Learning to Cope with Estrangement: When Children “Cancel” Their Parents
An estranged father reflects on the stigma and surprising prevalence of these family rifts.
Estrangement between parents and their adult children appears to be on the rise. Over 25 percent of Americans are currently estranged from a family member, and over 43 percent have experienced family estrangement at some point.
In fact, those statistics are probably low since they are based on pre-COVID data — before the stresses of the pandemic and the political climate deepened existing fault lines in many families. Some experts believe that increased political and cultural polarization coupled with growing mental health awareness and recognition of the effects of toxic or abusive family relationships on well-being have contributed to the upward trend in numbers.
Yet in spite of its prevalence, estrangement is rarely discussed openly because cultural norms and expectations make it especially stigmatizing. That has led to widespread misconceptions about estrangement, including that estrangement is rare, that it happens suddenly, that there’s a clear reason people become estranged, and that estrangement happens on a whim.
