The conditions under which estrangement might be considered acceptable depend on how cultures regard the obligations of parents and children to each other.
Countries clearly differ in those considerations.
For example, in the US, the idea that a society would require a grown child to pay for his father’s old-age care would be considered an intolerable infringement on his rights. However, a federal court in Germany in 2014 ruled in exactly that way against the son, despite the fact that his father had abandoned him four decades earlier and left his estate to his girlfriend.
Similarly, in the US, there would be outrage if a law suddenly made it a crime not to visit your aging parents, yet this is precisely what was prescribed by China’s ‘Elderly Rights Law’ in 2013.
These legal contrasts underscore a deeper cultural divide about what children owe their parents—and what parents are entitled to expect in return.
Culture powerfully influences our perceptions and the ways that we attribute causality, interpret the meaning of others’ actions and intentions, and enact the aims of the self in relation to the rest of society.
According to the Hofstede cultural dimensions model, Americans rank higher on scores of individualism than any other culture, as measured by valuing independence, freedom from outside influences, self-expression, and self-realization.
This individualist emphasis has profound implications for how Americans interpret conflict and define healthy relationships. It also impacts how we view the behavior and motivations of others, family included. Maybe family, especially.
An article in HuffPost illustrates our cultural preoccupation with narcissism, the importance of spotting it, and the need to protect oneself from its harmful influence.
How to “Break Up” with a Narcissistic Parent
First, don’t blame yourself for the state of the relationship. Sometimes loving a narcissist means doing so at a safe distance—even if the narcissist in question is your parent.
The following items of advice were offered to the adult child:
1. Recognize that your health and well-being come first.
2. Learn to detach and create boundaries.
3. Try not to be confrontational, but do set clear boundaries.
4. Accept that your parent may make it extremely difficult to initiate a break.
5. Don’t blame yourself for the state of the relationship.
The importance of boundaries, mentioned twice in the advice portion of the article, is a frequent topic that I hear from adult children (wanting more) and from their parents (wanting less). Maintaining one’s boundaries is important if becoming an individual is a goal—and we Americans care very much about being individuals.
But why is the desire for better boundaries such a common request from today’s adult children of their parents? Why are so many young adults claiming they have narcissistic, emotionally immature or borderline personality-disordered parents?
In part, this stems from how families have become more enmeshed in recent decades: parents are more worried, more stressed out, and more educated about child-rearing; all too aware that their mistakes could interfere with their child’s successful adulthood.
Or so they believe.
They also spent a lot more time with their children when raising them. All of this may have created a more intense family environment than prior generations where children were seen and not heard, the lines of authority were more spelled out, and parents were less concerned with what their children thought about the job they were doing as parents.
In addition, the many ways that technology allows families to stay in contact make for a family that is never more than a millisecond text away from one another. These shifts—more parental involvement, more psychological awareness, more technological proximity—may leave young adults feeling more enmeshed with the parent than they wish.
As I wrote in an earlier article here, therapists are often called upon to provide moral weight to separating or ending a relationship with a parent. In an individualist culture, emotions such as guilt or dispositions to help others become pathologized as “co-dependence” “over-responsibility” or “loving too much.” Parents who were highly involved become labeled as emotionally incestuous or narcissistic, recasting historically high levels of parental involvement as self-serving rather than expressions of love or commitment.
From this vantage point, cutting off contact with a parent is an attempt at purification. It’s a way of saying that the limitations in the individual were either put there by the parent or ‘triggered’ by parental contact.
It allows one to hold on to a self-assessment as ideal and without limitations, attributing one’s problems to childhood experiences or chemical imbalances rather than larger societal influences.
Prior to the 1960s, therapists were in line with a larger cultural emphasis on conformity. But today’s therapists are keen to remove any obstacles to personal achievement and the realization of happiness. In his book Perpetual Euphoria: On the Duty to be Happy (2011), the French philosopher Pascal Bruckner notes:
Democratic societies are characterised by a growing aversion to suffering. We are all the more scandalised by the latter’s persistence or spread because we can no longer resort to God for consolation. In that way, the Enlightenment gave rise to a certain number of contradictions from which we have still not emerged.
Our cultural allergy to suffering places even greater emphasis on personal growth—and greater suspicion on anyone perceived as obstructing it. In her book “Coming Up Short” (2013), the sociologist Jennifer Silva details how often today’s young working-class adults locate their inability to find a secure path to adulthood in their dysfunctional families:
Family pathology is invoked both to explain (to themselves and to others) why they have not achieved traditional adult milestones and to map meaning, order, and progress onto their experiences of stagnation in the present … Their foundational belief that they are completely and unconditionally responsible for creating a good life leads young people to examine their personal traits and behaviors for signs of weakness that could explain their precarious lives.
Prior generations were less preoccupied with being dutiful and conscientious parents – and in some ways that was a good thing. Before the 1960s, parents were far more involved in their own hobbies, neighborhood activities and religious institutions, notes the political scientist Robert Putnam in Bowling Alone (2000). They also spent considerable time with their friends. Today, they spend more time than ever on parenting.
Viewed from that perspective, estrangement is sometimes an attempt to develop a sense of self separate from that curated or desired by the often over-involved parent. It might explain why the declaration “You need to respect my boundaries” is one of the more common requests of parents that I hear from their adult children, estranged or not. The desire to label the parent as narcissistic or emotionally incestuous might be an attempt to feel less guilty for wanting to give less to the parent than the parent wants to receive.
Yet parents didn’t suddenly decide to become more actively involved out of nowhere. In the US, parents have become much more worried and involved because they believe it’s the only way to secure their children’s future. In Love, Money, and Parenting: How Economics Explain the Ways We Raise Our Kids (2019), the economists Matthias Doepke and Fabrizio Zilibotti observe that, in countries with low social inequality, such as Japan, Germany and most of the northern European nations, parents are happier and more relaxed, prioritizing their children’s independence and creativity. Conversely, in countries such as the US, the UK and China – countries with high rates of social inequality – parents are more likely to be anxious and restrictive, as often characterizes today’s “helicopter parent” or China’s “tiger mom.”
Similarly, a recent article in The Atlantic titled Grandparents Are Reaching Their Limit details how grandparents in Sweden are happier in the role of grandparenting because they’re not being called on to provide all of the extra care that grandparents, especially grandmothers do in the US. Family relations there are described as “especially warm and sweet.” This is in part because the government significantly subsidizes child care there. As the researcher Shel Silverstein told Faith Hill at The Atlantic “Once you take the burden of care away from the family…people can engage in a much more emotionally satisfying way.”
In this sense, parenting, even grandparenting styles reflect not just psychology—but economics. Social inequality is an important index because it reflects how much parents need to do without any support from government or employers.
***
Freed from the institutional constraints that governed behavior for millennia, today’s family relationships are ruled by a constant and ongoing assessment of one’s feelings in relation to the other, based on the principles of self-realization and personal discovery. This dynamic creates the potential for new possibilities in relations between parent and adult child, many of which are positive: for example, studies show that many of today’s parents are in close and regular contact with their adult children, an arrangement that both generations describe as meaningful. In addition, in the same way that there is greater permission to leave abusive marriages, adult children are also no longer obliged to stay in contact with parents who are chronically rejecting or hurtful.
But with freedom comes fragility. In unmooring individuals from the commitments that guided generations for centuries – defining family relations as either a source of personal growth and happiness or an impediment to personal fulfillment – we have created the potential for enormous upheaval and disruption for individuals and for society at large. We ignore it at our own peril.
Note: Parts of this article were originally published in Aeon under the title: Estranged: When feeling good about ourselves matters more than filial duty, cutting off our parents comes to seem like a valid choice
To learn more, read my book Rules of Estrangement: Why Adult Children Cut Ties and How to Heal the Distance or sign up for my free newsletter here
I appreciate this analysis. I have struggled to understand how adult children could label reasonable family relations from conscientious and loving parents as "co-dependent" or self-serving when parents use restraint to give their adult children 'space' and genuinely desire to see their children become independent and positive. The Acs have a huge need to feel separate and have peer pressures to re-define themselves. They also will not tolerate conflict or adversity. The callousness of the young adults however is really destructive.