Beatrice Sanders, 69, a divorced mother and her only child, Kat Schmidt, 30, were always a tight-knit unit. So when Sanders retired about two years ago, it was a no-brainer to move from Maryland to Utah where her daughter lives.
“She was a great kid and I was always so grateful for that as a single mother with an extremely demanding job,” as the secretary to an elementary-school principal, Sanders says.
But soon after she moved, she felt an unexpected tension between the two of them. Schmidt told her she had always felt responsible for her mother’s happiness and that the two of them were too enmeshed in each other’s lives. And that Sanders seemed to ignore Schmidt’s pleas to stop what she considered forced physical contact.
Then this April, Schmidt told Sanders she was blocking her cell number and needed to end all contact.
“I was devastated,” Sanders says. “I tried really really hard to be a good mom.”
Sanders’ story once would have been shocking but nowadays sounds familiar. Estrangement between parents and adult children has become a popular topic across the media landscape, especially social media; on Reddit several forums for estranged adult children have more than 30,000 visitors weekly. One public Facebook page for parents of estranged children has 13,000 followers.
Whether estrangement is more prevalent than it used to be is anybody’s guess. Researchers have looked into the phenomenon and begun to collect some data, but can’t yet gauge whether estrangement is more common or just more openly discussed.
“There’s no scientifically acceptable data proving that estrangement is increasing or decreasing,” says Karl Pillemer , a professor of human development at Cornell University and a leading expert on the topic. “What has genuinely increased is not the rate of estrangement, but the willingness to name it, and talk about it and engage with others about it.”
In a nationally representative survey of 1,340 U.S. adults conducted by Pillemer’s Cornell Family Estrangement and Reconciliation Project, 27% said they were estranged from a close relative, meaning they had no contact. This includes 17% who said that relative was a parent or a child. The survey was published in his 2020 book, Fault Lines: Fractured Families and How to Mend Them . And a 2025 YouGov poll found 38% of American adults reporting estrangement from an immediate family member, including 16% from a parent and 10% from a child.
What causes estrangement
The causes of estrangement vary as much as family dynamics. In some cases, it can be an adult child cutting off a parent as a consequence of physical, sexual or emotional abuse. Mental illness, drug abuse and other factors can also lead to parent/child breakdowns.
For Richard Heller, 67, and his son, 39, Heller’s self-admitted years of unchecked rage and anger led them to where they are now: almost no contact for a decade and a 4-year-old grandchild whom Heller has never met.
Heller, a licensed social worker who lives in Pelham, N.Y., was divorced from his wife when their two children were young; When Heller remarried, he says, his son did not adapt well to the blended family. The conflict only increased as Heller’s son became a teenager and an adult.
“Somewhere in there he just decided he didn’t want anything to do not only with us, but with his mother — in fact, he’s not in touch with anyone from his family of origin,” Heller says.
Heller knows the role he played in the conflict with his son. “I was a very angry and raging parent when my children were young,” he says. Recently, he says, his daughter Samantha told him that she was terrified of him as a child.
For a long time, he was furious at his son and desperate to get him back. But “after 10 years of hardcore meditation and outside help, I’ve resolved a lot of the pain that was driving that rage,” Heller says. Recently, he says, he’s learned to accept his situation by understanding how he transferred that pain to his son: “How did I help those seeds flourish, so that this estrangement came about? We want to have our children in our life, but more than anything, we need to be at peace with their choice.”
Samantha, 35, who asked to be identified only by her first name, says she and her brother had a very difficult childhood and she understands her brother’s feelings, although she is saddened he has also cut all contact with her.
“I don’t think he fully understands his emotions because I didn’t fully understand mine,” she says. “He might be presenting it as anger, but it’s not anger; it’s pain.”
Of her father she says, “I don’t think he’s fully aware of everything he has done, and I can understand why.” As the mother, she’s gained insight into the difficulty parents would have knowing they hurt their child. “So I can see how that’s painful to reflect on and think about.”
Another cause of estrangement: when parents feel their child is violating core beliefs and values, says Megan Gilligan , an associate professor of human development and family science at the University of Missouri.
Gilligan worked on the Within Family Differences study, which began in 2000 with in-depth interviews of around 500 mothers and some of their adult children. The women, all around 65 years old and from the Boston metropolitan area, were interviewed again seven years later.
She gives an example from the interviews: A mother, a devout Catholic, was willing to accept her child’s divorce, but not his remarriage. The mother and son ended up estranged. While the mother didn’t choose to end the relationship, her anger at her child’s decision most likely led to decades of unresolved tension and strain until her son decided to limit or end contact.
Many parents have difficulty coming to terms with the fact that traditional expectations about family roles and power balance have changed.
Joshua Coleman , a psychologist who specializes in family estrangement, says, “The old rules of engagement have just radically changed.” He explains that the principles of “honor thy mother and thy father, families forever respect thy elders, blood is thicker than water, have given way to this focus [among children] on ‘my mental health, my happiness, my personal growth, my identity, my political beliefs.'”
Coleman, who was estranged from his own daughter for several years, is the author of Rules of Estrangement: Why Adult Children Cut Ties and How to Heal the Conflict and writes the Substack Family Troubles . His services helping estranged family members are in high demand. So much so that he has a waitlist, although he charges $995 for one video session and a year of email support.
Different realities and “defensive ignorance”
What can make reconciliation difficult is that typically the parent and child are operating from clashing perceptions not only of who said what, but what actually happened.
Take Sanders and Schmidt, the mother and daughter who are currently estranged. When her mother moved to Utah, Schmidt had been going through some changes, including leaving the Mormon religion she had been raised in. She had recently started therapy to deal with anxiety.
Sanders sees Schmidt’s decision to cut her off as part of an effort to understand herself. “I feel that Kat is trying to find out who she really is and in order to do that, she needs to reject her mother and her church relationship.”
For Schmidt, her mother is not taking any responsibility for her own actions. She says she repeatedly explained to her mother why certain things she did bothered her so much. But her mother didn’t seem to understand or want to change.
Schmidt says her efforts to protect herself were fruitless. “I couldn’t say no and have it count.”
Mother and daughter both felt they were walking on eggshells for a few years. But as is often the case, one incident precipitated the break and both remember it very differently. On a night out, Schmidt says her mother unexpectedly grabbed her.
“I’m OK with consensual touches and hugs, but I told her forcing physical affection on me is not OK,” Schmidt says. “She showed me that she wouldn’t respect the most important thing to me — a boundary. She didn’t get it.”
As Sanders remembers it, she held on to Schmidt’s shoulder to balance herself in a moment of exuberance.
For Sanders, what makes the situation more agonizing is that she came from an abusive childhood herself, and she sees herself as a much better parent than her own father.
“I told her it breaks my heart that she feels about me the way I felt about my dad,” Sanders says. “I’m not angry at Kat; I’m sad, disappointed, and I resent that I was a good mother and she doesn’t see me that way.”
For Schmidt, her mother is just waiting for her to heal and expects Schmidt will return without examining her own role in the estrangement. “I love my mom,” she says. “I miss my mom, but I don’t feel safe around her.”
It’s not unusual for a parent to feel clueless when their adult child severs the relationship. “One of the most striking findings in our research is what I call defensive ignorance,” says Pillemer, the Cornell professor. “Parents in estrangements frequently say that they have no idea why the child cut them off.”
But in almost every case, when interviewers probed further, they found that “many parents had received detailed letters or messages from their children explaining exactly what went wrong, and they dismissed them as crazy, wrong or exaggerated.”
This isn’t necessarily surprising, Pillemer says; parents are not only experiencing rejection, but “there is also the pain of knowing they may have contributed to it. When this happens, our minds protect us by editing out the uncomfortable information.”
Moving toward reconciliation
The good news is that many estranged parents and their children find their way back to each other, although those numbers are hard to come by, too. And it can take a lot of hard work, however, especially on the parents’ part, to move toward some sort of rapprochement.
Insisting that one person is right and one person is wrong rarely works in any relationship, says Jan Anderson , a psychologist who now works as an executive life coach, often with parents of alienated adult children. “There are two separate realities here, and it does help to at least be able to understand where your kid is at.”
One of the first steps is to stop “litigating the facts.” — Jan Anderson
In a situation where an adult child has severed contact, the power lies with the child to resume it, a shift that parents often have a hard time accepting. “If you’re in a one-down position, how do you negotiate? You have to change your strategy a little bit,” says Anderson. The power dynamics have flipped, and “your child has basically told you, ‘I’m renegotiating the terms of our relationship, Mom and Dad.'”
One potential approach psychologist Coleman recommends considering is what he calls an amends letter. He says when working with clients, helping them write one is usually his first order of business.
That letter “attempts to express some degree of understanding and empathy and responsibility taking and being willing to work on the relationship,” he says. Writing such a letter to his daughter helped them overcome their estrangement.
“It has to be done very carefully because it’s easy to write a letter that may seem like amends, but says things like, ‘Well, if I did anything wrong,’ or ‘Maybe I wasn’t the most perfect parent.’ Those things are all well-intended, but they don’t persuade anybody,” Coleman says. “Parents have to be open and willing to take a good, hard look at themselves.”
Still, you can’t force a reconciliation. Parents often ask Anderson if they should just show up on their child’s doorstep. Her response is succinct: “I haven’t heard of a case yet where it went well.”
Heller, the father with the estranged son, knows that firsthand because he tried it.
“I made every effort to reach out,” Heller says. “Eventually, he started blocking my texts, my calls, and so I started stalking him on the internet. I went and visited his place of work. And he was there behind the register, like a deer in the headlights.” This was about three years after his son blocked all access.
Heller told him he loved him and wanted to talk. He says his son’s response was: “Don’t call me. Don’t text me. Don’t write me. Don’t reach out to me in any way, shape, or form.” He has not been in contact with his son since that failed meeting about eight years ago.
Hearing the heartbreaking stories of estrangement can make it easy to lose sight of the fact that many families are closer than ever. According to a 2024 Pew Research Survey, 77% of parents say their relationship with their adult children is excellent or very good.
“I think we have a fascinating paradox at the heart of the estrangement conversation,” Pillemer says. “On the one hand, young people are closer and more dependent on their parents than previous generations. On the other hand, estrangement appears to be prominent and highly visible.”
Sanders, the estranged mother, believes she and her daughter will reunite at some point, but for now she is leaving Utah for South Carolina and moving in with her brother, who has health issues.
“It’s not always easy, the call of family duty,” she says. “But that’s what family’s for.”
How to rebuild your relationship
(Image credit: Getty Images)
Getting back together with adult children who have cut you off isn’t easy, but it can be done. Here are some tips:
Let your child know your door is always open, but don’t stalk them on social media or show up at their home or office. If they’re saying they don’t want to talk with you, respect that.
Attempt to move past placing blame. Even if you feel you are completely in the right, be open and curious with yourself about why your child is so angry with you.
Get outside help. Good therapy is often useful and so is a friend or family member who will give you an honest view of the situation. Too often, people only confide in those who fully bolster their side, which reinforces the polarization.
Stay off or limit social media. While it can be a place of support, too often sites about estrangement serve to confirm the beliefs of one side, which isn’t helpful.
Accept that if you do renew relations with your child, they might set down specific rules of engagement that could feel rigid and unfair. If things go well, these may loosen with time. And keep your eye on the prize of reconciliation.
Note: This item first appeared in Kiplinger Retirement Report, our popular monthly periodical that covers key concerns of affluent older Americans who are retired or preparing for retirement. Subscribe for retirement advice that’s right on the money.
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