Parental estrangement is a hot topic in today’s discourse as more people are learning healthier ways to engage in their relationships. There’s so much damage that has been caused to family units by unrealistic, unfair expectations and behaviors. And responsibility is a hard topic for so many because it requires one to admit that they are flawed and potentially wrong.
But, here’s the thing. As Psychology Today informs us, parental estrangement doesn’t just come out of nowhere. Adult children are not predisposed to just cutting off their parents for absolutely no reason. In my experience, it’s usually because the parent can’t wrap their head around their own actions. So, let’s talk about some of them.
1. You can’t respect your adult child’s privacy.
Take this scenario as an example. Molly decides to go to an out-of-state school for college. Dad decides that he still needs to monitor his now young adult daughter, and requires her to check-in constantly. When she finally gets tired of checking in, she starts making herself harder to reach.
Dad then decides that it is perfectly reasonable to hire a private investigator to see what his daughter is up to. Molly, after realizing she had someone watching her, was quite concerned she had a stalker. And when she found out what Dad had done, she went no-contact with him.
Now Dad believes he’s the victim because he cares so much about his daughter that he just wants her to be safe. Why won’t she let him keep her safe? He just can’t seem to understand that his now adult daughter is trying to get out of his iron grip so she can learn to be an adult, find herself, and grow.
Yes, the world is a dangerous place. However, at some point, controlled people will rebel. This isn’t like some weird, esoteric fact, either. It’s like Dad completely forgot about his own rebellious youth.
2. Your helicopter parenting is impeding your adult child’s growth.
Therapist Tony Tramelli, MA, LPC, writes that helicopter parenting teaches a child helplessness and that someone is always going to fix things for them. The helicopter parent sees it as love and just taking care of their kid. But, in reality, it’s more likely stemming from anxiety or trauma of the parent.
They want to protect their child, which is fair and reasonable, but then they go way too far because they are overcorrecting from their own pain. Too much help and attention cause the child to be dependent on the parent. But when they finally get out into the world, they may see just how far behind they are and resent their parents for losing decades of development.
I remember when I was working in a building supplies center when I was younger. We had a 20-year-old man come in for an interview with his mother, who insisted on sitting in on the interview with him. You could just see how embarrassed he was about it, but he had yet to reach the point of actually setting that boundary. It would not surprise me in the slightest if he eventually went no-contact with her when he realized how much she was messing up his opportunities.
I don’t know what the mother’s deal was, but I can tell you from observation that there are a whole lot of traumatized parents who are terrified of their children being hurt the way they were. They may believe they are protecting their child, but they’re not; they’re self-soothing their own trauma and anxiety.
3. You don’t respect your adult child’s boundaries.
Let’s use the example of someone I once knew here, we’ll call him “Mark.” He gives his mother a spare key to the house to take care of the plants and pets while he’s gone away with his family. Months later, Mom is caught in the house rifling through drawers and snooping around. Turns out she had a spare key made while she had Mark’s house key.
Mom gets defensive and angry that she’s been caught and defends herself. She claims she didn’t think it was a bad idea, and she just wanted to be able to check up on Mark to see how he was doing. Mark identifies this for the lie it is. After all, if she didn’t know it was wrong, why would she hide it?
Once an adult child hits 18 years old, they’re legally an adult, and they have the right to privacy. Not to mention, who just creates a copy of a key to someone’s house to be nosy in? God forbid anyone do that to mom, though.
4. You failed your adult child at a pivotal moment in their life.
Humans make mistakes. However, some parents just can’t understand that something they viewed as a minor mistake they made translated into a traumatic experience for their adult child. Let’s take coming out of the closet as an extremely common example.
Dad’s an old school guy who thinks traditional masculinity is the only way to be a man. But it’s pretty clear his son is not going to grow up into a traditionally masculine man that’s defined by the patriarchy. So Dad tries to “toughen him up” through various ways, like making him play football, taking him hunting, and otherwise trying to force the son into a mold he doesn’t belong in.
Finally, the day comes when the son comes out as gay, and dad loses his mind and kicks his son out of his house. The son’s now homeless and has to struggle for everything, not only to find some safety and security, but to find some kind of peace within himself. As a result, the son turns to drugs and promiscuity to try to cope with the feelings and the desire to be authentically loved.
Years later, Dad finally has an epiphany that what he did was wrong and wants to try to fix the relationship. But it’s too late for the son. He wants nothing to do with it, even though his Dad is sorry, because it’s just a reminder of how his alleged protector completely failed him when he needed him most.
5. You enabled abuse by looking the other way.
It’s kind of curious listening to parents who want to deny the experiences of their children. You hear a lot of “well, I don’t remember it that way!” and “I never did that!” even though the adult children carry the emotional wounds and scars of the abuse they suffered. The parent may claim not to remember, the parent may actually not remember, but more often than not, the child does.
The child will remember if they saw you in the doorway whilst someone else hurt them. They will remember if you looked on and then left. They will remember if they were bullied, ridiculed, or otherwise emotionally harmed, and you allowed it. They will remember if they disclosed things to you and you either didn’t believe them or made excuses. They will remember that they were terrified, and you didn’t do anything to help them. These kinds of memories are burned into their brain from the trauma of it all, and they won’t forgive until the parent can acknowledge the pain their inaction caused.
“But I didn’t do anything!” you might say. That is incorrect. The enabler makes the choice to allow the abuser to act uncontested. And even if you had no choice, because you were afraid for yourself or your family, that isn’t something that’s going to be easy to let go. Denying that fact will just make your adult child withdraw harder.
6. You were chronically emotionally unavailable and negligent.
A parent who is closed off to the emotional connection with their child teaches that child to be emotionally distant. Decades of conditioning through emotional neglect are not something you can just change out of nowhere. Not without years of work with therapy, unpacking trauma, unlearning bad habits, learning new habits, and learning how to sit with negative emotions.
The parent may inadvertently teach their child to be distant and not care about them by withholding love and affection. After all, love is a two-way street. People love to romanticize the notion of unconditional love, but all love is conditional, even if that condition is the quality of the minds of the parents.
There are plenty of parents who don’t love their kids, and they can’t just turn it on decades later when the parents decide they want their child’s love. It’s a selfish mindset.
7. You’re not truly willing to do the work of healing with your adult child.
People aren’t wired to just discard their parents over minor inconveniences or problems. In many cases, it’s the result of years of disrespect, not listening, not accepting boundaries, and mistreatment. It may even come after the parent agrees to therapy, but instead of trying to understand and improve, the parent just uses it as another weapon against their child.
The parent doesn’t realize that even though they felt they were right or justified doesn’t mean that their actions were not harmful to their child. Some people just aren’t able to accept that two things can be true at once, that you can both make the best decision you’re able to and it causes more harm than good.
For example, let’s talk about a grandfather who badly physically abuses the father. The Father decides he’s not going to do the same thing to his kids, but still believes his kids need to be tough. So the Father still abuses his kids, just not as severely as he was abused, and he thinks he’s doing the right thing because of it.
It’s not enough for the father to say, “I didn’t abuse you as badly! Why are you upset!? It could have been so much worse!” Yes, that’s the kind of reasoning you’d expect from an abuse survivor, but if Dad wants any hope of healing his relationship with his child, he will eventually have to accept that he still didn’t make the right decision and acknowledge the harm he caused.
Closing thoughts…
Every example in this article is a scenario I’ve personally witnessed. In every one of these scenarios, the parent’s pride and ego kept them from seeing the truth. If your child went no-contact and you truly have no idea why, you need to explain the situation to a therapist and listen to them.
You need to be able to acknowledge that even if you made the best decisions that you were capable of, your choices could still be harmful or even traumatizing. It’s unfortunate, but that’s just the way it is.
Set aside your own defensiveness, work on those emotions, so you can hold space for the pain of your child. That’s the only real solution.
