Family Cut-Offs: The Darker Side

Earlier this year, I responded to a mother distraught that her 20-year-old daughter, with whom she had reportedly been close, had inexplicably cut off communication and moved out of state, likely with a boyfriend. I focused on the ways that closeness itself could have played a role, how a current generation of young adults, many overprotected while growing up, often feel anxious entering adult life, retroactively blame faulty parenting, and, lacking skills to modulate distance and closeness in relationships, believe a family cut-off is warranted. Several therapists replied, encouraging me to consider additional possibilities, notably dark influence by the boyfriend.

Indeed, family estrangement is now a silent epidemic in the U.S., with tens of millions of families affected, most feeling the deep pain of rejection, great shame, and enormous confusion. Yet, widen the lens and estrangement appears more generational than personal, common among Gen Z and due less to sins of parenting than shifts in how young people define themselves and what they expect of their family.

Cut-offs are often not the result of children voluntarily pushing parents away for any reason, Lisa Fontes, a Massachusetts therapist and expert witness on partner violence, wrote me. Often, she says, it’s women being manipulated by insecure partners who demand all their attention. She recommends that parents stay in touch with their child and urges siblings to visit and childhood friends to send emails to counter the ego-destroying isolation and messages of worthlessness the child is likely getting from a controlling partner.

Family therapist Stacy George adds that isolation of a family member should immediately set off alarms about abuse. Abusers not only isolate their victims but gaslight them, so that they come to doubt that family relationships were ever solid and secure. Further, the control may be so extensive that the victim doesn’t feel safe communicating with others—and communications may be monitored and manipulated by the controller. Staying in touch with the estranged child becomes a needed reality check about family love and support.

But partners are only part of the story, says California psychologist Joshua Coleman, author of Rules of Estrangement: Why Adult Children Cut Ties and How to Heal the Conflict. In his clinical experience, the number-one path to estrangement is parental divorce, including gray divorce. Whether or not one parent tries to poison the kids about the other parent, “divorce weakens the parent-child bond.”

Most estrangements occur when offspring are in their 20s. Coming into adulthood today, people often feel a lack of self-esteem or anxiety about the future: I didn’t get something I needed in the upbringing I got. It must be because my parents did something wrong. That narrative, Coleman notes, is sometimes promoted by therapists who are certain there’s trauma somewhere. Another pathway he sees is “a kind of rebellious adolescence, where the child doesn’t know any other way to feel separate from the parents.” Sometimes, he notes, estrangement starts when an adult child marries and a conflict-avoidant, socially vulnerable spouse makes them choose, “me or your parents.”

Earlier generations of parents hoped only that their kids would do well in life, Coleman observes. But young people now take as their highest value the protection of their mental health; parents are burdened with creating happy kids with high self-esteem.

Whatever the causes of estrangement, if parents want to connect with their kids, Coleman advises sending an amends letter adopting the framework of their offspring, starting with something like, “I understand you want no contact, but I’d just like to say I know you wouldn’t have cut me off unless you felt it was the healthiest thing for you to do.” And if the parent has no idea of the estrangement cause, to continue with, “It’s clear I have significant blind spots as a parent. But I would really like to learn more. Would you feel comfortable telling me more?”

Lack of response warrants a follow-up letter six weeks later: “I just want to see whether you’ve read my letter or had any thoughts about it.” If reaching out monthly for six months gets no results, Coleman urges parents to stop for a year, then resume with a note that reaffirms that the adult child wouldn’t be continuing the cut-off unless it was the best thing for them; the note may also suggest family therapy.

Research shows that more than 80 percent of the time, adult children eventually resume contact with their mother. Nearly 70 percent of the time, they reconcile with their father as well.