:11.647
Don't want you to feel worried about hurting my feelings, or, you know, making me feel feel bad. I mean, I actually would like, would like, to know. So some kids have to really be helped to complain. About the parent, because sometimes estrangement is a form of conflict avoidance, because the adult child doesn't have the words or the language or or doesn't trust that the parent can tolerate their complaints, so they just kind of go out.

00:25:11.647 --> 00:25:12.488
They just go See ya,

00:25:13.446 --> 00:25:29.118
oh gosh, I love that. Yeah, and you did mention earlier that the terrible impact that it has on parents. Can you explain or describe how it affects the body and mind of a parent if they end up estranged from their child? Yeah.

00:25:29.119 --> 00:26:35.660
I mean, the research on emotional pain is it sort of affects the same pain centers in the brain and the body is, you know, actual physical pain. I did a retreat a few years ago with about 15 estranged parents, or one of the moms was talking about how she felt suicidal, and I said, well, So by a show of hands, how many other parents in this room at one time or another, felt suicidal? Every single parent raised their hand so, so it's just, you know is a testimony to how deeply painful and disorienting, as one mother said to me, said, Nobody calls me mom anymore, which I thought was the most heartbreaking. You know, thing for a parent to say is kind of losing that identity, you know, this whole field of research called mattering, which is just the idea that we have to matter to people, right? We have to feel like, particularly through our children. You know, we have to feel like we matter to them, and to feel like we don't matter to them, that we're so in consequential that, that we can just be erased from their lives is incredibly profoundly disorienting and heartbreaking and upsetting. So for the parent, yeah, the effects are both. They're both physical and psychological.

00:26:36.319 --> 00:26:46.240
And presumably there's, there's also this sort of open sword where, okay, maybe they're coming back. So if there's a little bit of contact, and then there's no That in itself, must be torture.

00:26:46.900 --> 00:26:53.440
Yeah, exactly right. It's a nightmare if your child dies. But there's closure.

00:26:49.779 --> 00:27:56.440
There's also kind of a repertoire of responses that people know to give to somebody who's, you know, if they've lost a child, however uncomforting they may be, but for estrangement, it's what psychologist Pauline boss refers to as an ambiguous loss, meaning that people don't really know how to respond to it. And it's not really, you know, it's not identified in the same way that, like a Death of the Family is, or even a divorce or something else, where people, you know, they probably had personal experience or they're close to somebody who has whereas estrangement, people often don't know what to say, and so often they say things that are kind of insensitive or out of tune with what that person really needs or wants. And it is ambiguous in the sense that the parent the kid is out there, and if they're on social media, they can see them, and maybe they see them with the other parents, you know, the in laws, or they see pictures of the grandkids, but not because they're being sent, but because they can see them on Facebook if they haven't been blocked, which many have been so been blocked from access to the social media. So it's just this kind of ongoing open wound that parents need enormous support to know how to have manage and navigate.

00:27:57.220 --> 00:28:16.259
Yes, and that's absolutely what I'm hearing, is this shame tied up with this lack of any support and and saying nobody's talking about it, nobody, and the only people who have said things to this parent have made it much worse by making her feel like it was her fault, and then saying, Well, you need to do something, and she's like, doing everything I can.

00:28:17.099 --> 00:28:43.059
Exactly, yeah, I mean, and it's part of the reason that that it's still a somewhat closeted issue, is that most parents don't talk about it because they are worried about having that kind of response that well, you must have done something terrible. I mean, kids don't just cut off a parent for no reason, and it's true, they don't cut off a parent for no reason. It's just not they don't always cut them off because it's the parents fault, because the parent was so abusive or neglectful or harmful, or whatever the popular culture causes people to believe so, okay,

00:28:43.059 --> 00:28:49.839
we've got parents of teenagers and tweens here. What can they do now to reduce a risk of future estrangement?

00:28:51.339 --> 00:30:12.180
I mean, I think in general, keeping lines of communication open with your child at any age is always going to be the best, you know, the best strategy showing yourself to be somebody who's capable of having corrective feedback. And, you know, in some cultures and in some parents, that's a big, a big ask, right? I mean, if you come from a culture or society where parental authority was the rule of the game, the idea of a parent being open to Child's feedback just feels like kind of an upset in the order of order of things, but you might have to, if you live in a western society, you might have to modify that. And the number of Asian clients in my practice, or the great minority. So it's not, it isn't like I have a lot, but those who do, particularly those who come from, say, China or India, which are two of the countries where I've sort of seen the most estrangements. You know, they have a double disorientation, because not only is the disorientation from having the child cut them off, but it's also the disorientation of not having raised their child or grown up in a society anyway, where that was considered a reasonable thing, and they, in particularly, don't feel like they can talk to their friends or family about it, because it's culturally considered so so forbidden. So. So. So no matter what your culture, though, is, if you want to save your relationship with a kid and you live in a western society, you kind of have to know that this is the new, the new moral order.

00:30:08.640 --> 00:30:58.720
You know, the more the old moral order of Honor thy mother and thy father, respect, thy elders, families forever, has given way to this much more mental I need to protect my mental health and my personal happiness. It's what, what the British sociologist Anthony Giddens refers to as the evolution to pure relationships. Those relationships purely constituted on the basis of whether or not their relationships in line with that person's ideals for personal happiness and growth and and identity, and if it's not, then get rid of them. Is this ever going to shift back? I suspect that it will eventually stop. I kind of think about this. You know, my second book that I wrote in 2003 the lazy husband had to get men to do more parenting and housework, a title that you're now on record now Rachel for having said that.

00:30:58.720 --> 00:31:14.640
But anyway, when I wrote that book, there was a lot of discussion about the fact that women are now in the workforce and they can leave marriages, but men haven't yet made the transition to being kind of equal participators in terms of parenting and housework. But I think a lot of that has changed.

00:31:14.640 --> 00:32:17.460
So for example, younger generations are much more likely to have an equal participation around parenting and and housework. It's not perfect, but much more so than older generations. And so I suspect a similar thing will eventually happen here, because this is really the first generation of parents who've had to do this kind of huge moral shift and psychological shift. So, you know, for the kids of millennials, those parents probably wouldn't have to do it as much. But the way that I think about it, you know, the way that men kind of had to change in, say, the 1970s 80s, 90s, well more than that, you know, probably well into the 2000s they they were kind of forced to change in because women's increased economic power, and because women could control their fertility, and because they could leave their marriages. So all those things really empowered women to create a marriage that was much more in line with their ideals. I think similarly, adult children, now that they have the legitimization of therapists and therapy and social media, they are much more empowered to say, look, if you want a relationship with me, Mom or Dad, this is what it's going to look like.

00:32:17.460 --> 00:32:37.880
Otherwise, I don't have to be in relationship with you. And so I think that huge moral shift is going on now. I do think eventually it's going to calm down. I think in the same way, there will always be divorces, you know, over these kinds of differences, there will always be estrangements. But I suspect the numbers that we're seeing right now, I would predict, are going to go down. That's my hope.

00:32:37.940 --> 00:32:48.220
I hope so. I hope so. And just before we finish. I mean, do you think that we are have a generation that's less skilled at relational repair, or are we getting better at this?

00:32:48.700 --> 00:33:19.680
No, well, no, for all the therapy, no, they're conflict avoidant for spending they spent way too much time on their cell phones or looking at social media. They have far less friends than older generations do. They're much more socially isolated, so so in some ways, that contradicts my point that they may be able to do it better because they're not necessarily in better relationships, but hopefully by the time they have children, they've kind of figured some of these things out. But no, younger generations are incredibly isolated, and particularly boys, but But girls do? They have fewer friends.

00:33:19.680 --> 00:33:22.220
They're more lonely. So it's a huge problem.

00:33:23.059 --> 00:33:28.700
And finally, if you could tell parents one thing before their relationship breaks down, or now, what would it be?

00:33:30.500 --> 00:34:07.440
It would be to really take your child's complaints seriously, to not defend yourself, to not try to explain it away, to not get mad, to try to take it out of the realm of your child disrespecting you or not being grateful for all the sacrifices that you made for them, which were probably significant and probably more than your parents made for you, and it just put it much more purely in the context that your child is trying to have a conversation with you about something that's really important to them, and it's our duty as parents to take those conversations and those complaints seriously. We don't have to agree internally, but we have to be empathic and curious and interested if we want to preserve the relationship.

00:34:05.759 --> 00:34:07.440
Brilliant.

00:34:07.740 --> 00:34:15.300
Dr Coleman, absolutely brilliant. I'm so grateful for this. You've really given me some new perspectives on quite a few things there.

00:34:12.480 --> 00:34:18.300
I've already mentioned your sub stack and one of your books.

00:34:15.300 --> 00:34:22.519
What else would you like to let people know about contacting you or getting hold of your work?

00:34:23.239 --> 00:34:36.199
Yeah, no. I think my substack family troubles, my book rules of estrangement. I think those are the most important things. My website, triple w.dr Joshua Coleman, those are probably the best, best places to find me, amazing.

00:34:36.259 --> 00:34:38.418
And if you want to find me, I'm on substack too.

00:34:38.418 --> 00:34:54.398
It's teenagersuntangled.substack.com and I have a website, www.teenagersuntangled.com and I take emails, teenagersuntangled@gmail.com it's lovely having you on the program. Thank you so much. It's all the teenagers untangled, and I hope you have a great week.

00:34:54.579 --> 00:34:56.978
Big hug from me. Bye, bye.

00:34:54.579 --> 00:34:56.978
Thanks. Rachel.