Adults Who Cut Off Their Parents Usually Had These 11 Experiences As Kids
Not every household is full of love, laughter and nurturing.
F01 PHOTO | Shutterstock Even the most available, loving parents will cause their kids some amount of harm. Although there's a marked difference between small traumas and big traumas, we still need our parents to validate what we went through and how we felt. Parental estrangement isn't something that happens overnight. It's something that occurs after years of turmoil that's built from childhood trauma. Adults who cut their parents off usually had experiences as kids that remain unresolved.
Supportive parents focus on repair and reconciliation after these experiences, but not every parent has the tools to do that. It takes deep self-reflection, humility, and emotional awareness for parents to receive the more painful parts of their grown children's lived experience. When adults cut their parents off, it's usually because they're unable or unwilling to hear what they experienced as true.
Adults who cut off their parents usually had these 11 experiences as kids
1. Emotional neglect
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In order for kids to flourish, they need to feel safe, protected and cared for on both practical and emotional levels. Just as kids need three meals a day and a place to call home, they also need their parents to be emotionally available. Showing up and being present is an expression of love, and kids who were emotionally neglected grow up believing that their parents didn't truly love them.
Parental emotional neglect is deeply damaging for kids. It's an experience that extends far beyond childhood, negatively impacting how kids enter relationships once they become adults.
They often feel alienated from their family of origin and resentful that they weren't given the attention and affection they should have received. The deep resentment and residual distrust they feel for their parents can lead them to put distance between themselves and their parents for their own self-preservation.
From the outside looking in, adults who cut off their parents might appear callous and cruel. In reality, they're doing what they need to protect their emotional well-being, which is something their parents never did for them as kids.
2. Conditional love
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Adults who cut off their parents usually experienced conditional love as kids. They felt harshly judged when they did something wrong, as though their parents might pull away from them or rescind their love.
As family psychotherapist Sidu Arroyo-Boulter revealed, "Conditional love becomes conditional self-acceptance." While conditional love is based around a performance and a child's ability to meet their parents expectations, unconditional love "requires that the child be nothing more than who they are right now in order to be fully accepted."
Of all the lessons kids take away from their parents' conditional love, one of the most harmful is that they feel "as if the only way they can be loved is through meeting others' conditions... These children struggle to find themselves loveable and repeatedly judge themselves for their mistakes and perceived shortcomings," Arroyo-Boulter explained.
"In adulthood, they continuously adjust to meet their partner's expectations... looking for certainty that they are indeed loveable. While true unconditional acceptance and love may be impossible, the parent-child relationship may be the closest example of us demonstrating this type of love," Arroyo-Boulter concluded.
3. Invasions of privacy
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Adults who cut off their parents usually experienced repeated boundary-crossing and invasions of privacy when they were kids. Mutual respect and trust are the core points of every relationship, even those between children and their parents.
Some parents believe that the scope of their role allows them to disregard their kids' need to have a private life. They read diaries and rifle through desk drawers. They thumb through notebooks and listen in on phone calls. They can't handle the idea of their kids making independent decisions and having a deep inner world that belongs solely to them.
Being young doesn't mean kids should tolerate being disrespected, but being reliant on their parents for survival can make that situation very tricky to navigate. Kids who weren't given a safe childhood experience usually cut their parents off as adults.
4. An unstable home environment
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Growing up in an unstable home environment is an experience that usually leads kids to cut off their parents as adults. Their basic needs often went unmet, which meant they had to focus on surviving, instead of having fun, making friends, and just being a kid.
Childhood trauma therapist Patrick Teahan described the chaos system as a toxic family dynamic, noting, "In a system like this, there can be a lot of broken promises, and the family is weirdly familiar with the fast-moving chaotic changes so much that they assume that's kind of how life is."
The chaos can show up as a "total loss of basics for children, like clean laundry, stable, consistent schooling, stable food, basic needs," Teahn explained.
Kids from chaotic homes are "fiercely independent due to the shame of having grown up in this, which is a way to protect themselves." As adults, they tend to be "emotionally in transit." They struggle to trust others and themselves, and they have a deep fear that any emotional connection they make could dissolve at any moment.
As they grieve the consistency and stability they were never given, adults who had chaotic experiences as kids might cut their parents off, in an effort to give themselves the stable foundation they've always deserved.
5. High expectations that were impossible to meet
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Setting expectations for kids to meet is a natural part of being a parent, but when those expectations are so high that they can't actually be reached, the experience usually leads kids to cut off their parents in adulthood.
Many parents believe that pushing kids to meet high standards teaches them to challenge themselves and be achievement-oriented, but really, it lowers their self-esteem, until they're wracked with self-doubt.
Family and Human Development Specialist at the University of Delaware, Pat Tanner Nelson, pointed out that unrealistic parental expectations make it hard for kids to develop a healthy sense of self-esteem. Kids with strong self-esteem grow up to accept, like, and respect themselves, and they tend to value the relationship they have with their parents. "When expectations are realistic, it is easy for a child to experience success and feel personally valuable," Nelson said.
Parents who celebrate the effort their kids put into a task, rather than the outcome, send their kids a message that doing their best is absolutely good enough. Kids need to know their parents believe in them and will keep loving them, even when they fall short of perfection. Without that experience, they usually cut their parents off later in life.
6. Shame as a disciplinary technique
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Shame is an especially difficult emotional experience. Being shamed by their parents is something kids don't easily bounce back from, because it drags down their self-worth to subterranean levels. Parental shame becomes a core wound that often defines how people move through the rest of their lives. They're left feeling unloved and unworthy, like nothing they did back then or do now has ever been good enough.
As researcher and vulnerability expert Brené Brown revealed, "The enemy of worthiness is shame... Where we need to start the conversation around wholeheartedness and worthiness is around shame and what that looks like in our families."
Brown described shame as "this belief that we are unworthy of love and belonging, that there's something about us, something we've done, that renders us unloveable, that we don't deserve to be in connection." She noted the crucial difference between shame and guilt. Guilt is when we say, "I did something bad," and shame is when we say, "I am bad."
Brown shared "The Wholehearted Parenting Manifesto," which outlines how to approach parenting in a heart-centered way that eradicates shame. "I want you to engage with the world from a place of worthiness," she wrote. "You will learn that you are worthy of love, belonging, and joy every time you see me practice self-compassion and embrace my own imperfections."
Using shame as a disciplinary technique doesn't actually work. Shame serves no other purpose than to make people doubt themselves so deeply, it often takes a lifetime for them to heal.
7. The silent treatment
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Kids who experience the silent treatment from their parents get sent the message that they need to stay small, so that they fit into the rigidly-defined behaviors their parents think they should follow. With the silent treatment, there's barely any room for making a mistake.
Kids learn from an early age that their parents are willing to wield cruelty to get them to fall into line. The silent treatment is a subtle form of emotional abuse, one that cuts off the connection and sense of continuity a parent is supposed to provide for their kids.
Relationship expert Dr. Margaret Paul explained that the silent treatment occurs when someone withdraws their approval and goes completely quiet. It's a destructive form of punishment.
She shared that the healthy response to the silent treatment involves recognizing that you can't control someone else's emotional responses, but kids don't know that, especially when it comes to their parents. In an ideal world, kids who were given the silent treatment are able to move on and heal by "bringing love inside, letting [themselves] know that [they] are a good person and deserving of love."
8. Triangulation
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Triangulation is a term used in psychology to describe what happens when someone gets dragged into the middle of a fight between two other people. Triangulation is an especially devastating thing for kids to experience at the hands of their own parents, and it can pose a serious risk to their emotional development.
The conflict between their parents has nothing to do with them, but they're suddenly expected to keep the peace or manage their parents emotions, which are burdens no kid should ever have to carry. When kids go through triangulation, they absorb their parents' issues as though they were the ones at fault.
As licensed mental health counselor Alyssa Mairanz told Parents Magazine, "This can look like one or both parents putting their child in the middle of their issues... Another sign is being constantly forced to choose sides or say who is right."
Licensed clinical social worker Michelle Felder shared, "Parental triangulation can leave children feeling responsible for their parent's happiness or for maintaining the peace within their family. Triangulation can also leave children feeling torn between their parents."
The weight of this experience doesn't just disappear once kids grow up and leave home, and it can often lead to estrangement as a way for them to find and protect the peace they were denied in childhood.
9. Lack of validation
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Adults who cut their parents off usually feel like their emotional experiences are continuously minimized, so their parents can protect their own narrative around how they raised their kids. Parents and their adult children don't necessarily have to agree with each other's version of what happened all those years ago, but they do have to hear each other and respect the other person's perspective.
Kids need their family to be a container for their emotions. Kids who grew up with parents who dismissed, avoided, or ignored them whenever they expressed difficult emotions usually become adults who don't know how to regulate how they feel.
The lack of validation from when they were kids often continues well past childhood. It can be overt, like when a parent tells their adult kid to "just get over it" every time they bring up painful parts of their past. It can also be more nuanced, like when parents change the course of the conversation every time a challenging subject comes up.
No matter how it plays out, a lack of validation is a subtle form of gaslighting, as parents essentially tell their adult kids that their feelings and perceptions were exaggerated or flat-out wrong.
10. Parental oversharing
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Kids rely on their parents to guide them through their younger years, laying out a solid foundation for them to grow into the people they want to be. When parents blur the line between their role and what children are developmentally ready for, they often inhibit their kids from that process of becoming.
Oversharing is often an indication of parentification, which occurs when parents expect their kids to take on adult roles that they're not emotionally or psychologically prepared for. Kids deserve to have a childhood where they can play and explore and discover their own authentic path.
When parents overshare, it puts their kids in a deeply uncomfortable position. Kids don't have the emotional capacity to manage their parents feelings, and expecting them to do so is inherently unfair.
11. Minimal displays of affection
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Affectionate touch is at the center of what makes us human. Touch is a baby's first language, the way they give and receive love.
Even as kids get older, they still need the comfort and warmth of their parents' affection. They need their parents to hold their hand when they walk down a busy street, so they know they're safe. They need to be hugged when they're sad and in moments of joy.
Kids who experience minimal displays of affection often see their parents as detached, cold, and emotionally unavailable, and the truth is, they're not wrong. In fact, a study from the Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health found that babies, specifically, who have affectionate mothers are happier, less anxious, and more resilient adults.
Kids deserve to feel the full extent of a parents' love. Kids who grow up without affectionate touch miss out on having an essential human connection with their parents, and usually distance themselves from them as adults.
Alexandra Blogier, MFA, is a staff writer who covers psychology, social issues, relationships, self-help topics, and human interest stories.