Family estrangement keeps coming up at the dinner table, often because someone isn't there. On Oct. 15, The Wall Street Journal published "Why Are So Many Adult Children Cutting Off Their Parents? Readers Weigh In," a collection of reader responses on grown children ending contact with their parents. The University of Minnesota added the piece to its in-the-news feed the same day.
The reader roundup follows earlier reporting. On Sept. 26 the Journal ran an analysis of the rise in parent-child estrangement. It pointed to changing family expectations, social media, and the way people now talk about trauma and boundaries.
The UMN connection is clearest in a summer story on whether therapists are fueling the trend. That reporting cited an April survey of 7,000 estranged parents, and 1 in 3 of them blamed therapy for the break. It also said more than 25% of young adults in the U.S. are estranged from 1 or both parents. One caveat matters: the survey records how parents explain why their child left. It doesn't show that therapy caused the split.
In that coverage, William Doherty of the University of Minnesota gave the sharpest version of the critique. "We are in a culture where we emphasize fragility, everything becomes trauma, and the solution increasingly is to split and leave," Doherty said. "But it should be the tragic exception that you cut off a parent or loved one, not business as usual in therapy." His concern is not that estrangement is never warranted. He objects to therapists making it a routine recommendation when it should be a last resort for genuinely harmful families.
Plenty of people disagree. They argue that the therapy framing ignores abuse, rejection of LGBTQ+ kids, and other reasons people walk away. The new reader responses come out of that ongoing back-and-forth.
For many people at UMN, though, the question isn't academic. A lot of students are working out for the first time what an adult relationship with their parents looks like.
