Parental estrangement. What do you secretly think?

[Orphlids]

I’m interested in outsiders’ views on estrangements between parents and their adult children. If you’ve met, or were to meet someone, and then discovered they were estranged from both their adult children, what would your initial thoughts be, assuming you knew nothing more about how the estrangement came to happen?

UABU - you wouldn’t think negatively about the parent. You’d be prepared accept the adult children were perhaps unpleasant, or difficult people. You’d feel sorry for the parent.

UANBU - you’d suspect the parent’s poor behaviour was more likely to have caused the estrangements, and you might view that person with suspicion.

Which is closer to your view? I’d be interested in any thoughts, if you’d like to comment in further detail.

^ This. In my experience most people judge the daughter. Unless they themselves have been there.

As a society there is still a bias that women will put up with anything from their parents, regardless of how poor they were.

Equally, as someone said to me recently the issue for outsiders is they only ever see one chapter of the book, they haven't read the whole thing. If the chapter they have seen is charming, erudite and lovely they won't understand there are darker elements to the story and find it very hard to come to terms with that. So I guess it depends on which "chapters" people have seen.

If they were a genuinely nice and decent person , I’d reserve judgement. Listen and yes, be prepared to accept that the kids might be the problem.
However , I’ll admit that things like “I have no idea what I did “ or similar, particularly coupled with “I gave them this, I did that” instantly get my spidey senses tingling.

I will add to what I said above though in that, I don’t think the people who are the cause of an estrangement can be expected to be reliable narrators of the story. If they couldn’t be accountable in the most precious relationship in their lifetime, they certainly aren’t going to be accountable in relationships with neighbours, friends from yoga, whatever.

The reason I am NC with my mum is that she facilitated a convicted paedophile’s contact with my children knowing that he was engaging in abusive behaviour with other children (so was obviously a risk to them and all children because she’d seen it with her own eyes).

If you ask her neighbours or her friends from the golf club why we are estranged, they’ll tell you it’s because Dh and I stole a six figure sum from her and when she refused to allow us to take more, we cut her off from her grandchildren. 🙄 I know because one of her lifelong friends has been in touch with me to tell me and shared the email with me, so I have it literally in her own words. No mention of the paedophile though. 🤔

It really is. I’ve been called “cold and harsh” for stating that imo my grandparents were my Mum and Dad. Nobody would ever criticise a child adopted at 7 for seeing the people that brought them up as their parents, but because I was taken by grandparents (and our situation was so dire that my school and my siblings school basically coordinated to allow my grandparents to snatch us then date my parents to try and get us back) then it’s cold to consider them my parents.

I think the fact I’m not bitter or angry confuses people. I had a lot of therapy during my first pregnancy and am in a very good place.

In fact I find it almost amusing, albeit in a very sad way, that I’m seen by some extended family as the young weak one (I’m the youngest of 4 - the very late mistake) as I was the only one who refused to see him. Despite the fact his appearance and the drama around it made zero impact on my life beyond me saying no I apparently “clearly” couldn’t cope. Since his appearance and death two of my siblings have hit alcohol and/or drugs and both spent time in hospital and my sister is about to get married for the third time in 10 years. But I’m the one that didn’t deal with it well…

With the people I know, they tend to be quite similar to the parent they are estranged from. Similar issues on both sides.

I wouldn’t leap to any conclusions. If I described on here how my parents responded to me telling them I was being sexually abused in childhood, and how my mother reacted when I brought it up forty years later because I still didn’t understand what she did then, Mn would chorus ‘Go NC’. But I choose not to, though I’ve reduced contact. She’s not going to change.

My Bff has a daughter who cut her off when Ff left the father.
The father is a vile manipulative narc.
The daughter was already difficult & spectacularly rude & ungrateful with her mother.
Ff had made massive sacrifices to allow her D to achieve professional sports athlete level.
The cutting off sent Bff into terrible depression. Fortunately she got ADs & a good psychologist, & she is OK now, but daughter is still 99% silent.
The pain can be debilitating

I think as an adult you need to stop blaming your parents. What happens after 25 (although I’d argue 18) is on you. The vast majority of parents do their best. Obviously some fail miserably and are just generally shit. But then if you choose to continue engaging with shit as an adult that’s also on you.

I don't have an axe to grind because my children are still young and I get on well with my own parents.
My thoughts about parental estrangement are that both parties are responsible for the situation. I base this opinion on the fact that I have a fair number of friends, acquaintances, colleagues who are NC with their parents, and they all are difficult personalities. I'm sure there are cases where the children are genuinely nice people and the parents awful (and vice versa), but I've yet to come across them.

Hmm I wonder what shaped their difficult personalities…

There is a situation in my wider family with estrangement of 3 children.

The parents will have people believe that they are faultless and have been badly treated. But the truth is the fault lies entirely with them and they just can’t self reflect enough to understand their own toxicity.

Sadly they will end their lives not reconciling and I often wonder if deep down they know they are at fault.

They tell a convincing tale to all their friends but the truth is a different matter. So I would ALWAYS assume that there are three sides to every tale, and never believe only one side.

i agree with this.

for most people, the idea of cutting off a loving parent who has supported them and cherished them from the moment they were born is unfathomable. in fact, most people would rather put up with awful treatment for decades than cut their parents off.

i think if someone’s made that choice the chances are the parent has had a very detrimental effect on the child’s wellbeing in some way and the child felt it was something they had to do.

I have seen a couple of cases of parental alienation, where one parent has slowly convinced the child that the other parent doesn’t care and/or is a terrible person.

so on the whole I can see situations where neither parent nor child are in the wrong. The parent is actually a decent person who has done their best, but the child has been manipulated into believing a different version of the truth.

it’s very hard as a child to realise the parent you trust and love has used you to get back at the other parent.

By far the most common scenario I see professionally is dad losing contact after divorce as kids take mums side.

Second most common is son not being able to maintain relationships with new family and old so he stops bothering with his parents.

This. Much more likely to be the parents of more than one sibling has issues with them.

An otherwise rational daughter not being in contact with elderly parents frankly i would assume she had very good reasons.

NC with my mother. She tells everyone she has no idea why, "she made some mistakes but tried her best, as a struggling single mother" and I'm just spoilt or ungrateful or mentally ill.

One of her 'mistakes' involved me being abused by a paedo (her new boyfriend) from 7 years old.

Another 'mistake' nearly killed me and I still have nightmares about it decades later.

There's more, but you get the idea. She'll deny everything and go ballistic if I ever dare tell people. So no-one knows and I'm estranged from most of the family.

Estranged from 1 child and I wouldn't think anything. People don't always get on and personalities can clash. Estranged from 2 and I'd think you are the common denominator.

If its just one child it could be either, could be both. Multiple I'd be inclined to think it was the parents

It's always hard to judge unless you were actually present, but usually if someone has no idea as to why their child cut them off or they blame someone else "turning their child against them" then it's their fault.

My cousin and her mother are NC. I would say both are incredibly self centred, toxic people but as the adult throughout the majority of the relationship I would hold the mother responsible. And it's hard to know if my cousin would be so self centred had her mother not been

It depends how they explain it. If they said they had no idea how it happened or what went wrong then I’d absolutely assume they were at fault.

I wouldn't judge. You just don't know who is at fault or if it's a dynamic of two difficult characters clashing.

I'm fairly LC with my parents because I've always been the scapegoat child. I spent years striving to succeed in various aspects of my life but my role as the disappointment/rebel has been cast in stone for decades. If i won a Nobel prize my mum's only comment would be something like "your hair looked a mess at the presentation". Whereas my sister could do a shit on the floor and my parents would get the neighbours round to admire it. There was no falling out but I drifted away for my own self protection. I don't think they are that bothered but I'm sure people ask about me and they probably say something like I'm cold and uncaring and can't be bothered to visit very often (and it may well look like that to be fair).

What's your point?

Sorry for the late response, I went out and I can’t seem to log into MN on my phone.

Some interesting and sad replies here. For those wondering, no, I haven’t posted this before. I suspect it’s a topic that will be at the forefront of many people’s minds, but for many, they can’t discuss it in real life, so an anonymous forum is ideal.

My own estrangement is from my father, and is of my choosing (well, I went NC, but felt I was given no alternative due to his behaviour). I haven’t seen him in nearly six years. Although I know my father to be a cruel and unpleasant man behind closed doors, he presents a very different persona to the rest of the world. He is charming, funny, exciting, articulate.

While the estrangement itself does not upset me, I occasionally allow myself to wonder what his friends and wider circle make of the fact he has no contact with either me, or my only sibling. Bizarrely, I quite like thinking about it… I’m not sure what that’s about. I don’t move in the same circles as my father, so I never hear if, or what, he says about his adult children. I wonder if, when he got married recently, any of the guests noticed neither of his children were there. I suppose that was the only occasion of enough gravity to make people wonder. The rest of the time, I doubt anyone has enough interest in other people’s lives to give it much thought.

I don’t think the people who are the cause of an estrangement can be expected to be reliable narrators of the story. If they couldn’t be accountable in the most precious relationship in their lifetime, they certainly aren’t going to be accountable in relationships with neighbours, friends from yoga, whatever.

I agree with this.

What they are saying / not saying and the why is going to have me considering if I want to befriend this person because if they are content treating their own children whom they raised (or probably didn’t) a certain way, what is stopping them from doing the same to me.

Presumably that it's all the parent's fault.
However unless you accept a) the blank slate theory of human personality b) believe that noone except parents have any impact ( which has been demonstrated in studies to be untrue) it's a lot more complicated than that.
It's a frequent "gotcha" tactic in these ' discussions' tho'