Myths about family estrangement
It’s the classic image of the holidays: Parents, siblings and grandchildren gather around the family table to feast and catch up on one another’s lives. But it doesn’t always work that way.
After years of discontent, some adults stop talking to their parents or returning home for family gatherings. Sometimes parents disapprove of a child so intensely that he or she is no longer welcome home.
In the past five years, a clearer picture of estrangement has been emerging as more researchers have turned their attention to this kind of family rupture.
Last month, Lucy Blake, a lecturer at Edge Hill University in England, published a review of 51 articles about estrangement in the Journal of Family Theory & Review. This body of literature, Blake wrote, gives scholars an opportunity to “understand family relationships as they are.”
Myth No. 1: Separation happens suddenly: It’s usually a long, drawn-out process rather than a single blowout — a familial relationship that erodes over time, not overnight.
Kylie Agllias, a social worker in Australia and the author of Family Estrangement, has found that the rift “occurs across years and decades.”
It’s been three years since Nikolaus Maack, 47, has had contact with most of his family. But he started distancing himself from his parents and siblings a decade before.“I was staying away,” said Maack, a civil servant in Ottawa. His father’s temper had always kept him on edge, he said, and he felt holiday meals were particularly uncomfortable and demeaning. Eventually, Maack stopped attending Christmas festivities altogether.
Reached by email, Maack’s father declined to be interviewed, saying he no longer considered him to be his son and insulting him at length.
Myth No. 2: It’s obvious what caused the rift: Multiple factors are usually at play in family estrangement. In some cases, parents reported that a son or daughter had chosen a new partner over the parents, or had chosen to limit interaction that had become damaging. In others, the adult child was punishing the parent for “perceived wrongdoing” or a difference in values.
Most parents cited additional contributors to the estrangement, including domestic violence, divorce and failing health.
Myth No. 3: There’s just one problem: In a study published in the journal Australian Social Work, 26 adults reported being estranged from parents for three main reasons: abuse (everything from belittling to physical or sexual abuse), betrayal (keeping secrets or sabotaging them), and poor parenting (being overly critical, shaming children or making them scapegoats).
Maack, for example, said that he resented being routinely left in charge of his two younger siblings, so much so that he decided never to have children of his own. He drifted from his parents for years, but the final straw came on his wedding day.
In 2014, he and his longtime girlfriend decided to marry at City Hall. He didn’t invite his family. He also worried that his father might be disruptive. He did not want to invite him, and felt that other family members would not want to attend without him.
“I agonized over inviting them or not for a long time,” he said, “but in the end decided ‘I can’t have them there.’ ”