12 Triggering Behaviors That Make Adult Children Cut Their Parents Off For Good
Parents who want to remain close to their children as they grow into adults would be wise to take notes.
Chokniti-Studio / Shutterstock Relationships between parents and their adult children can be complicated, as each person has expectations for a certain type of treatment and care. While parents are obligated to care for their kids in childhood, their connective bond can rupture once their kids grow up. The decision to go no-contact with a parent is never easy, yet oftentimes, there are specific triggering behaviors that make adult children cut their parents off for good. In fact, a study published in the book Fault Lines: Fractured Families and How to Mend Them and cited by the American Psychological Association found that 27% of participants reported being estranged from a family member and 10% reported active estrangement with a parent or child.
Everyone has their own reasons for making the difficult decision to become estranged, as licensed family and marriage therapist Dan Neuharth told the APA. “It’s important to recognize that while family estrangements often have a discrete triggering event, they are rarely a short-term, overnight phenomenon,” he said. “It’s usually been something that’s been brewing for a long time.”
These “final straw” moments are usually the result of incessant triggering behaviors that destroy the connection between adult children and their parents.
Here are 12 triggering behaviors that make adult children cut their parents off for good
1. Focusing on their flaws
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A triggering behavior that makes adult children cut their parents off for good is focusing on their flaws. Parents who always point out what their adult children are doing wrong instead of celebrating their achievements usually don’t stay close to them for long. Everyone has imperfections, yet those imperfections are the only thing critical parents can see. This triggering behavior makes adult children feel inadequate, like nothing they do is good enough.
Licensed marriage and family therapist Jennifer Twardowski points out that critical people will attack your character and focus solely on your shortcomings, noting “they reduce a person to their failure without offering a helpful solution or ways to make it better.”
“A valid criticism would focus on how to improve instead of defining a person,” she explains. “But an overly critical person will weaponize your shortcomings to attack you and make you feel inferior.
Twardowski advises setting clear boundaries around how you expect to be treated, but if that doesn’t work, creating some distance is a viable option.
“You cannot create the life of your dreams if you don't focus on doing things for yourself first,” she shares. “By creating distance from the negative people in your life, and surrounding yourself with more positive and like-minded people, you allow yourself to grow and receive the support you truly need.”
2. Undermining their independence
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Another triggering behavior that makes adult children cut their parents off for good is undermining their independence. Parents might micromanage their adult children’s decisions or disapprove of their life choices because they’re unable to see them as the independent individuals they’ve become.
For adult children, having their independence undermined makes them feel like their parents don’t trust their judgment or respect their autonomy. While they might be willing to overlook this triggering behavior for a little while, their frustration usually builds up over time, and the bond between them and their parents will start to erode and even disappear completely.
3. Invalidating their emotions
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Being emotionally invalidating is a triggering behavior that makes adult children cut their parents off for good. Emotional invalidation makes adult kids feel like their parents are dismissing their experiences, when all they really want to is be heard. If a parent tells their adult child to “just get over it already” or “it wasn’t that bad” in response to a painful memory from childhood, it shows an inability to hold space for their more difficult emotions.
Psychologist Nick Wignall points out that emotional invalidation is a painfully bad habit that interferes with emotional maturity. “When you insist on always feeling good and happy, you invalidate feeling bad. And when you’re in the habit of invalidating your painful feelings, you end up feeling more and more miserable and more and more desperate to feel happy,” he explains. “Insisting that you should always feel happier than you are is a great way to always feel worse than you should.”
“Trying to feel good all the time is a recipe for emotional immaturity and suffering because it leads to emotional invalidation,” he continues. “When you’re validating your emotional pain and unhappiness, it leads to emotional strength, and eventually, more frequent levels of happiness.”
“It’s not about feeling good or bad. It’s about the willingness to feel whatever you’re feeling,” he concluds.
Parents who invalidate their adult children’s emotions ultimately don’t allow them to feel their true feelings, which can lead to them getting cut off for good.
4. Offering only conditional love
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Offering conditional love is a triggering behavior that makes adult children cut their parents off for good. While supportive, unconditional parents make it clear that their kids are worthy of being loved for exactly who they are, parents who only offer conditional love put up guardrails around the care they give.
Therapist Vienna Pharaon spoke with YourTango's CEO Andrea Miller on the “Getting Open,” podcast about how the parental behavior of pushing kids toward perfection sets them up for self-destruction.
“What you probably learned as a kid is that in order to get love, connection, presence, attention, validation, calm, peace in your family, in your home, you had to get the straight A's, dress a certain way or [do] a hat trick on the field,” Pharaon explained.
Those well-meaning expectations teach kids that love and acceptance are conditional, which leads them to believe that making mistakes means they won’t be loved.
“We have so much shame, where we believe that love is lost,” Pharaon continued.
As they grow up, kids with conditional parents hopefully learn that they deserve love that’s given freely, without them having to reach certain expectations. Realizing that they’re worthy often coincides with them cutting their conditional parents off for good.
5. Financial control
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Money tends to be a fraught issue in many relationships, and it can prove to be an especially tense path to walk for parents and their adult children. Parents are expected to financially provide for their kids when they’re young, yet the line can become blurred upon reaching adulthood.
Trauma and relationship therapist Jordan Pickell describes the various ways financial manipulation can present itself. Parents might threaten to cut kids off financially if they disagree with them or give gifts and financial support as a way to control their kid’s decisions, like where they go to college or what job field they enter.
“You do not ‘owe’ your parents for keeping you alive,” she shares. “That is a bare minimum of having children in their care.”
Pickell notes that at best, financial manipulation is a misguided or anxious attempt to provide care, and at worst, it’s “part of a larger pattern of abuse.”
“Financial abuse is about using money to keep you under their power and control. It is a particularly effective and covert abuse tactic because it can seem like a natural extension of the parent/child relationship,” she explains.
“If your parent holds their financial support over your head, you might feel helpless to make decisions or set boundaries,” Pickell continues. “You deserve support without feeling belittled.”
While setting those boundaries and extracting yourself from financial manipulation is by no means easy, doing so allows you to live a life by your own definition, and no one else’s.
6. Perpetuating drama
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Another triggering behavior that makes adult children cut their parents off for good is perpetuating drama. All families have their ups and downs, but a drama-hungry parent leans into conflict, rather than working to diffuse it. Parents might perpetuate drama by drawing on toxic dynamics within the family system. They might play favorites or spread gossip and talk behind people’s backs. Whatever form their drama takes, adult children often respond by cutting their parents off for good, in order to protect their well-being and inner peace.
Life coach Alex Mathers points out that people who have very little drama in their lives carefully choose where they put their energy, which includes how much energy they devote to their relationships.
“Note what drains your energy and cut it out. Replace it with energy boosters and be brutal with how you negotiate this time,” he advises.
Mathers also shares that people with drama-free lives hold onto an essential truth: We can’t control anyone else’s behavior, we can only control our own reactions.
“There is tremendous relief in knowing you aren’t required to change anyone. Instead, focus on developing yourself into a beautiful and inspiring creature,” he concludes.
Adult children who prioritize their mental health in the face of family drama know that distance is the ultimate form of protection, which is why they refuse to engage in that triggering behavior and cut their parents off for good.
7. Chronic negativity
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Having a tirelessly negative attitude is a triggering behavior that makes adult children cut their parents off for good. Parents who complain to no end and rely on their adult children for their own emotional regulation rupture the relationship. Their chronic negativity puts their adult children in a role they never asked for, as they’re expected to pick up the pieces and make their parents feel better.
This leaves them feeling drained and devalued, like they only exist to serve as their parents’ sounding board for everything that’s wrong in their lives. It’s not easy to maintain a long-term connection with chronically negative people, even when those people are your parents, which is why adult children cut their parents off for good.
8. Deflecting blame
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Deflecting blame is a triggering behavior that makes adult children cut their parents off for good. Parents who avoid taking accountability for their actions tend to have a victim mentality, which means they think nothing is ever their fault.
Developmental coach and psychotherapist in training Amy Millie describes deflection as a defense mechanism. “If someone is deflecting, they will be redirecting the focus, blame, [and] criticism away from themselves in order to protect their self-image. People often deflect as a way to avoid feelings of guilt or shame, or to avoid accountability,” she explains.
“It’s really hard to have a conversation with someone who is deflecting,” she continues. “It’s also rarely helpful to call them out on what they’re doing.”
Millie shares tactics to counteract deflection, advising people to bring the focus back to themselves, by saying something like, “I’m trying to talk to you about this because it’s really important to me that we’re on the same page.”
“After you’ve said this, it’s okay to take a breather and give them time to reflect,” she shares. “Sometimes they’ll come around and sometimes they won’t, unfortunately, and that’s painful, but equally important to remember that you can lead a horse to water, but you can’t force it to drink.”
Parents who insist that they’ve done nothing wrong and refuse to own up to their own behavior trigger their adult children, so they cut their parents off for good.
9. Acting entitled to their time
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Another triggering behavior that makes adult children cut their parents off for good is acting entitled to their time and energy. They might expect their adult children to always put their needs first, without considering the other aspects of their lives that need attention. They call constantly, they expect immediate responses to texts, and they just don’t understand why you’re not coming home for the holidays.
Entitled parents put so much pressure on their adult children, it’s not surprising that their bond tends to collapse under the weight of all their demands. Parents should be able to recognize that their adult children have established lives of their own, without making them feel guilty for doing so.
10. Holding grudges
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Holding grudges is a triggering behavior that makes adult children cut their parents off for good. Whenever there’s conflict, they bring up the past, as though to define their adult children by mistakes they made when they were younger. They simmer and seethe in resentment, which triggers their adult children to the point of cutting them off for good.
Psychotherapist Diane Barth notes that holding a grudge is often accompanied by “the sense of victimization” that becomes a person’s whole identity, and “that identity brings along with it a sense of being the one who is right.”
“An unrelenting grudge puts the grudger into the category of those who are right, and the person who wronged them in the category of those who are bad,” she explained.
Navigating a relationship with someone who’s holding a grudge can be difficult, which is why Barth advises that people offer an apology, if needed, and leave it at that.
“Repeatedly pushing at the issue by demanding repeatedly to have your perspective acknowledged will simply reinforce the grudge,” she notes. “In many cases, a person holding a grudge will eventually let it go. Sometimes this shift happens faster when you move on first.”
“At some point, you may have to give up the hope that you can change things,” Barth shares. While ending a relationship or putting a stop-gap in place is never simple, it can bring you the peace you need.
11. Forcing forgiveness
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A triggering behavior that makes adult children cut their parents off for good is forcing forgiveness. This behavior is almost the counterpoint to holding a grudge, only the focus of the behavior is to be absolved of wrongdoing, often before the other person is ready to accept an apology.
When adult children call attention to ways their parents have let them down or hurt them, parents often pressure them to move on quickly, without actually addressing how they acted. They want to be forgiven, but they’re unwilling or unable to be self-reflective and consider the underlying issues at play.
Yet forcing forgiveness can often do more harm than good, as psychologist Dr. Ramani Durvasala makes clear. “Most of what we read about forgiveness is that forgiveness is always good. It’s great. It heals people, it heals countries, it heals cities. It heals everyone,” she says. “What if you forgive someone who repeatedly does bad, betraying things to you?”
“How many times are we expected to forgive?” she asks. “Do we keep taking the punches and fall back on the idea that forgiveness is virtuous? How are we supposed to forgive if there are no consequences for the person who keeps harming us?”
“Authentic forgiveness doesn’t mean you just forgive,” Dr. Ramani explains. “It means you engage in a process that is not mandated or scheduled. It means that you put your healing first and work on feeling whole and safe again.”
“It means you hold space for you and your identity,” she continues. “It may not even look like forgiveness to other people… As part of your process, you may decide to no longer speak to someone because it feels healthier for you, and a result of that, you start feeling more whole again… and find that you’re able to let go of some of the resentment.”
Forcing forgiveness isn’t true forgiveness, and a repeated pattern of asking to be forgiven without making any effort to change makes adult children cut their parents off for good.
12. Ignoring their personal growth
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A triggering behavior that makes adult children cut their parents off for good is ignoring their personal growth. By refusing to recognize the work they’ve done to become who they are, parents might overlook their identity and insist they’re the same as they’ve always been. They disregard their adult children’s changing worldview or the changes they’ve made, which makes their adult children feel like their parents don’t see them for who they really are.
Ignoring their adult children’s personal growth is a display of blatant disrespect, which can lead adult children to cut their parents off so they're able to flourish into their most authentic selves.
Alexandra Blogier, MFA, is a staff writer who covers psychology, social issues, relationships, self-help topics, and human interest stories.