Let me just state at the drop that I am estranged from one of my parents and have limited contact with the other so I’m not exactly an unbiased source here, but this article is pure self-serving copium bullshit written by a hack who shouldn't be licensed to practice anything anywhere because his judgement is compromised by his emotions.

In just the same way that divorce has become destigmatized, estrangement has become destigmatized.

Oh, boo fucking hoo with your false equivalence. Instead of staying with an abusive or toxic spouse, people are now able to legally get out of that relationship without it destroying their lives, and you're complaining? That’s a good thing! The same happens for people with abusive or toxic family members--whom they didn’t get to choose--and the victim is supposed to feel bad about it? Are you arguing that divorce and estrangement should be stigmatized? "Your father's a raging alcoholic, Billy, but you don't want him around anymore? Shame on you! Back into the closet with all the divorced women where you belong!"

This high level of estrangements leaves older people without care and younger people without resources. We’re leaving the state to take over the space where family members used to help each other out, even as the state does a frankly shitty job of that.

There's a reckoning for people who squirted out another human for selfish reasons? Good. You aren’t entitled to your kids’ undying love and doting affection just because you made a baby 30 or 40 years ago. If the state is doing a bad job of caring for the unloved elderly (and I note, by the way, that this piece is focused entirely on elder care, hmm) that is 100% the state's choice of priorities. One made by the same gerontocracy who’d agree that their kids owe them everything, I’ll warrant.

Q. What’s causing all these rifts? A. If you look at the surveys of adult children, they’ll say that the biggest reason is emotional abuse and maybe values differences, whereas parents are more likely to blame their divorce, their child’s marriage or their child’s therapy.

The story is always the same, and that is extremely telling. The parent never did anything wrong, and their child is just bitter about ancient history from their childhood. Or I bet it’s their harridan spouse or hippie therapist turning their child against them! It’s the abuser dehumanizing the victim, in this case the parent infantilizing the adult child such that they would never come to such a decision on their own accord based on their own judgement. To be fair though, my parents are divorced, I am married and I am in therapy (strike three!) so I am kind of exactly the person this guy hates. But I’m getting a weird vibe from this piece. It’s almost as if this psychologist has some kind of emotional investment in-

Q. You’ve written about your own experience with estrangement…. A. My daughter…didn’t speak to me for several years in her early twenties

And there it is!

I collaborated with researchers on a survey of 1,035 mothers who were estranged from at least one child. The mothers were recruited from an email discussion list of people who sought support and help with their estrangement, so it was a selective sample. The majority blamed outside factors — i.e., not their own actions — for the split. Seventy-eight percent said the estrangement happened after the child was married or became involved with a partner.

Motivated reasoning. Of course the kind of people who are estranged from their children don’t blame themselves! That’s almost the entire fucking point. It is over and over again a story of someone who can’t accept their child for who they are.

And are you surprised that a child with an at-risk-of-estrangement parent wants to protect their partner from said parent? They are looking at their relationships, sensing that one of those relationships could potentially be destructive to the other, and choosing to protect the relationship they value more. This is normal. This is healthy.

Q. It’s the kids who are mostly initiating these estrangements, correct? A. [Parents who initiate estrangement] are in the minority, and that it’s usually for religious reasons or they disapprove of the child’s gender identity or maybe the person that they’ve married, or their values.

Thank you for proving my point. When a child cuts a parent out of their life, it's the children who are wrong. When the parent cuts the child out, why, it's somehow still the children who are wrong.

I don’t feel like the culture’s yet reckoned with how much we are wrongly blaming parents. We’re still in a time where people assume that if you have problems in adulthood, it’s largely your parents’ fault.

Bro, what? It’s not my parents’ fault I have problems in adulthood, they are the problem. I know my mother will never change, except to get more unhinged, more emotionally manipulative, more destructively self-centered. I am choosing to shield myself--and the relationships I want to protect--from that. And what the fuck is "wrongly blaming parents?" Here's a conversation that has never happened: "I've got a job I hate, my dog needs surgery, and I burned my eggs this morning. Then my father called out of the blue and said that he was sorry he ever had me and that I'm an ungrateful shitbag. I was shocked! So I'm cutting him off."

Let me paint you a more realistic picture: you are devastated, emotionally wrung out, because after decades of bullshit you have finally reached the end of your rope with one of your parents and you are so fucking done you want nothing to do with them anymore. So you seek out a therapist to work through your feelings, and you find this one. He walks into your first session, drops trou, squats in the middle of the floor, and just shits out "you’re wrongly blaming your parents" because he came in to the room with that idea before he even met you. Unbelievable.

Therapists can do a lot of damage. We might encourage a parent to cut a child out of a will without having that parent consider how much he or she may have contributed to conflict with that child. ... I do think that therapists are a big agent of estrangements, and I would like to see my field be much more strict about diagnosing people who aren’t in the room.

Lol. Lmao. As though someone with an estranged parent who's in therapy hasn't brought them into the room with them. After living with her physical and emotional abuse my whole life, I finally snapped late last year. My therapist knows exactly who my mother is and why I chose to cut her out of my life, which I generally boil down to 3 points:

• In 2024 she went so completely apeshit at a McDonalds because they messed up her order that she is now banned from that McDonalds. People have stabbed someone in a McDonalds and not been banned. She actually called the cops on the employees, real main-character Karen shit. I wouldn't be surprised if she's featured on a worst-public-freakouts compilation video somewhere. She has been like this my entire life. I call this the "not-someone-I-would-associate-with" checkbox.
• Also in 2024, after I delivered the eulogy at her mother's funeral, she came up to my wife and I and said that it was a nice eulogy but that she did a lot of work taking care of my grandmother and was upset I didn't acknowledge her. In her mother's eulogy. I was so floored by the utter shamelessness of it, I had to quickly excuse us and confirm if my wife had heard the same thing. The "entitlement" checkbox.
• After not speaking or texting me for months in 2025, she sent me this video apropos of nothing. No context, no followup. I said nothing despite having so much to say and quietly blocked her the next day instead. That was the end of our relationship. The "guilt trip" checkbox. If you want a window into the deranged mind of an estranged parent and see exactly who this dipshit psychologist is advocating for, watch that video.

By the way, stop taking away my agency: my therapist didn't encourage me to do jack shit. She just listened while I played that video for her, and afterward said, "for what it's worth, I'm sorry." I had already decided that enough was enough earlier that week. After years of being low-contact with her, my mother pushed me over the edge to no-contact. Because if every time someone comes into your house they take all the eggs out of your refrigerator and smash them on the floor, eventually you get sick of cleaning up the eggs and stop inviting them over entirely.

And I don't think my situation is in any way unique. Thousands of people are growing up, looking at the people they were forced to spend the early parts of their life with, and thinking, "wow, I definitely wouldn't choose to have these people in my life if I weren't related to them." And at some point, it becomes less painful to remove them from your life than to keep them in it.

So fuck this guy for his dumb and wrong ideas, fuck this magazine for giving him a platform, and fuck the shitty parents who for way too long have gotten a pass for their abusive behavior no one should ever put up with in any relationship.