BROKEN TIES
Study considers how and why some relatives find themselves cut off
With New Year’s parties this weekend and Christmas gatherings just over, the image of a family holiday is a classic one: Parents, siblings and grandchildren gathered 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 the child 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. Their findings challenge the deeply held notion that family relationships can’t be dissolved and suggest that estrangement is not all that uncommon.
Broadly speaking, estrangement is defined as one or more relatives intentionally choosing to end contact because of an ongoing negative relationship.
“To the extent you are actively trying to distance yourself and maintain that distance, that makes you estranged,’’ said Kristina Scharp, an assistant professor of communication studies at Utah State University.
Last month, Lucy Blake, a lecturer at Edge Hill University in England, published a systematic review of 51 articles about estrangement in the Journal of Family Theory & Review. This body of literature, Blake wrote, gives family scholars an opportunity to ‘‘understand family relationships as they are, rather than how they could or should be.’’
There are no reliable numbers on estrangement in the United States. In 2014, 8 percent of roughly 2,000 British adults said they had cut off a family member, which translates to more than 5 million people, according to a nationally representative survey commissioned by Stand Alone, a charity that supports estranged people.
Estrangement is widely misunderstood, but as more people share their experiences publicly, some misconceptions are being overturned. Assuming that every relationship between a parent and child will last a lifetime is as simplistic as assuming that every couple will stay married. Here’s a look at what’s true and what’s not:
Myth: Quick separation
It’s usually a long, drawnout 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. All the hurt and betrayals, all the things that accumulate, undermine a person’s sense of trust.”
In a study published in June, Utah State’s Scharp spoke to 52 adult children
and found that they had distanced themselves from their parents in various ways over time.
Some subjects moved away. Others no longer made an effort to fulfill expectations of a daughter or son role. One 48-year-old woman, after 33 years without contact with her father, declined to visit him in the hospital or to attend his funeral.
Still others chose to limit conversations with a family member to superficial small talk or reduce the frequency of contact. One 21-year-old man described how he called and texted his mother, but not his father, after leaving for college.
“They still live together, so obviously he noticed, and that bothered him,” he said.
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, Ontario, Canada. His father’s temper always had kept him on edge, he said, and he felt holiday meals were particularly uncomfortable and demeaning. Eventually, Maack stopped attending Christmas festivities altogether.
Myth: The rift reason
Multiple factors are usually at play in family estrangements.
In a 2015 study, Agllias interviewed 25 Australian parents, each of whom had been cut off by at least one child.
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 or failing health.
One woman insisted to Agllias that she had not spoken to her son and his wife in seven years because when she asked her daughter-inlaw to bring a specific dessert to a family gathering, the daughter-in-law deliberately brought the same dessert her mother-in-law had baked.
The woman saw it as “a symbol of total disrespect,” Agllias said. Yet the woman eventually revealed other factors that had undermined their relationship, including that she felt her son’s wife sometimes kept the grandchildren from her and didn’t properly take care of her son.
Myth: 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).
The three were not mutually exclusive and often overlapped, said Agllias. Most of the participants said their estrangements followed childhoods in which they had poor connections with parents who were physically or emotionally unavailable.
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, in part because it was an informal gathering.
But 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.”
His family found out he was married through Facebook. One brother told Maack he was hurt that he hadn’t been told. His sister and father made it clear that they would no longer talk to him, according to Maack and his wife. Two relatives confirmed their account.
These days, one brother still talks to Maack, mostly through messages on Facebook. But they don’t talk about the rest of the family.