Three years ago, I stopped speaking to my parents. I recently learned that this apparently makes me part of some millennial trend, thanks in large part to The Wall Street Journal. I had always associated this publication with stock tables, men named Richard, and niche travel stories. The piece, titled “Why Are So Many Adults Cutting Off Their Parents?" almost made me spit out my pumpkin spice latte. I felt as if I had been hit over the head or accused of some heinous misdeed. It read like a dispatch from a newly discovered tribe and was deeply one-sided.
I understand the impulse from journalists, who are taught to look for patterns, and a pattern with a hashtag and hundreds of TikTok videos is easy to write about. But reading about your own life as a cultural phenomenon while eating breakfast is a strange and disorienting experience. It’s kind of like finding your divorce on a list of “Fall’s Hottest Trends.”
A Trend Is Something You Can Opt Out Of
Trends should be light things like bucket hats, rose gold everything, and Hailey Bieber’s glazed donut look. They come with a start date and an expiration date, and nobody grieves when they’re over (well, I did grieve the loss of my beloved skinny jeans).
What I, and many others like me, have done doesn’t work like that. Nobody wakes up one day, watches a viral video on Instagram, and thinks, “Hey, maybe I should cut off contact with my parents today. I mean, everyone is doing it, right?” Going “no contact” with your parents is not an aesthetic, and there is no fun part of this decision. There’s usually a long, exhausting stretch of trying, followed by a quiet decision when you’ve run out of options and finally put yourself and your mental health first.
It doesn’t feel like joining anything; it feels like leaving and finding out later that you’re not the only one. It’s not something that can be explained in a simple social media caption or a two-minute video to please the algorithm.
The Question Nobody Asks
Here's what really gets me. Almost every one of these stories is built around the same question: what is wrong with adult children these days? The answers always come pre-loaded: they’re entitled, fragile, and too “therapized.” They can’t take discomfort or a hard conversation, or a mother who said something mildly critical at Thanksgiving dinner in 2009.
Did you notice who isn’t in that paragraph? The parents often show up as the injured party: the perpetual victims, bewildered and sitting by the phone waiting for their child to call. The child, on the other hand, is treated as the subject of an investigation.
The story always begins on the day the calls stopped, and parents often claim they “have no idea” why their adult child cut them off. It’s as if the first 20 to 30 years don’t exist and everything before that moment was all sunshine and rainbows. The adult child was simply ungrateful and decided to burn down the happy home.
I’m not going to go over my entire childhood or the years after, and I also want to be fair. There are parents who are truly heartbroken and confused, and their pain is real. I don’t think every estranged parent is a villain or every estranged child a hero. People are complicated, and so are families.
But I do think it's telling that the trend coverage has a favourite suspect, and it's almost never the person who held the most power in the relationship. For most of a child's life, that power runs in one direction. When the person with less of it finally walks away after years of trying, it seems worth asking what they’re walking away from before asking what's wrong with them.
The Deathbed Argument
The most persuasive card in the trend-piece deck is the deathbed. You've heard it: someday your parents will be dying, and you'll wish you had called, or some other iteration of this. It came up in an Oprah podcast episode on going “no contact” that I watched recently, which I found highly biased.
A hospice nurse, Hadley Vlahos, talked about parents asking to speak to their estranged children in their final days. There was one part that really stuck with me, as Vlahos herself is estranged from her biological father. When asked why, she answered in one line: “I say it’s a million cuts that bled me dry.” Oooof.
That one sentence explains estrangement, at least for me, better than most of the trend pieces I’ve read. It’s not a big blowout argument over a rude comment at Christmas or a “boundary” borrowed from TikTok. It’s a slow accumulation of things that chip away at you, taken one at a time, that sound too small to justify cutting off contact. But together, they show why many adult children make that decision.
It’s also why people like me struggle to explain it to an outsider. Most people ask what the one incident was, and there isn’t one. You can feel sorrow and still know why you left; both things can be true. It just doesn’t sound like a click-worthy headline.
What It Actually Looks Like
If you want to know what estrangement looks like, it’s actually way less dramatic than it sounds. There aren’t big moments where I’m in tears walking through the Mother’s Day card aisle. I’m a mom now, and the only thing I think about on Mother’s Day is the beautiful handmade candle holder my daughter made at school or the slobbery kisses she plants on my cheek.
Sometimes, at parties, someone will ask about my parents visiting since I live in a foreign country, and it’s almost always when I’m crazed and holding a charcuterie board. I briefly say I’m not in touch with them and move on. My birthday and my parents' birthdays pass without a phone call, and I never shed a tear. If anything, after three years, I feel quite detached from them.
Of course, knowing how much to explain to strangers is always a maths equation. I have a short, medium, and long version, and I run a quick assessment every time someone asks. Will this person be kind? Will they tell me I’ll regret it? Sometimes I just lie and say they’ll visit at Christmas.
Everyone Is an Expert
People who would never comment on your marriage or finances feel completely qualified to weigh in on your family. I always hear the old, “But they’re your parents,” or “You’ll regret it when they’re gone.” And my answers are usually, “But I was their child,” and “Will I?”
Most people who say this mean well. They’re picturing their own family, scaled to fit, and reaching for the closest concept they know.
The internet, as it always does, offers black-and-white verdicts. In the comment sections, estranged children are either truth-tellers or spoiled brats, depending on which side of the algorithm you land on. Neither one is me. I’m just a person with a job, a husband, a kid, and strong opinions about the correct way to load a dishwasher, who made a hard call to keep myself and my child safe.
What I Would Like Instead
I'm not asking anyone to take my side or agree that I made the right choice. I'm not even asking for sympathy, though a greeting card section that acknowledged people like me would be a nice touch.
What I would really like is coverage that starts the story earlier. I want fewer clickbait headlines that treat estrangement as a quirk of the millennial generation or a casualty of therapy culture. I want the response when someone says they don’t speak to their parents to be something other than “but why?” A good response could be “That sounds hard,” followed by, miracle of miracles, a change of subject if that’s what the person wants.
It’s hard, but it’s not a vibe, a phase, or an aesthetic. On most days, I forget about it entirely, and it’s just a perfectly normal Monday. If it is a trend, it’s the worst one I never asked to be part of; there isn’t even good merch.
Estrangement isn’t a trend, though. It’s just my life, and I would like to be asked, not told about it.