A generation ago, parental estrangement was rarely spoken of. Today, it has its own hashtag.
Studies over the past several years have shown that 38% of adults report being estranged from a family member. Six percent of adult children experience a time of no or limited communication with their mother, and 26% experience such a period with their father. While a parent or child may move toward estrangement, adult children are more likely to initiate it.
RELATED: Check out Denise George’s book: Waiting in the Meantime: A Guided Journey Toward Hope and Healing for Mothers of Estranged Adult Children
Conversations about this reality have assumed an online presence, with #nocontact reaching 1.9 billion views on TikTok and Google searches for the phrase “no contact with parents” rising by more than 700 percent over the past five years. Books, podcasts, and social media testimonies describe personal experiences with going no-contact and validate adults’ decisions to cut their parents off.
The internet is filled with easily accessible resources from therapists and psychologists, from guides discussing whether cutting off ties with parents or other family members is necessary to online quizzes evaluating how toxic one’s family is.
“You don’t have to justify your decision to go no contact to anyone, including your parent,” one therapist’s blog reads. “Going no contact is a valid choice.”
“When your mom chose to become your mother, you didn’t get to choose to be her child… If anyone has the right to walk away from a relationship that’s not working for them, it’s someone who never consented to the relationship in the first place,” another therapist writes.
These words carry compassion, and the advice they offer may be relevant in genuinely unsafe relationships. But they also risk framing the parent-child relationship as a contract, valid only as long as it serves us in the way we prefer, and the people who raised us as people we can simply walk away from.
How did we get to the point where this approach to family can seem normal?
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EDITOR’S NOTE — This story was written by Emma Joy McArthy and originally published by Denison Forum.
