Breaking Up With Adult Children

In 1935, zoologist Konrad Lorenz observed that ducklings and goslings believed the first object they saw or heard to be their parent. When newly hatched ducklings were exposed to Lorenz’s quacking, they thought, “Mama!” This filial imprinting in birds was nonspecific: Even a bouncing red ball could become a parent to a duckling.

A reverse “imprinting” of the baby to the parent may be why parents have difficulty breaking up with an adult child despite a toxic relationship. For the overwhelming majority, the lens by which the parent views the adult child is formed and strengthened by innate inclinations to care for a vulnerable being so completely dependent on their caregiver. This imprinting is so strong that it can lead to overlooking obvious flaws and faults of the adult child. It can make cutting off an adult child almost an impossibility.

Furthering that difficulty is that cutting off an adult child runs contrary to societal expectations of parenthood as enduring: a forever relationship. Family estrangement is painful. To cut off an adult child is to admit failure as a parent. All told, there are many reasons to avoid cutting off an adult child. There may, however, be times when breaking up with an adult child or children is the difficult but right choice.

Causes of estrangement differ between parents and adult children

Carr and colleagues conducted a qualitative analysis of parent-adult child estrangement through responses from estranged parents and children sampled from websites offering support. The parents were overwhelmingly female (93 percent), were on average 56 years old, and had been estranged from their child or children for about five years. The adult children were also primarily female (82 percent), on average 40 years old, and estranged from the parent or parents for about nine years. Both groups were largely Caucasian and lived in the United States, though there were responses from 11 other countries.

Admittedly, given the gender distribution of the study sample and that it sampled those who had accessed websites for support, it may speak more to mother-daughter estrangement where the cut-off remained distressful. Nonetheless, the themes that emerged provide a window into what causes parent-child estrangement: intrafamilial (negative behavior between the estranged members), interfamilial (related to situations outside the family), and interpersonal (personality characteristics of one of the family members).

Parents tended to attribute the estrangement to external factors (objectionable relationships), not their personality styles or behavior. The parents’ primary reason for cutting off their adult children was situational or family stressors (e.g., the adult child’s objectionable relationship as causing the adult child’s entitled or harmful behavior). Adult children, on the other hand, attributed estrangement to their parents’ behavior, such as feeling unsupported or unaccepted by them and their unwillingness to accept their relationship choices.

Making the difficult but right choice

Few of the parents in the Carr et al. study recognized their role in their adult children’s self-centeredness. The authors hypothesized that this may have been due to being excessively supportive or overly accommodating. An interesting conclusion by both parents and adult children in the Carr et al. study was that even the parents viewed themselves to have caused the estrangement—that it was the parent who was responsible, and not the adult child, for maintaining the parent-child relationship. Adult children identified the sources of estrangement as related to their parent’s personal characteristics (toxicity). Given this viewpoint, it is often the adult child who presses the eject button on the parent, not the other way around.

Psychologist Joshua Coleman suggested that there may be a hurt or suffering child identity fostered by a low bar set by society for what trauma means, such as parental failure in keeping a marriage intact, having a second family, or having been a helicopter parent, which stifled independence. This may lead to adult children labeling parents as narcissistic or toxic, particularly when the adult parents set limits or cut the financial cord. Relative to this point is the Merrill Lynch/Age Wave study: This 2018 survey of parents found that 79 percent of parents provided financial support to their early adult children (including housing, cars, and vacations), representing twice as much as what they were contributing to retirement accounts.

Pathways for reconciliation

There may be pathways for reconciliation. Estrangement does not have to be permanent. Researchers suggest that acknowledging failures and taking responsibility for mistakes may open up a pathway for communication between the parent and the adult child or children. This requires the parent to take a close look at whether they hold rigid, unfair, or unrealistic expectations for the adult child’s professional, financial, or relationship success that have contributed to the breach in the relationship.

Family Dynamics Essential Reads

Welcoming the Black Sheep of the Family

Why Is It So Hard to Divorce Your Toxic Biological Family?

It is difficult in any situation to face one’s shortcomings, particularly when the parent does not believe that their behavior was so egregious as to create the estrangement. In such situations, if reconciliation would be healthy for the parent, then swallowing the temptation to correct, clarify, and justify one’s behavior may be the price to pay.

The reconciliation pathway may face obstacles if the adult child harbors resentment that is disproportionate (anger) to what happened (e.g., failing to attend a few after-school events) and their recall is distorted (e.g., that their parent never attended any events) and interacts with the parent in an abusive manner (e.g., cursing, yelling, etc.). Pathways for reconciliation may not be possible in such situations. Nor are they realistic or healthy when the adult child’s erratic behavior stems from drug or alcohol abuse problems, suffers from severe psychiatric illness and will not submit to treatment, or is engaged in criminal behavior. In such situations, the parent may have to differentiate what is helpful to the adult child (e.g., setting limits and boundaries) from what enables their bad behavior (e.g., giving in to financial demands).