Parental Estrangement- a Missing Puzzle Piece in Estranged Parents’ Minds
Recently I began looking at the material that comes up when you put “estranged adult child” (EAC) into Google. Most of the first page was filled with pieces aimed at the parents of these children.
One of these sites was rejectedparents.net, a site that offers peer support for parents of EACs. The website’s owner, an author named Sheri McGregor, has a daughter who cut contact from her. On this site’s first page, one sentence jumped out to me.
“Often, a parent has done nothing to warrant an adult child’s rejection.”
The thing that struck me about this line was that it implies that for estrangement to be valid the parent has to have done something to cause it. However, sometimes what sends an EAC over the edge isn’t solely what the parent did, but what they failed to do.
Those who remember the old Simpsons episodes may recall the season 8 episode In Marge We Trust. I wish to highlight the scene where Reverend Lovejoy has a vision where the saints in the stained glass windows speak to him.
“What did I do to lose them?” Lovejoy asks himself, referring to the congregation, after seeing them swarm around Marge after service and leaving him alone in the church.
“The real question is, what did you do to keep them?” the first saint asks.
“What have you done to inspire the hearts of men?” asks the second.
If you are a parent of an EAC, I turn these questions to you in regards to your child for a moment. What did you do to keep your child in your life?
Why do we, as a society, treat close blood ties as being any different from relationships without them? If we treat a friend badly, it’s natural, almost expected, for them to distance themselves from us, yet the opposite holds for immediate family.
“But we fed them, clothed them, and gave them a home!” I imagine some estranged parents are saying right now.
To this, I give you Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs.
American psychologist Abraham Maslow developed this hierarchy in the height of World War II and this grew in popularity after being published in the 1950s.
This pyramid suggests that providing what is needed to physically stay alive and a secure home is the bare minimum for a person to feel content with their life. However, I would argue that because of this nature, if your goal is to make your child independent, you are setting yourself up to become a redundancy in their lives unless you provide something that cannot be earned by your child financially when they reach adulthood.
Between my husband and I, we have a functional parent each, so I will share some of the ways they meet our non-material needs.
My Dad encourages us to ask questions about areas tied to his personal strengths. Of the parents we speak to, Dad is easily the one to go to for financial advice. If a process I do not understand about houses comes up I will shoot him an email about it and he usually answers within a couple of days. His style of teaching is also very digestible without feeling preachy.
My mother-in-law knows what her family members like and spends quality time in these activities. When we play video games together, no one expects her to have the gaming prowess of an e-sports player, but her effort in taking part creates a fun time and a treasured memory for everyone involved.
Dad sometimes reaches out first with open questions about my life. He also draws from topics we’ve discussed before. “How is your house hunt going?” “Tell me about your new job.” These things tell me that he has actively paid attention to things going on in my life, which in turn enforces that what is going on with me is important to him.
My mother-in-law makes our talents feel valued. When we go to visit her (due to distance we stay at her house for a week when we do) she expects two things, the aforementioned family time, and a batch of my pancakes for breakfast at least once during the week. She treats this as one of the highlights of our visits and I cannot say I recall a time when my mother treated my talents with this level of enthusiasm.
As parental estrangement starts to become more common and spoken about, studies into the subject have started to take place. This includes the survey by the University of Cambridge Centre for Family Research in collaboration with Stand Alone, a charity that focuses on EACs, that was collated in 2015. This study cites emotional abuse, mismatched expectations, and clash of values as the three most common reasons for estrangement. The thing that struck me about these reasons for relationship breakdown is that they do not require either party to be malicious, but they can come about from poor communication and a lack of willingness to compromise. It is a personal theory that sometimes the parent does not cope with the idea that their child is now at an age or stage of life where they should be treated more like a peer.
In my case, I know my mother bombarded me with messages through her actions that made it clear that she did not enjoy my presence.
When my Uncle died, she doubled down with the message, “You are not allowed to be around myself or your Dad when we times are tough for us.” She never said this aloud, but her behaviour told me this. If I told her what her body language was telling me, I would be met with a wall made of three words, “Don’t be stupid.”
Do I believe my mother is evil? No. Malicious? Not really. I have learned to apply Hanlon’s razor and accept that she was merely incompetent at presenting herself in a way that didn’t beat me down psychologically. However, it took separation, therapy, and introspection that I could not have had while in contact with her to get there. Tina Gilbertson points out in an article on Psychology Today:
Adult children cut off their parents only as a way to protect themselves. It’s not to punish you, or because they don’t care about you. It’s because they’ve been hurt too many times.
This is very much true in my case, and I am willing to bet that Sheri’s daughter, if asked, feels similarly.
Only a fool would be able to say that this level of digging deep into one’s own behaviour is easy, and the same can be said for looking at one’s own actions without trying to justify or defend them. However, one of Dr Phil’s golden quotes is, “You either want to be right or to be happy.”
If the parents of adult children want to keep their children in their lives, like Reverend Lovejoy, they need to do something more inspiring than have the vestibule recarpeted.
