Estrangement Isn't a Trend - It's a Last Resort

In 2023, I wrote an article published here called The Pain of Estrangement to address how invisible, stigmatized, and misunderstood family estrangement often is. My goal at the time was simple: to speak honestly about how painful and complicated estrangement can be, and to challenge the snap judgments people make when someone chooses distance from family.

Estrangement has always existed. What’s changed is our willingness to speak about it openly. And in the two years since I wrote that article estrangement is being discussed more publicly, but not necessarily more thoughtfully.

Every few months, a familiar concern resurfaces in public discourse: Adult children are cutting off their parents too easily. No contact has become fashionable. Family estrangement has gone too far.

Most recently, this showed up in Oprah’s conversation on estrangement, in Mel Robbins’ article in the New York Times, and in the way Abigail Shrier presented it in her piece for The Free Press. The issue isn’t that estrangement is being discussed, but how it’s being framed- as a “trend,” a moral failure, or something people should simply “move on” from. That framing centers parents’ pain while sidelining the adult children whose experiences would actually help us understand how estrangement happens and how it might be prevented or repaired.

Estrangement is not a trend. Adult children are not going no contact because it is fashionable or because a friend, therapist, or social media post suggested it. 

People do not walk away from their families lightly. In clinical spaces and real conversations with estranged adults, that’s not what I hear, and it’s not what my colleagues hear either. It was never just one incident. It was years. “Death by a thousand cuts” is the best description I’ve heard for it.

Years of emotional harm, neglect, endless criticism, chronic over stepping, or invalidation. Years of trying to explain, repair, forgive, and hope something finally changes. What parents often experience as a sudden cutoff is usually the final step in a very long process.

This is where perspective diverges. Parents tend to remember the last argument. Adult children remember the lifetime.

Our culture struggles with this distinction because we are deeply attached to the idea that family closeness requires sticking it out at all costs. Suffering within families is often framed as virtuous, even par for the course. Especially when parents are involved, distance is treated as a betrayal rather than self-preservation.

Public conversations about estrangement overwhelmingly center parents’ pain, their confusion, their heartbreak and their sense of loss. Meanwhile, adult children are asked to justify themselves, explain themselves, and filter their stories so they are easier to hear.

Advice about forgiveness, acceptance, and “moving on” is almost always directed at the people who were harmed, never the people who caused harm.

While estrangement can occur between siblings, extended family, or partners, this conversation is specifically about parent–child estrangement, where power and dependency fundamentally shape the relationship.This imbalance matters because the parent-child relationship is not an equal one. It never has been. Parents hold power for years through dependency, authority, and control over a child’s physical and emotional world. That history does not disappear simply because a child reaches adulthood and part of why this gets so distorted is that we talk about parent-child relationships as if they’re equal. They are not.

Another major issue in estrangement discussions is the tendency to collapse very different experiences into one category. Annoying family dynamics are treated as equivalent to abusive or harmful ones, and discomfort is discussed alongside danger as if they require the same response. They do not. When everything gets lumped together under the umbrella of “family conflict,” people who left because staying was genuinely unsafe or psychologically damaging are told they simply lacked tolerance or resilience. Survivors don’t get the support they deserve, harmful behavior gets minimized, and in some cases people are retraumatized all over again.

A lot of the public conversation also revolves around this mythical group of adult children. Supposedly raised by loving, attentive parents. Supposedly influenced by social media or a spouse or partner. Supposedly cutting off family over minor grievances. Clinicians rarely encounter this group, yet it dominates the cultural narratives.

It is also important to acknowledge that there *are* cases where an adult child cuts off a family member because they lack the capacity to tolerate conflict, avoid emotional discomfort, or are strongly influenced by a partner who turns them against their family. That does happen. But it is the exception, not the rule. Framing the entire estrangement conversation around these smaller, harder-to-verify cases is neither intellectually honest nor clinically responsible. When cultural narratives are built around edge cases instead of the far more common realities of chronic harm, neglect, and failed repair, we end up misrepresenting the issue and further stigmatizing the people who are already carrying the greatest burden.

In some communities, this gets amplified even further. In Jewish spaces, estrangement is often discussed through the lens of kibbud av v’em (honoring your parents) with a heavy focus on parental pain and religious obligation. I’ve seen this recently on community-specific platforms, including Meaningful People. These conversations are often well-intentioned and rooted in real concern about the breakdown of family and community, but they frequently leave little room for the lived experience of adult children who felt compelled to create distance.

Honoring parents becomes framed as enduring anything, staying quiet, and maintaining contact no matter the cost, while far less attention is paid to how parents are actually behaving. That framing misses the point. Kibbud av v’em was never meant to demand self-erasure or ongoing emotional harm. When it’s used to guilt people into deeply painful or damaging relationships, it stops being about kavod (honor) and starts being about preserving hierarchy and control.

This is also why broad “just reconcile” advice can be so damaging. Calls for reconciliation without accountability prioritize family “harmony” over genuinely healthy relationships and individual well-being. Time does not heal unsafe relationships, and love does not neutralize harm.

None of this is meant to deny how devastating it is for parents to be cut off from a child. The grief is real and the confusion is real. The longing, regret, and sense of loss can be overwhelming. Parents are allowed to hurt and they deserve support. At the same time, pain alone cannot be the end of the conversation. Being the parent means holding more responsibility, even in adulthood. It means being willing to reflect rather than defend, to listen rather than explain, and to consider how the relationship may have felt from the child’s side long before the distance occurred. Empathy for parents and accountability are not opposites. In fact, accountability is often the very thing that makes repair possible.

Some relationships can be repaired with responsibility, limits, and support while others cannot. Two things can be true at once: Not every rupture requires estrangement, and some estrangements are necessary for survival.

Part of the confusion comes from the way boundaries and estrangement are often treated as the same thing.They are not. Boundaries are attempts to preserve relationships. Estrangement usually occurs when boundaries are repeatedly ignored or punished.

If you have never had to consider estrangement, it likely means your family relationships, while imperfect, contained enough safety and repair. That is something to be grateful for, not a vantage point from which to judge.

Estrangement isn't a fad, it's a last resort. It is not a punishment and it is not a failure of character. It is one of the most painful decisions a person can make, often accompanied by ambiguous loss, shame, and lifelong grief.

If we want a healthier cultural conversation, we need to stop moralizing reconciliation and stop centering extreme or hypothetical examples. We need to think more carefully instead of relying on catchy one-liners. “Life is short” is not helpful. Understanding context is what actually helps. We need to speak to the people who walked away. 

As I wrote in The Pain of Estrangement, estrangement itself does not need to be fixed. The stigma around it does, and we won’t change that with judgment. We change it with curiosity, honesty, empathy, and care.