my immediate thought is, "I bet they were dicks to their kids."

I share this prejudice, if that's what it is. But I also think that in the scenario where your kids write you off for no good reason, you're better off with them out of your life. In other words, it's only the shitty parents who complain about estrangement.

My parents and I were on a bad path, and they resolved the situation by deciding to not be awful to me. So I had my shit sorted out with them by the time I was 25.

But I also think that in the scenario where your kids write you off for no good reason, you're better off with them out of your life. In other words, it's only the shitty parents who complain about estrangement.
I don't see how this follows.

Also, it's totally possible to be a bad parent without being a dick to the child (or in general).

I remember when Doug was talking about how he wanted to be just like Bob Dylan and his dad said something like "You mean your uncle Robert?"

Minor anecdotal data point: I'm basically estranged from my Dad. Not really by design, but we haven't spoken in three years, and it's quite hard to get it together to rekindle that connection.

However, I don't really think he was a dick at all, when I was a kid. In fact, he was a pretty good parent, especially by boomer standards. He spent a lot of time with us, he was funny and mostly fairly mellow, he wasn't violent or abusive, he wasn't judgemental or cruel. He cooked, he told stories, took us places, listened to us, etc. His main issue and something that only really became an issue once we were independent autonomous adults or near adults, is that he's very self-absorbed and he's just not really prepared to make the effort to reach out or be social. He suffers from thinking he's always the smartest person in the room, which I think, for most of his childhood and early adulthood was probably true, and the outcome is that he's really opinionated and would mostly rather just be on his own reading books.

I moved out of my parents' house when I turned 18. Just before I left, my father said to me: I know you're eager to get away from us, but I want you to know, it's been no picnic living with you either.

More than once, when I told this story to my friends, they said, Omigod, your parents kicked you out? I still don't know how I created that false impression. My departure from my parents' home was entirely on my own initiative.

This exchange with my father was, in my mind, a heartwarming moment. I've always had trouble explaining that.

But my father was being honest with me, and treating me as a fellow human for basically the first time. He was seeking sympathy -- which I was delighted to grant. I absolutely understood that I was doing him a favor by moving out, and the moment when we both acknowledged that remains one of my favorite memories of my father.

he's very self-absorbed and he's just not really prepared to make the effort to reach out or be social. He suffers from thinking he's always the smartest person in the room

I should print this out to save my kids time figuring it out on their own.

OP link:

A survey of mothers from 65 to 75 years old with at least two living adult children found that about 11 percent were estranged from a child. Of those, 62 percent reported contact less than once a month with at least one child, and the remaining 38 percent reported zero contact in the past year.

Yeah. That's just being busy.

7: Well, that looks like it's determining "estrangement" separately (maybe just self-reporting whether you are estranged) because it then says "of those". But clearly that's not no-contact-estrangement.

4 I was the other side of the conversation in a similar moment. My 17 year old middle son, who had been expelled from high school and arrested and would soon be on his way to a quite good non-punishment oriented special school in Maine, said he'd go to the school but that once he hit 18 there was nothing we could do. And I agreed and pointed out that ran both ways. He smiled and agreed. And actually for what was a horrible period in all our lives (my wife was recovering from cancer surgery, chemo, and radiation at the time) it never reached the levels of rancor that, for example, I saw between my nephew and his father (my brother).

I am eternally grateful that our other children and my in-laws all strove mightily to keep middle son integrated with the family. He returned home after completing a harsher program at one of the Montana rehab places and, now 18, promptly moved out of our house to live with a friend and more or less get totally drunk every day, but somehow managed to actually complete his senior year in high school under those circumstances. 15 years later he is fine, just bought a house. He still maintains distance, in particular from his mother who will not accept that he's wired differently than the rest of us, but he's always been private and is a full participating member of the family as long as we respect his boundaries.

Above response is to 5, not 4. Apologies, I not good at higher order math.

I agree with the OP. I'm in the weird position of having gotten them when they were already teens without the buildup of raising them as kids, which may cut either way I guess as far as how easy it is to get along with them. In practice it's been pretty easy though.

4 and 5 are so foreign to my own experience that they're really hard to understand. I don't mean this in a negative or judgmental way -- I just mean that your relationships with your parents seem as different from my own as, say, eating cheese crackers vs. deep sea exploration. That's an exaggeration of course, but 4 and 5 really do sound that bizarre to me.

I see my parents every weekend. I do this even though we don't have much in common or a lot to talk about together. I don't necessarily think this is objectively "better" than not having such a constant relationship, it's just that the alternative seems unbearably painful (and, even more, pain-causing) to me. I'm sure this is largely cultural - I just can't imagine ending a parental relationship without basically insurmountable reasons. I have two friends who are emphatically estranged from their mothers, and in both cases it's because of serious and unreconstructed emotional abuse. Even so, one of them continues to try, at great cost to her own mental health, every year or so, to let her mother back into her life, with awful results every time. This is not better! But it's comprehensible to me.

Question for ttaM and pf (and for everyone else): If you have kids, why? I've never wanted kids, and that lack of desire has made my life so simple. I can understand wanting children in a couple of circumstances. One: your relationships within your family of origin were so wonderful that you want to recreate those dynamics again as an adult. Or two: you fall in love with a partner and want to see them in all the stages of life that you've missed, or would otherwise miss - the child version of your partner which would be reflected in your own child, or the version of your partner as a parent. I have felt this before, but decided that (a) it's a pretty creepy thought process and (b) it's not a great reason to bring a new life into the world, and anyway it didn't sufficiently motivate me. But absent those two circumstances, why do people - especially those who are estranged from their own parents - have kids? I hope this isn't a rude question - I'm genuinely curious. I ask people this irl and never get a convincing or satisfactory answer.

Lady Bird has a lot to say about this... one of my good friends is basically of the opinion that the mom is awful and everything is her fault, but I don't think that's Gerwig's viewpoint. Of course she's an empathetic filmmaker who managed to even make Amy Marsh a rich and interesting character, so maybe that's saying more about how she views characters than a judgement on when parents are to blame.

I don't know if I have an answer to "If you have kids, why?", nor do I really understand what would make it "convincing or satisfactory" -- like, a reason that is so self-evident and profound that it makes the choice to have kids inevitable? A reason that just seems incredibly good, or reflects incredibly well on the parents?

If you think of this as suddenly being housemates with a person who you didn't choose, it kinda makes sense that such a relationship sometimes it goes off the rails without either person necessarily being horrible.

My other big theory here is that lots of parents just hate teenagers. People who hate teenagers and like little kids still have kids, while people who like teenagers and don't like little kids don't, so we hear lots of stories about parents who don't like their teens.

I believe I explained exactly why.

Notwithstanding 17, " your relationships within your family of origin were so wonderful that you want to recreate those dynamics again as an adult" pretty accurately captures why I wanted to have kids. I literally was thinking more about adult children than little babies, and I was quite uneasy about the little babies.

Now I love little babies! I just hadn't really been around them before having my own. Toddlers, too!

I certainly wasn't motivated by my growing up family dynamic -- I was the more difficult child of the four of us -- or by the hope for a mini-me or a mini-her. I like kids better as they age, and even teens better than babies.

My daughter (36) and granddaughter (6) are moving in with us a week from today. It's going to be pretty wild, but the grand is such a sunshine, and there are so many ways that we can help the both of them.

I sort of generally agree with the OP -- teenagers aren't innately unbearable and when a parent thinks they are it's largely on the parent. Mine certainly weren't; there were some stressy moments but they were always very easy to like, and I think they liked me reasonably well throughout.

There is a thing that's not universal to teens, but I think is pretty common, and how unbearable is depends on your own personality. They're sort of terrible roommates: there's just a lot of life experience that goes into sharing space tolerably; tidying up after yourself; communicating plans, and so on. And if you haven't established the rigid-obedience kind of relationship, they can be pretty annoying. Newt and I spent a lot of time together first after Sally went to college and then when he moved back home for the active pandemic, and he's probably top 10% for domestic skills and considerateness in his demographic, and he still kind of drove me nuts that way. Loved having him there but was reliably also annoyed. If that's the kind of conflict that winds you up, I could see thinking that teens were terrible in general.

It would just mean so much to me if I could once again rely on the toilet being flushed or the milk not being left out.

On why to have them -- it's funny, I'd call my family of origin dynamic quite difficult in a lot of ways, and my god would I not want to replicate it. But I also really enjoy both my parents and my sister, they're just in many ways the sort of person I like. What I was hoping for, and kind of got, was more Breaths like the ones I was already fond of, in a less stressy family structure. Bonus, while they do both take strongly after me, the ways they're like Tim are largely that they're less dysfunctional in characteristically Breathy ways.

There is a thing that's not universal to teens, but I think is pretty common, and how unbearable is depends on your own personality. They're sort of terrible roommates: there's just a lot of life experience that goes into sharing space tolerably; tidying up after yourself; communicating plans, and so on. And if you haven't established the rigid-obedience kind of relationship, they can be pretty annoying.

Yeah, this is very much a thing. It can be especially annoying because, unlike little kids, they are definitely capable of doing better, they just don't actually do it without a lot of prodding and pestering. I don't mind it much personally but I can see how it drives some people crazy.

The lever is right there.

21: Precisely. Some people, and they're not necessarily bad people, can't shrug and get past that sort of thing, they end up angry all the time.

While I'm proud of Newt for a lot of things, one of the big ones this year is that he's successfully living with four housemates and they're maintaining civilization. No heaps of rotting dishes and they don't seem to be mad about chores at each other. I think that sort of thing is a real test of character.

My sophomore year of college, six of us made a very nice Thanksgiving dinner. We also had a refrigerator so foul that someone puked from the smell when we finally did clean it.

I had a habit of making big Thanksgiving dinners for friends, and then never using my oven, and discovering dessicated turkey carcasses the following year. (I lived alone in grad school.) Fortunately this didn't happen around the same witness multiple times, and so I got good at feigning surprise at the situation.

Yeah, that is a very natural failure mode for any housemate group larger than two or three.

27: You have told that story before and I love it so much.

Why did it stay in the oven over the course of Thanksgiving, though? You took it out, carved it, then returned what was left to the oven as a holding spot, I guess?

Wait, wouldn't people have noticed at the dinner if there was no turkey on the table? Or were you making multiple turkeys each time?

I see I'm not alone in my confusion.

27: Last week I finally got around to the big glop on the bottom shelf of the fridge after successfully half-ignoring it for some time. The only bad thing was that I decided to tackle it, which involved removing the whole shelf and attached crisper drawers for a scrub in the sink right at dinner time. (Getting food out for dinner was my prompt... the plastic stuck in a disturbing way, so I decided that it was time.)

It dismayed my wife, who'd left work with us having agreed to an idea for dinner and coming home to the disorder of the disorganized fridge contents waiting to return to the shelves which turned out to be a more involved clean than I'd thought before I began.

I don't recall the turkey story. That would really alarm me. Like avian leatherface.

If I remember the story correctly, it was such a small kitchen that tucking the remains of the turkey back in the oven to get it out of the way during kitchen cleanup made sense. And then if you don't use the oven between Thanksgivings, there's the carcass again next year.

Ah, okay, that makes sense.

On adult estranged children, I think it's vastly likelier, when there isn't some kind of super obvious criminality or addiction or something, to be the parents' fault. In the cases I'm familiar with, the ultimately estranged children have put in a more than reasonable amount of effort trying to communicate the problems, and the parents have just refused to acknowledge that the attempts happened at all.

37: I do have a coworker who is raising 2 of his grandkids, because their older son has addiction issues. In both the don and the girlfriend who gave birth. The youngest was adopted. I don't think the older one was. He was initially embarrassed to admit at work that the older grandkid was his grandkid and why they were raising them.

I don't know what he was like as a parent. I think he did most of the work caring for his father, and his mother lived with him and his wife for a while - even as she got dementia.

He is half Doninican/half Puerto Rican, and I think that the dynamics of these relationships are different in Latin culture.

If you have kids, why?

I come from a big family, and always wanted kids. I'm not sure I can explain why.

Does anyone remember Ellen Goodman? She was a terrific newspaper columnist from back in the day. In one column, she discussed a book that enumerated the pros and cons of having children. The idea was to help people decide whether they wanted to become parents.

Goodman (who I believe has a daughter) said the list of costs and benefits was quite reasonable, and that the practical upshot was that nobody should ever have kids. Her conclusion, which has stuck with me all these decades later, is that having children isn't about a rational calculation, but instead (like sex itself) is about desire.

That seems totally right to me. My kids are lovely, and I have never for a moment regretted them. But it is entirely unsurprising to me when people publish studies about how much happier the childless are.

To think "and then I found $5" could have been "and then I found last year's Thanksgiving turkey" this whole time.

My teenage years were rough in that I was as near as I can tell a perfect kid who got hit in the face a lot for not being perfect. College was sort of a revelation in that there were other successful people who liked their parents. I talk to my mom. My dad seems content to chainsmoke and read InfoWars and I'm 2000 miles away so I guess we're sort of estranged by pocket veto? Things are polite enough most of the time when I do see him but there's just not a whole lot of motivation for me to keep the relationship going. He doesn't care to visit the kids. I don't want to teach my kids that they need to earn the affection of people who don't seem to like them. So we're sort of at a standoff but most days I don't really care.

Anyhow, I sort of assume that the Calabat and Pebbles will leave when they're 18 and not come back (it's not likely they'll want to stay in Utah.)

37: I assume everyone's already read the famous internet text about this? Surely we've discussed it here before.

https://www.issendai.com/psychology/estrangement/missing-missing-reasons.html

Yeah, I've read that and found it a recognizable depiction of the situations I know about.

Boy, the front page from the link in 17 is something else: 9/11 boob tat, the announcement of Biden as VP, and a long LB post about Haidt's liberalism.

Coming to all this half a day late as I usually do but 5.3, 5.4, I totally get that. You didn't have to explain it, but good explanation anyway ("...being honest with me, and treating me as a fellow human being for basically the first time...").

42: I forgot about that. I think I even posted it at some point.

Someone did before. I know I've seen it here.

Here's that thread.

(Oddly, that link seems to want to go to the post directly above the correct post -- after first calling up the correct post and adjusting.)

Ha, almost exactly one year ago. Maybe it's a seasonal topic.

4/20 takes its toll.

Anyway, I've read the site linked in 42 a couple of times. Not for personal reasons, but because the whole thing about how the parents see events based entirely on their own feelings (as opposed to what happens) strikes me as obviously the relevant politically.

When I was 25, I would probably have said I had a bad relationship with my parents, but in hindsight and in the context of this thread I saw them at least weekly without great stress so it can't have been that bad. No great personality defects, I just found them annoying and we didn't have much in common besides genetics. Being a parent was the last thing on my mind.

When I was 30, I was engaged to Cassandane, but not married yet. We were on the same page about parenthood, which is to say, mildly interested in the idea. If it happened as a result of unprotected sex, great; if not, we didn't want to spend tens of thousands of dollars on fertility treatments or adopt an already existing child to get to experience parenthood by some other route. It may sound strange to be so neutral, so wishy-washy, about something as big a deal as parenthood. I'm inclined to say that we'd make our lives as close to the same as possible either way, but with a kid we'd have someone else to blame our boredom and mediocrity on.

Now I'm 40, Atossa is 7, and she's so moody sometimes it feels like she's already a teenager. Ugh.

The most irritating teenager years for us have been 3-5th grade, when they seem to make achieving a caricature of teenagerhood their main business.

51: This was my thought, too.

Anything tinged with negative emotion, anything that makes them feel bad about themselves, shocks them so deeply that they block it out. ... This emotional amnesia shapes their entire lives, pushing them to associate only with people who won't criticize them, training their families to shelter them from blows so thoroughly that the softest protest feels like a fist to the face. ... The difference isn't a matter of style, it's a split between two ways of perceiving the world. In one worldview, emotion is king. Details exist to support emotion. ... Emotion creates reality.

It's moral relativism for assholes.

I guess there's not assholes in moral relativism.

Apparently the woman begging outside the old Barnes and Noble knows the bartender and uses the restroom here. So now she knows I was lying when I said I didn't have any money.

The Barnes and Noble has a bartender?

Pennsylvania has the weirdest liquor laws.

It's confusing.

I still think if Borders would have gone broke sooner, the Barnes and Noble would have made it.

I think the Pamela's next for door would have made it too if we were willing to sacrifice a few hundred thousand elders.

61: Considering the number of local independent bookstores that Barnes & Noble killed* (including the local superstore** I worked for), it's hard for me to feel bad for them at all.

* Publishers gave them wholesale price discounts such that they could sell at retail for less than we were paying wholesale. I'm sure that they got a much better real estate deal than we could have, too. Anyway, it has been at least 25 years and I am definitely not still bitter. And I had even gone to work somewhere else (Budapest) by the time my bookstore went under.

** I mean maybe there's a social media group somewhere for people who worked at the B&N in that part of Atlanta, where former patrons come by to gush about how much they loved the store, how it's a beloved childhood memory, how it saved their teenaged selves***, how they miss it still. Many things are possible.

*** This is the bit that's relevant to the original post.

So did you stock your bookstore by just walking over to B&N?

Not as far as I know, but then I wasn't in purchasing. Ordering was done well in advance, so it's possible we'd have been in breach of some contract clause if we'd stocked up from B&N and returned our orders. I think I remember lawsuits about the trade practices, but don't know what became of them.

And B&N got into financial trouble because of a bigger competitor and a shift away from books? I'm sure I have a teeny tiny violin around here somewhere. Not sure if I will bother to play it for them.

It was the only bookstore you could walk to from my house. There's a new, smaller, non-chain one that I can walk to now. But between 2010 and 2022, I had to drive across a bridge to get to a bookstore.

Ok, I've just come across my second little blond kid named Cohen. Is this a thing?

Apparently it is just that: https://www.kveller.com/whats-the-deal-with-people-using-cohen-as-a-first-name/

I had a decent childhood but I was a rebellious teen, though not out of control or unusually so, and my parents responded with a lot of emotional and psychological abuse (some of which I now see was present during childhood too). I basically cut them off for most of my 20s and early 30s. I've recently come to have a good relationship with them because I made the effort, because family and oddly family history is important to me but mostly because I wanted a good relationship with my nephews and for reasons that meant having to have a good relationship with my parents. My mother has in the recent past expressed a desire to talk about it but has proven incapable of discussing it without getting extremely defensive (I remain calm, not accusatory, just the facts ma'am throughout). It became so much easier on me when I realized they have the emotional aptitude of children themselves. They are just not capable of looking at themselves, their past behaviors, or anything with any objectivity or equanimity. It's peace, of a sorts.

67 reminds me how I was 21 before I realized "Cohen" was a very common last name.

54 is what got me to write 69

I know a blond Cohen and a blond Kohen, but they're both late teens or early tweens.

Is Kohen an unacknowledged Roger Clemens child?

Cohen is what you name your son when you want everyone to be absolutely sure you're a Terry Pratchett fan but you don't want your boy to grow up hating you.

74. Your boy will probably not grow up hating you unless you raise him on an exclusive diet of soup.

This inspired me to read Wikipedia about the rules for kohanim since I was vaguely aware of their special role in Judaism and damn that's some messed up stuff.

(Mostly the part about if your wife is raped too bad have to get a divorce.)

I vaguely remember a member of my extended family being a kohen because they couldn't come to funerals.

Can they come after and eat lunch with everyone?

79: Yes, it's just about not getting too close to the dead body. I guess that mean they aren't allowed to kill anyone too, but there is an exception for close relatives.

Obviously necessary.

Is the exemption also for going to the funeral of close relatives?

80 ranged weapon use only, like how clerics aren't allowed to use edged weapons.

I think one of my friends is a kohen, but isn't orthodox so it only came up because our mutual ex-orthodox friend who was sitting next to me at the wedding noticed it from the Hebrew portions of the wedding ceremony. Not the only wedding where sitting next to him made the ceremony much more interesting due to interesting observations around what was translated and what wasn't.

84 s/b a youtube channel.

I mean, the ceremony commentary tracks, not the comment. Sorry upetgi.

You could co-host, I guess.

Usually a reader, not a commenter.

My daughter and I had a very difficult relationship when she was a teenager, and she is still only 23 now. I don't think I am or ever was a bad parent. I was working full-time and I was not handling stress all that well, but she was so angry at me all the time. It was exhausting. It actually started when she was about 11. We thought that when she went to college it would get better, but we (my husband/me and her) still didn't quite get along for reasons we never really understood. But I think there are/were a few factors:
1. Her younger brother is neurodivergent and has needed a lot of attention. He also needed to be parented differently, so for years she thought he was my favorite child.
2. As a result of my son's diagnosis, my husband came to understand and be diagnosed for his own neurodivergence, so we were also dealing with that.
3. She has a lot of anxiety, which made her paranoid and afraid a lot of the time. I do have suspicions about what she might need to be treated for, but right now she is relatively steady.
(4. The worst thing about neurodivergence - and I am using the term broadly - is that it is genetic and if your kids are, you probably are too, which means that no one in the family has decent pragmatic social communication skills.)
5. But in the end, we were and are very good parents, we love both our kids a lot, and after a year working shit jobs in the US and being in the middle of another year working a shit job abroad and getting to know different kinds of people, my daughter is growing up a bit. We have a better relationship now and FaceTime every week and don't get mad at each other.

I did spend a lot of time wondering if I was a bad parent, and I needed a really good therapist to help me realize I was a good parent doing my best. I make mistakes sometimes, but overall I have a good approach to parenting my children, and a great partner in my husband. It was a little tough to read the central premise of your post, but therapy taught me to ignore other people's views of my parenting and to have faith in myself. I am being only a little snarky here. I am just very aware that there but for the grace of the Flying Spaghetti Monster go I, and you.

Not to be rude, but that sounds like a case where you know exactly why you don't get along, you clearly list it as your reason number 1! Of course that's an objectively very difficult situation especially with parents working full-time, and I don't doubt that you did your best, but it seems a little strange to me to say that you don't really understand what's happening. Looks like she felt like she never had her parents attention or interest because she came last behind careers and her brother, and it looks like she feels that way because it's true. Seems a perfectly valid and classic reason to be angry, and even if you grant that you made the objectively best decisions in difficult circumstances, that doesn't change any of what she went through.

Also, welcome!

The worst thing about neurodivergence - and I am using the term broadly - is that it is genetic and if your kids are, you probably are too, which means that no one in the family has decent pragmatic social communication skills.

Yeah, its been very helpful watching my kid be diagnosed because now I can see what's been affecting me all my life. And also why my pragmatic social communication skills are somewhat limited.

agree with 89. youngest of three here all born within 4 years, parents were young when they had us, not particularly happy or good marriage even at its best. they loved us and did their best. they also struggled economically and emotionally. all much of a muchness until my oldest sibling suddenly became very, very ill in her teens and suddenly and for perfectly valid and understandable reasons all parental resources pivoted to keeping her alive. they succeeded! although she has had lifelong health issues and very limited life options as a result. my brother and i suffered, this is just an undeniable fact.

i tended to react by turning the damage inwards. consider that your daughter's reaction has pushed some of the pain and anger outwards even if onto you - perhaps she'll leave it all behind her with fewer lingering negatives in her life!

it isn't possible to raise children without any damage or compromise. some families are dealt an awful hand. there is some expectation of solidarity and self sacrifice that it is reasonable and healthy to expect of siblings, but it isn't an unlimited amount. likewise, once your children are adults, it's perfectly reasonable and healthy to decline damaging interactions with them.

I'm a fan of therapy, but it's important that therapists are helping you become healthier psychologically, not making you a better person or investigating your life to find the objective truth. Of course your therapist is saying you did your best, that's what therapists do! (And I don't doubt that you were!) But if your daughter is seeing a therapist her therapist isn't saying "but your mom did her best" they're saying stuff like "it makes sense that you were angry in those circumstances, you were a little kid who deserved your parents full attention."

And to bring things back to Lady Bird in 14, which I really do think is the best piece of art on the topic of difficult parent/kid relationships, as Sister Joan says: "Don't you think maybe they are the same thing, love and attention?"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GUo2XuqMcCU

"Don't you think maybe they are the same thing, love and attention?"

That sounds really clingy.

I clicked through to the Atlantic link in the OP and, in fact, it was interesting, not because the ideas are remotely new but because I realize I haven't quite settled my thoughts about them:

...how profoundly the rules of family life have changed over the past half century. "Never before have family relationships been seen as so interwoven with the search for personal growth, the pursuit of happiness, and the need to confront and overcome psychological obstacles," the historian Stephanie Coontz, the director of education and research for the Council on Contemporary Families, told me in an email. "For most of history, family relationships were based on mutual obligations rather than on mutual understanding. Parents or children might reproach the other for failing to honor/acknowledge their duty, but the idea that a relative could be faulted for failing to honor/acknowledge one's 'identity' would have been incomprehensible."

[...]

In The Marriage-Go-Round, the Johns Hopkins University sociologist Andrew Cherlin wrote that starting in the late 19th century, traditional sources of identity such as class, religion, and community slowly began to be replaced with an emphasis on personal growth and happiness. By the second half of the 20th century, American families had gone through changes that, Cherlin said, were "unlike anything that previous generations of Americans have ever seen."

Deciding which people to keep in or out of one's life has become an important strategy to achieve that happiness. While there's nothing especially modern about family conflict or a desire to feel insulated from it, conceptualizing the estrangement of a family member as an expression of personal growth as it is commonly done today is almost certainly new.

Obviously Freud casts a long shadow here, but the Freudian focus on pathologies of fantasy has very much given way to realism, almost literalism, in considering the lasting effects of family relationships. I don't think that's the result of any one thing, but it seems like there's been some synergy between changes to social structures and the development of clinical psychology as a profession. The self-help industry in all its diverse forms is one effect of that professionalization.

My grandmother was more of a normal person and she was always frustrated with us. "Don't you ever talk to each other about this stuff?" And no one would ever tell her the truth, that we worked by guessing or assuming what the others were thinking and that we had no intention of switching methods regardless of how well it worked or didn't.

AIMHMHB I'm estranged from my mom, and it's tough. I feel terrible guilt about it, but envisioning having a relationship with her feels even worse. It's just a bad situation all around.

88: It was a little tough to read the central premise of your post,

Heebie's expectations about harmonious family relationships are a bit high:

I'm sure there are exceptions that prove the rule, where the teen is taking their anger out on their parent and just miserable to get along with, through no fault of the parent. But I'm watching a lot of parents raise their teenagers and more-or-less everyone kinda seems to like each other.

Members of happy families routinely go through periods where they don't like each other -- and where they conceal friction from outsiders. In other words, I agree with this:

I am just very aware that there but for the grace of the Flying Spaghetti Monster go I, and you.

And this looks like success to me:

We have a better relationship now and FaceTime every week and don't get mad at each other.

Good for you!

61: It was a great Barnes and Noble, though. Fairly large math and science section, and it was upstairs above the movie theater, giving a nice view of the main street.

I'm somewhat isolated from my father. Part of it is ethical--he's very good to his family but he has no care for the good of the world. (I could never tell which of his statements were real beliefs and which were just trolling; Trump made things clearer.) He takes care of my mom--they were dealt such a raw card with her MS and he's become her full time carer. But he's both a control freak and a poor communicator of his needs, and good enough is never good enough. Once things got worse for her, I ended up having a lot more contact with him. And it was helpful having my wife had a lot more contact with him, too; she's been able to articulate things clearly that I wouldn't have. A lot of my less adaptive behaviors and habits make more sense with that context.

Back in January, because he has to do everything himself, he hurt himself pretty badly--messing around with a garage door led to him breaking his leg. I took two trips back to America to watch my mom, the first while he was in the hospital, the second while he was home. The first trip was stressful since we're pretty stressed out about the baby and I had to do everything for my mom myself, but I got through it (having taken care of a baby helped) and was proud to have done so. The second trip, when my dad was there, was awful. The same doing the wrong thing the wrong way communication pattern. I ended up barely helping at all, he had a health aide do everything. Saving grace was we got the kid's visa paperwork sorted so he and my wife came along. It's good he got to meet his family.

Having a child has given me a lot to think about with intergenerational trauma.

Sorry about your parents. That's rough.

I agree, Dal, that's a rough year.

Heebie's expectations about harmonious family relationships are a bit high:

That's probably true! Also I'm over-extrapolating from my own pod's frictions: I get along reasonably well with each kid, but the kids themselves are tearing each other's throats out.

So much so that at the last ADHD checkup for the boys, the psychiatrist was like, "Why don't I put you in touch with my collaborator-therapist?" and we're going to give that a whirl over the summer, specifically on trying to tone down the sibling rivalry. Or more accurately, give them skills for defusing situations and then hold them accountable when they don't use their newfound skills.

So you all should feel free to presume I'm full of shit when I'm yammering on about happy families! The fullest.

I'm kind of pessimistic about the therapy, though. My current theory is that being calm on the inside and being calm on the outside (of an individual) are two independent things. There are a lot of people who are pretty calm on the outside but a royal anxious mess on the inside. I think we're kind of the opposite: six people who aren't that worked up on the inside but massively not-calm on the outside - every little impulse gets acted on or spoken out loud and argued over, which leads to just a giant amount of arguing and yelling. (Actually, Jammies and Hawaii are also not that calm on the inside, but far more calm from the outside. I shouldn't lump us all together.)

Anyway:

The worst thing about neurodivergence - and I am using the term broadly - is that it is genetic and if your kids are, you probably are too

Also has been true here.

88,98: the central premise is based on observation from the outside. The outside can be deceiving.

But also, to 88: your daughter is only 23. That's young enough for her feelings re: attention and her brother to still feel recent. It might look a lot better when she's 30. My youngest sister was impossible at 23 and at 34 takes my mom out to dinner regularly.

99 sounds really tough. Having your kid meet his grampa (or at least to have pictures of them together if your kid is too young to remember) is good to have happen.

102: if you can give your kids a starter set of insights & skills to learn *eventually* how to manage the feeling-but-perhaps-not-saying, at least in this moment/in this way, thing, you will give them a gift that will produce massive intergenerational benefits imo. oh my god the wild 20c swing in the u.s. between widespread total repression & then unregulated destructive over sharing yikes. here let me barf all of my uninterrogated internal chaos onto you my closest target! oh no that didn't work out so well??? wait i thought as a family member you were obliged to endure!

105 is one of the truest things ever written.

"Don't you think maybe they are the same thing, love and attention?"

NOT IN EVERY CASE, NO.