“I used to be close to my son. We spoke a few times a week and he called me whenever he had a problem. Now, he wants nothing to do with me. When we talk – maybe it’s a few times a year – every interaction is tense.”
Surely you’ve known people who are estranged from their adult children. It’s not a new phenomena, but in the past few years, I hear many more of these stories from my patients, as well as from people I know in my personal life. The adult children want distance – a lot of distance – and either the parent doesn’t know why, or she is presented with a list of personality characteristics she possesses and can’t quite change to suit her offspring. “Critical” and “judgmental” are often high on the list.
Heard from the perspective of the heart-broken and distressed parent, the adult children have been well-loved and cared for; they are not the victims of physical or sexual abuse or extreme deprivation, and the parent wants to share her life. The parent – usually, but not always, the mother – feels she’s made sacrifices for her child and has done an adequate (if not superb) job of parenting, and is perplexed by the estrangement.
It’s a hard story to hear. I tell my patients I wish their son or daughter would come with them to a session – but they won’t, or so the parent says – so that I can have some understanding of what their parent has done to warrant this often-sudden divorce. Of course, there is another side to the story, and I am surprised at how often the parents do not seem to understand their adult child’s decision. Instead, the parents devise theories, and often these theories don’t really work as adequate explanations. Somehow, all meaningful communications have come to a halt and even the most well-meant words from one party may be interpreted by the other as having manipulative intentions.
In May 2010, The New York Times’s Well blog reported on this phenomenon. Health blogger Tara Parker-Pope wrote:
“Joshua Coleman, a San Francisco psychologist who is an expert on parental estrangement, says it appears to be growing more and more common, even in families who haven’t experienced obvious cruelty or traumas like abuse and addiction. Instead, parents often report that a once-close relationship has deteriorated after a conflict over money, a boyfriend or built-up resentments about a parent’s divorce or remarriage.
“ ‘We live in a culture that assumes if there is an estrangement, the parents must have done something really terrible,’ ” said Dr. Coleman, whose book When Parents Hurt (William Morrow, 2007) focuses on estrangement. But this is not a story of adult children cutting off parents who made egregious mistakes. It’s about parents who were good parents, who made mistakes that were certainly within normal limits.’ ”
The column received 1,788 comments – a lot, even for The New York Times.
I don’t know why this has become a surprisingly common story in my practice. I have a theory that children and parents approach their expectations of the parental role differently. I imagine the adult children see their parents’ criticism as as destructive and wearing, and they justify the pain they inflict with their silence as something the parents deserve. The parents, on the other hand, often truly are critical and seem to be unaware that their disapproval is both obvious and distressing. It’s hard, if one disapproves of a behavior, a career, a tattoo, or a spouse, to fake genuine approval, and that is what the script often calls for.
Parents, I believe, start with the idea that a child comes in to the world with nothing, and their efforts add to a baseline of zero. Homemade cookies after school, add two points. Driving friends to an amusement park and paying for admission for the whole gang, eight points. Forgoing career opportunities so a child won’t be uprooted by a move, 15 points, at least. Parents look at what they’ve done for a child and the sacrifices they’ve made, which often are considerable. Children, on the other hand, are raised in a child-centric world where there is an assumption that their needs and desires will come first. They start the counter at 100%. There are no brownie points, and deductions are taken when parents deviate from an expected level. Missing a little league game, minus one. Being overly strict, minus eight. Being critical, minus 10. There may be larger point deductions for mean things yelled out in anger, even if the child’s behavior provoked such a reaction, and while some people remember generalities, others recall specific slights and have a very long memory.