They Say It’s the Worst Millennial Habit of Them All. It’s the Best Thing I’ve Ever Done. (2024)

Last year, my mom had abdominal cancer. Doctors injected her stomach with hot chemotherapy and lifted her body onto the operating table to spread the steaming poison. I wasn’t there. This summer, I had a daughter whom my mom won’t meet. When I think about the holidays, when there will be no cards, no phone calls, no texts—nothing—my body floods with joy and relief.

Estrangement, long a taboo topic, is now being discussed more openly, thanks in part to the royal rift between Prince Harry and Prince William, and in part to the popularity of TikTok, where thousands of twentysomethings testify that walking away from parents improved their mental health. Last month, the New York Times profiled a social worker who urges his social media followers to pen a brief letter saying sayonara to their abusers of origin.

The Times piece zoomed in on an extreme example of a commonplace phenomenon that goes back to biblical times. Like many stories on estrangement, it gave ample room to the therapists who think it’s a bad idea and the parents who feel hurt and rejected and confused about how to present their plight in public, leaving some older readers to shake their heads and sigh, “Kids these days.” This kind of reporting is nothing new. Conversations about cutting ties with family members are usually littered with caveats: that it’s a complicated decision, a last resort, invariably painful and fraught. Some liken the choice to “losing a limb,” walking through a never-ending fog of grief, or being “orphaned.”

But after four years of no contact with my mom and almost two decades without my other parent, I want to shout: Estrangement can also feel wonderful! Saying goodbye changed my life for the better, and I’m far from alone. Understanding the experiences of millions of Americans like me is crucial to understanding why estrangement seems to be on the rise—and why that might be a good thing.

Despite the stigma, going no contact is extremely common: About 30percent of Americans are currently estranged from a family member, with up to 40percent of Americans having experienced it at some point. Though hard data is difficult to come by, anecdotes suggest that family splits are becoming more frequent.

Common narratives portray these breakups as a scourge inflicted by hyperindividualistic, narcissistic millennials who reject filial duty, refuse to reconcile, fail to forgive, and take the easy way out of hard conversations. In 2021 David Brooks pointed to millennial insistence on drawing these kinds of hard boundaries as “evidence of the breakdown of society” and proof of the “pervasive psychological decline” that’s “ripping families apart.” Rejectedparents.net, an online support group, urges cut-off parents to “call it what it is: ABUSE by adult children.”

But these sensationalist critiques ignore the perspective of the millions of people like me, who are very happily distant. Joshua Coleman, a psychologist with 20 years of experience working with fractured relationships and the author of Rules of Estrangement, told the BBC, “The research shows that the majority of adult children say it was for the best.”

I’m estranged from both of my parents for very different reasons. My parents separated when I was 11, after my mom won custody, and my other parent, Theresa, moved across the country. After one phone call, I didn’t hear from Theresa for five years, until Facebook came on the scene. I’d missed her terribly, but the parent I instant-messaged was not who I expected: Theresa was deep in crisis, unable to even leave her house. She felt that I, as a child, had abandoned her and seemed to hold me responsible for her subsequent psychiatric hospitalizations. I kept trying to reconnect, but she politely declined offers to meet up for coffee. I had hoped to invite Theresa to my wedding, until her unenthusiastic response to the news of my engagement—“Congratulations,” followed by a period—persuaded me to give up.

Losing a relative involuntarily, whether through desertion or death, can be a gut-wrenching experience. Discussions of estrangement tend to focus on the pain inflicted on the person left behind: The recent Times piece condensed one estranged mother’s shortcomings—including alcoholism, a personality disorder, and creating a “volatile atmosphere” for her young children—into a single paragraph, while dedicating seven to her grief.

I’ve seen the agony of abandonment from both sides. As a child, I certainly suffered years of lonely afternoons in my mom’s apartment, wondering if Theresa loved me and how she could have left. But the more I learned about her emotional well-being, the more grateful I became for her decision to let me go. Theresa knew her limits. By honoring them, she spared me years of caregiving and playing go-between in bitter conflicts between my parents. Even though I had no control over our rift and it hurt bitterly at the time, it wound up being a gift.

As an adult, I learned how difficult it could be to decide to say goodbye. After Theresa’s departure, my mom raised me as a single parent, while struggling with compulsive shopping and hoarding. My mom did the best she could, but she couldn’t tell there was a problem, even when we had no place to cook or bathe, or when I spent a year in foster care. In high school, after her apartment became totally unlivable, I spent months scrounging up places to stay, making me an easy target if someone wanted to hurt me. When, at 17, I slept in my Toyota, she declared, “No child is homeless when they have a 1992 Corolla!”

As a teenager, I didn’t realize setting boundaries was even an option. Therapists at the time urged me to “focus on what you can control”—but what I could control, it seemed, never included my need to have a relationship with her. Endless aphorisms emphasize the unique bond between relatives: “Blood is thicker than water”; “You can’t choose your family”; “You have only one mom.” But these maxims ignore the special ways our closest kin can hurt us—particularly parents who wield near-absolute power over their minor children. Like many other folks navigating family dysfunction, I received advice focused on keeping us in contact, regardless of the personal cost.

Even after college, once I realized that estrangement was an option, I wasn’t sure I qualified for it. Most people believe that distance is sometimes warranted: Even the most vigorous critics of estrangement carve out a tidy exception for abuse, before using that caveat to condemn whatever boundaries they deem selfish. But all too often, only heinous physical and sexual violence is considered valid. Even the nature of mistreatment is open to interpretation; what one generation calls parenting, the next generation identifies as gaslighting.

Once I began telling more people about my childhood, they started asking me, “Are you still in touch with your parents?” I thought that this was a rhetorical question. “Of course!” I would reply. Their confused stares indicated that this answer wasn’t the obvious one. In my mid-20s, a therapist suggested that stronger boundaries might help me. Shortly after, my husband casually told me, “I don’t know how you can still talk to your mom.”

Even so, I wanted to avoid being one of the self-absorbed, conflict-avoidant millennials that populate think pieces about cutting ties. If I set limits, I would be not only a bad daughter but also the source of society’s decline. At a certain point, though, the idea of never speaking to my mom again began to feel like a huge relief. But I wasn’t sure I could handle the stigma of having wrecked that relationship, a characterization reinforced by every article that trivializes the reasons families are falling apart. I’d never seen an unapologetic account of someone who had walked away and thrived. Back then, I didn’t believe that it was possible because I’d never seen it depicted.

While writing this piece, I put out a call on social media, and before long my inbox was flooded with people of all ages who are happily estranged from parents, siblings, children, and other relatives. Many said it was the best choice they’d ever made; some said it had saved them from suicide. One 27-year-old man wrote that since he and his mother got a restraining order against his father, “we have never been this happy.… It’s almost like my life is divided into a before and after.” Walking away has enabled people to discover who they are, model healthy relationships, and invest in those who are there for them.

“Sometimes estrangement can force a wake-up call,” said Coleman, the estrangement psychologist. Coleman told me he found his specialty after his daughter stopped talking to him in her mid-20s. “It forced me to do a much deeper self-exploration that was critical to the healing that took place.” If it hadn’t been for his daughter’s decision, he might have never done the work that enabled him to eventually reconcile. “Some parents—I was one of them—have to be hit on the head to do that kind of empathetic deep dive.”

Although estrangement can have positives, powerful barriers keep people trapped in relationships that might not be healthy. In many communities of color, stigma around severing relationships can be especially intense. For others, it means being utterly alone, often without resources. Lilly (who asked to be identified only by her first name to protect her privacy) runs EaCES, an organization for former foster youth and estranged young adults in the U.K. EaCES distributes a guide about how to navigate social services and survive without family support. “Filling in that information gap can be the difference between being homeless or not,” Lilly said.

Many critics claim that estrangement is a social media trend, spread via viral videos often crowned with the hashtag #toxicfamily. But internet culture’s emphasis on identifying harmful patterns can have benefits too. Lilly explained, “TikTok can help people work out how to have healthy relationships and try to break the cycle with their own kids.” Seeing many different perspectives helps to counteract reductionist storylines in which cutting ties is an all-or-nothing proposition that’s justified only in the narrowest cases of severe abuse.

From age 23 to 27, I felt hamstrung by those impossible standards. I walked around with an invisible measuring stick, trying to judge whether what my mom had done was bad enough, weighing it against how much she clearly loved me. But in thinking so deeply about her actions, I ignored how our relationship made me feel. When my mom texted me, I grew agitated for weeks. I blamed myself for the ways I’d been hurt as a vulnerable teenager on my own; it took me years to realize that those heinous self-blaming thoughts grew out of things my mom had said to me. I don’t believe she had bad intentions, but she seemed incapable of responding in any other way. Confronting her went nowhere; she only doubled down. My attempts to bridge the gaps weren’t helping her, or me.

No one needs a reason to justify estrangement, because estrangement is not about blame. Instead, it highlights the fact that adult relationships require mutuality. Children aren’t indentured servants; parents don’t owe their grown kids heroic acts of saintliness either.

Many assume that because estrangement is a difficult choice, it must feel bad. The truth is, lots of important decisions are hard. People grapple for years with the idea of getting married or go back and forth about wanting kids. Yet we don’t assume that every moment of a marriage must be fraught or that every instant of our children’s lives is tinged with regret. Even though it took me nearly a decade to decide I couldn’t have contact with my mom, as soon as I called her, I knew I had made the right decision.

After I said goodbye to my mom, my whole life changed. I stopped doubting my basic emotions and deferring to her version of reality. Relationships with other relatives deepened once I stopped equating family with guilt and obligation. For the first time, I started wanting to become a parent and believing that I could do an OK job.

Yes, I fear that my own daughter may not speak to me when she grows up, but that’s her choice. Knowing she has that right has pushed me to think about how to become someone she will want to call—and avoid replicating my parents’ mistakes.

After three years, I’m convinced that estrangement can be an act of love. Theresa spared me years of fighting and caregiving. With my mom, there’s no more judging, no more begging her to change. Nor am I enabling her compulsions. I used to hope, or fear, that my distance would crush my mom, but given what I’ve heard from relatives, she is, by her own definition, thriving: beating cancer, pursuing her passion (clearance shopping), and surrounding herself with like-minded friends who share her perspective. I’m happy for her. She deserves to live her life free from the scorn of people—like me—whose baggage prevents them from embracing her as she is. We all do.