Dear Millennial Parents
Your Children May One Day Estrange You, Too
“Dear Mom and Dad,
I no longer wish to have you in my life. I have learned in my therapy that you were emotionally incestuous with me throughout my childhood and that is why I have had the difficulties I’ve had in my own marriage. I would never treat my children the way that you treated me. Being around you only makes me feel re-traumatized and I can’t have that in my life or around my kids. If I change my mind it will be on my terms and in my own time. Please respect my boundaries.”
I read letters like this every day from adult children to their parents. While the accusations vary, they share a similarity in quality and tone: The invocation of a therapist’s authority, the allegations of trauma, the authority of acting in the best interests of their children, and the firm request for the respect of boundaries.
When I’m consulted by an estranged parent, I make no assumptions about their innocence or guilt in regard to the claims of their adult child. Sometimes parents present themselves in a more idealized light than is likely the case. Often, it’s not until I read the correspondence with their adult child or speak with them that I see how the parent contributes to their need for distance.
While I don’t assume that the parent is at fault, much of my work revolves around helping them empathize with their children’s complaints, make amends, and express a willingness to allow the adult child to set the terms of the relationship.
But I would like to say this to those adult children:
You are probably right. You will do a better job than your parents. You will not expose your own children to the danger, insult, or harm you believe shaped and limited the trajectory of your aspirations and talents. That branded you with your insecurities, anxieties, and inhibitions.
And because your parenting is more conscientious and sensitive, you may be right that you are made immune from that most fateful of consequences—the one you have visited on your own parent—the wish and directive for them to never contact you again.
But that’s also where you’re wrong.
Your love, your dedication, your heartfelt desire to give your children the confidence, happiness, and security won’t protect you from the terrible forces that can turn your child forever away from you.
It won’t shield you from a mental illness that blinds them to your love and makes you an enemy; where your dedication is cast as selfish, destructive, or narcissistic.
It won’t make them remember your many years of love or dedication if they marry someone so insecure that when their spouse says choose them or me they choose them.
It will not save you from a therapist who interprets their anxiety, depression, or insecurity through the lens of emotionally immature parenting or family trauma, however unfounded that may be.
Parenting better than your parents won’t save you if you leave your spouse or your spouse leaves you and your child blames you for breaking up their happy home. It won’t help if they see you as ruining the other parent’s life, even though you were the far more dedicated of the parents.
And here’s the worst of it: It may be your love, your dedication, your availability that has become the problem. It was your willingness to give up your career to become a mother, or work long hours to give your children the life you never had.
In accepting that reality—millennial parents—horrible as it is, you are facing the horrible randomness of life. That our best of intentions can not only prove useless but used against us as evidence of our selfishness or arrogance by those we most hoped to insulate from it.
And while you claim in your letters that the trauma stops with you, it doesn’t. Because the trauma you’re visiting on your parents by cutting them off from you and their grandchildren is more painful than anything they could imagine.
Today, your hapless parents, terrible in their naivete, their lineage of carrying their pasts into the nursery and the kitchen, might have thought the same when they were raising you: That they were avoiding the mistakes of their parents and grandparents, and in so doing, giving you the life they never had.
If someone had told them this would happen one day to them,, they wouldn’t have believed it. Just like you right now.
They would not believe such a thing was possible.
Reading Dr. Coleman's words, I felt an ache deep in my bones—because he names what so few of us are willing to say out loud: even the most loving, devoted parent can still be turned into the villain in their child's story.
We think that by parenting better, by loving harder, perhaps by doing everything our own parents didn’t do, we can prevent heartbreak. We think we can "break the cycle." But the terrible irony Dr. Coleman reveals is that in cutting off their parents, today's adult children create a new and even deeper trauma—the tearing apart of generations. They do not break the cycle of pain. They extend it.
And in doing so, they inflict a wound they cannot yet imagine being dealt to them. Because one day, despite all their efforts to be the “better” parent, their own children may turn away too—rewriting years of love, sacrifice, and memories into something dark and unrecognizable.
Dr. Coleman’s wisdom is painful because it is so true: parenting with more love, more intention, more sacrifice doesn’t guarantee loyalty, gratitude, or even connection. Reality is sometimes crueler and more random than that.
I agree with him wholeheartedly. This is the grief few talk about—the grief of realizing that sometimes the very ones we love the most may one day see us not as their refuge, but as the source of their pain, no matter how hard we tried to spare them.
This essay and truth are exactly what I needed to hear today. Thank you.