“People are saying if you have a conservative family member, don’t invite them to Thanksgiving or Christmas. Like, stay away from them,” TikToker Brooker Tee Jones complained. “If that is happening, the devil is definitely winning.”
After the November election, a rowdy debate erupted in online spaces over whether it’s acceptable to cut off family and friends because of how they voted. Supporters of Kamala Harris expressed a range of views, from a reluctance to burn bridges to a “screw ’em all” mentality. “It’s okay to shame someone for doing something shameful,” feminist writer Jessica Valenti argued on Instagram. Shunning those who voted for Donald Trump, she added, was “a reasonable response by those of us who are disgusted, anxious, and afraid.”
Some on the “Hysteria” podcast agreed with Valenti. But guest Megan Gailey said, “If you think you can bring them over, bring them over.” Errin Haines agreed: “We cannot give up on our friends, our family. I think there was too much of that, frankly, after 2016.” But that’s a liberal podcast, so of course the panelists also offered reassurances that it’s OK to disown family members if their Trump vote is “a symptom of larger issues.”
On the Trump-voter side of the debate, the sentiment has been nearly unanimous: It’s an outrage if “woke” friends and family stop speaking to them. The only real disagreement among that cohort is whether this trend is literally the devil’s work, or merely liberal “intolerance.” One TikTok video that went viral featured a woman crying about being cut off and saying, “I’m completely heartbroken about my family taking it how they are. I never did this to them when Biden won.” Conservatives have coined the phrase “vote-shaming,” which seems to equate political and ideological conflict with personal choices regarding diet or sexuality.
Estrangement has always been part of being human, but in recent months, we’ve seen a deluge of press coverage of the phenomenon. Most stories ignore the question of politics or mention it only in passing, instead blaming the seeming rise in family estrangement on social media, therapy culture and shifting cultural norms that prioritize individual happiness over familial duty. Yet an undercurrent of political tension rumbles right under the surface, a suspicion that this is tied to the increasing partisan polarization driven by the MAGA movement.
Perhaps America’s most famous estrangement story is the one involving Trump super-donor Elon Musk and his daughter Vivian Wilson, who has publicly denounced her father for refusing to accept her trans identity. Former Republican congressman Adam Kinzinger, who served on the House Jan. 6 committee, has repeatedly spoken out about members of his family disowning him over his opposition to Trump, who has threatened to throw Kinzinger in prison.
“On the day after the election, I had several calls from clients that they need to have an appointment as soon as possible,” Dr. Farnoosh Nouri, a clinical assistant therapist at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, told Salon. She reports that colleagues across the state are reporting the same. “One colleague had 33 calls the day after the election, new clients who wanted to come in.”
Before 2016, Nouri said, she had not witnessed this kind of political stress on families. After Trump’s first win, she saw a spike in college students “struggling with going back home for Thanksgiving holidays, for Christmas holidays.” Now the fear and stress are ramping up again. Across social media, the stories are mounting, both from liberals who wonder whether it’s time to go no-contact with MAGA parents and from Trump voters who complain about “childish” offspring who no longer speak to them. Nouri’s experiences are backed by new statistics from the Public Religion Research Institute, which found that “Democratic voters (23%) are nearly five times as likely as Republican voters (5%) to say they will be spending less time with certain family members because of their political views.”
Interesting finding from @prripoll.bsky.social. www.prri.org/research/ana…
[image or embed]
— Amanda Marcotte (@amandamarcotte.bsky.social) December 13, 2024 at 2:12 PM
Salon posted a request on Reddit to interview adult children who factored politics into their decision to go no-contact with parents. The response was overwhelming. Contrary to the stereotypes that adult children who make this decision are being callous, impulsive or foolish, the respondents — many of whom said they were in therapy — spoke eloquently about what was often described as a long and emotional decision-making process.
“I literally thought being a Democrat was a sin”
“I don’t know anybody who’s gone no-contact with their family just because of politics.”
In saying that, a woman Salon will call Ellie echoed a sentiment that came up in nearly every interview with children who have cut off right-wing parents: It’s not fair to reduce the dispute to mere political differences. (All adult children and parents interviewed in this article are identified by pseudonyms to protect their privacy.)
Ellie’s parents, she said, were “extremely, extremely religious” and “very physically violent.” This is not uncommon in fundamentalist Christian households, where the biblical proverb about “sparing the rod” is regularly wielded to justify corporal punishment.
The problem, Ellie said, is that in many cases it’s not possible “to separate what people believe in politically with their values as a whole.” She argued that “Donald Trump and his administration and all these Republicans have been justifying abuse forever,” which she compared to the ways her family used religion to rationalize abuse.
“Donald Trump and all these Republicans have been justifying abuse forever,” Ellie said, comparing it to the ways her family used religion to rationalize abuse.
“Children who choose to estrange themselves aren’t making a little decision on a whim,” explained Joshua Stein, a researcher who tracks online trends, especially those that intersect with psychology and bioethics. Stein has been collecting data on the online discourse about estrangement and says that many children who were raised according to the fundamentalist teachings of James Dobson and Michael Pearl “are now adults and are estranged from their parents.” For many such adult children, he says, “It’s not the fact that the person is MAGA. It’s the fact that you do not feel that it is safe to be around them.”
Maureen was also raised by parents she describes as devotees of Dobson, a famous proponent of spanking children. “I literally thought being a Democrat was a sin,” she said, laughing. “I was very encouraged to get married young, to an older man,” she said, but found herself becoming more liberal over the years and eventually left him. Trump’s election further strained her relationship with her parents. “I was raised with all the shame, like having sex before marriage was bad,” but “then my family was just completely willing to embrace Donald Trump.”
“All the things that they told me Christianity stood for? No longer matters,” Maureen said. Like many of the adult children who spoke with Salon, she went full no-contact with her parents during the COVID pandemic.
Want more Amanda Marcotte on politics? Subscribe to her newsletter Standing Room Only.
Paul described living “two lives” with his conservative Roman Catholic parents. In the outside world, he said, “I was very liberal,” but at home, “I had to keep that to myself.” He describes feeling mounting frustration with “this weird allegiance to Trump” that started during Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation hearings and escalated during the pandemic. That anxiety was interwoven with his efforts to build a personal life outside his household. “Anytime I got close to a woman,” he said, his parents “would sabotage the relationship.” When Paul started seeing a woman who was both Jewish and Spanish, his mother “had some wonderful expletives about her,” he said sarcastically.
Paul’s parents “dragged me to church every Sunday,” he said. He often saw an older man at Mass “who looked like a shell of himself,” and worried, “That’s going to be me when I’m 60.” He felt that Trump’s political rise made the situation worse by creating “this environment where you’re either with us or you’re not with us.” He moved out of his family home, but has concealed his new address from his parents so they can’t show up at his house uninvited.
Other estranged kids didn’t necessarily grow up in religious households, but told similar stories: Trump’s election had exacerbated existing family tensions, often to the breaking point. “My father has always been conservative Republican, but was never vocal about politics and was a reasonable man,” explained Penny, who spoke with Salon through a chat app. “His new wife, on the other hand, was very divisive and made ‘owning the libs’ her purpose in life.”
“I was spending hours of my day, every day, just thinking about this argument we were having,” Robert said. He said he felt ill whenever he received emails from his parents.
Penny says she kept politics out of conversation in person but, as is common in many of these cases, social media got involved. Her dad’s wife “didn’t like my fact-check on a mutual relative’s Facebook page on a racist, anti-liberal post,” she said, and un-friended Penny on Facebook while continuing to send her “anti-liberal, anti-BLM, racist memes via Messenger.” Penny messaged her father’s wife and asked her “to stop sending me these racist things,” which provoked a crisis: Her stepmother then announced “that she didn’t want me in her life anymore (um, OK) and that she would speak to my dad about it.” Penny added, parenthetically, “Because apparently I was 5, not 47.” That resulted in a big fight with her father, in which she says he blamed her for all the tension and bad feelings. She hasn’t spoken to him since 2020.
“Our once-reasonable father has been brainwashed by her and made into a MAGA,” she lamented.
Robert felt he had a good relationship with his parents, but after the Supreme Court overturned the constitutional right to abortion in 2022, his father celebrated with a Facebook post about how aborted pregnancies “could have all been doctors or lawyers or electricians.” Robert has two teenage kids and wants “to protect the options that are open to them.” When he confronted his father about the post, it blew up into an argument that kept escalating. Robert realized his father has “a very strong personality” and “would raise his voice and possibly physically dominate the situation” when challenged on his beliefs.
“I was spending hours of my day, every day, just thinking about this argument we were having,” Robert said, adding that he felt ill whenever he received emails from his parents. “It was pushing me into depression and honestly to the point where I was having suicidal thoughts,” he said. He cut off contact, which he saw as an act of self-preservation. “I still hold out the hope that something will change,” he added, but currently has little hope “they are ready to actually listen.”
“She is racist,” Christine said of her mother. That was especially painful on a personal level, she added, because Christine is biracial: Her mother is white and her biological father was Black, and the family history was awkward. There are “a lot of clashes around race,” she said. “I am the result of her getting caught sleeping with a Black man.”
While the estrangement from her mother was “a long time coming,” Christine said, things came to a head during the pandemic when her mother began to make cruel comments about her ex-husband’s new wife, who is an immigrant. “My mom was starting up on her racism again,” Christine said, and “I called her out on it” for the first time, although her mother had “said several things in the past that were even racist towards me.”
Christine said the issue wasn’t just political differences with her mother, but her mother’s tendency to denigrate “any identity that deviated from hers.” She concluded, “If this is the type of toxic relationship you wouldn’t tolerate from a romantic partner,” then she also shouldn’t endure it from a parent.
Blaming “woke ideology”
“I was not invited to my daughter’s wedding,” Darlene told Salon. “That’s how sick these people are, because how do you do that to a mom?”
Quite a few parents who have become estranged from their children expressed interest in speaking with Salon, but most declined after learning they would be asked questions about their political views. Darlene was the exception. Like the adult children interviewed, she also saw a connection between politics and her personal situation.
“There’s a mindset, there’s an entitlement” in younger people, she said, which she believes has led to the government being “out of money.” She added, “I don’t have beaucoup bucks to just throw it out so that somebody else can make the decision as to how it gets spent, when it’s not on the same values that I have.”
Darlene’s daughter is a practicing nurse and aspiring country singer. Darlene says she gave her daughter money to start her band and record an album, but believed that “I was to have no say in how we went about promoting” the music and managing the band. Things turned out differently, in her view: “I just was to give the money and she was at will to do whatever she wanted with it.” Darlene also blamed her son-in-law, whose family is “more left” and “very controlling,” she believes. (Her daughter did not respond to a request for comment.)
“There’s a mindset, there’s an entitlement” in younger people, Darlene said, which she believes has led to the government being “out of money.”
She felt that her daughter’s unwillingness to speak with her was indicative of a larger social problem: “What’s happening to this country if you can’t sit down and have a civil conversation?” She felt that Americans are not “discussing what’s actually happening to this country” or “trying to find solutions,” but “keep raising taxes” instead. Similarly, she said her daughter would not “sit down with me and discuss what was happening with the money,” but implied that “I was just to be quiet” when it came to her daughter’s music career.
Darlene said she has worked with Dr. Joshua Coleman, a psychologist who has made a name for himself counseling parents whose children have cut off contact. His book, “Rules of Estrangement: Why Adult Children Cut Ties and How to Heal the Conflict,” is controversial. Adult children in estrangement forums argue that Coleman is overly aggressive in his efforts at family reconciliation and too quick to blame “the younger generation’s dysfunction,” as one redditor put it.
In an interview with Salon, Coleman argued that estrangement is on the rise and partly results from “Instagram influencers having opinions about who’s toxic” and low “rates of social trust.” On the other hand, he has also been criticized by some estranged parents, because his book asks them to reflect on the role their actions may have played and to consider making amends.
Coleman told Salon that political differences are a “common pathway” to estrangement. He has many clients who voted for Trump and have an “adult child who hates that idea.” That dynamic, he added, “can either fuel underlying tensions in the parent-child relationship or it can create a rift that can later leads to an estrangement.”
Coleman is no defender of Trump, whom he calls “an incredible amplifier of these kinds of hostilities.” Trump’s “contempt, his anger, his tribalistic orientation” creates “enormous social permission for people to say and behave in ways toward other people, family included, that they might not otherwise.” Coleman said that he wished political opinions were less important, but would advise parents to listen to their children’s views with “empathy” and without getting “defensive.” He added that “a deeper dive” into whether “other issues could be underlying the conflict” is often important.
Want a daily wrap-up of all the news and commentary Salon has to offer? Subscribe to our morning newsletter, Crash Course.
Joshua Stein, the researcher of online content, wasn’t surprised that Salon struggled to get parents to talk openly about family estrangement. When he first started researching forums for estranged parents, most of them were public-facing. But once members realized that outsiders were reading their discussions, the groups shifted to private forums, often behind a paywall. Most of the rhetoric in these groups, he said, allows parents “to absolve themselves” and “blame it all on the kid.” The parents often ascribe estrangement to “a social contagion or a mass psychosis.”
Stein sees a link between the culture of these forums and the larger MAGA movement. The pro-Trump “community has insulated itself from criticism by treating any outside information as illegitimate,” he said, and many parent forums do the same, “perpetuating the posture that the kids are unreasonable” and the parents “did nothing wrong.”
For online influencer Diane Cohn, the underlying problem is “woke ideology.” She blames college campuses where “ideological indoctrination” shifts young people “away from traditional family values, the bedrock of civilization.”
While such parent groups are nearly all private, the people who run these communities often market themselves aggressively and in public. Last year, Diane Cohn launched the forum Estranged Parents (membership is $28 a month) with a video titled “My Daughter Stopped Talking to Me [SO I LET HER GO],” featuring dramatic music and images of Cohn clicking away at her computer keyboard. She declined to answer questions from Salon, but her videos center on political disagreements with her daughter, which suggests she believes that will draw in potential customers.
In another video, “What’s Behind the Estrangement Epidemic?”, Cohn — whose avatar features her face within a red strike-through circle — lays out her theory: The underlying problem is “woke ideology.” She blames “schools and universities where ideological indoctrination of young minds, in many cases, delivers dogmatic thinking disguised as critical thinking,” a “declining work ethic” and “alternative lifestyles” that shift young people “away from traditional family values, the bedrock of civilization.”
In an environment where the “government steps in to pick up the slack,” Cohn says, young people feel “free to delete family from their lives.” Salon obtained a copy of a video posted by Cohn (which she later removed) that is more explicit. She complains about college campuses “where they confirm that your gender is anything you want it to be,” and suggests that “meritocracy” has been replaced by “skin color as a primary indicator of who’s in and who’s out.” Wider social acceptance of estrangement, she concludes, will lead to “America’s collapse.”
Unsurprisingly, Cohn markets her community almost exclusively to conservatives. Stein pointed out that longstanding right-wing media organizations have produced lots of content aimed at estranged parents in recent years. Focus on the Family, founded by Dobson, has extensive materials for Christian conservative parents angry that their children have walked away from them and rejected their faith. Dennis Prager of PragerU has posted videos with titles like “You Better Have a Really Good Reason for Not Talking to Your Parent,” “Your Parents Don’t Deserve This” and “When Adult Children Don’t Speak to Their Parents.” Conservative organizations like the American Enterprise Institute and the Institute for Family Studies routinely denounce children who go no-contact. Even New York Times columnist David Brooks weighed in, declaring that estrangement contributes to “the psychological unraveling of America.”
Sheri McGregor, a “certified life coach” and author of multiple books about estrangement, has one of the few websites where comments from estranged parents aren’t behind a wall. One popular post titled “The beat goes on: Politics dividing families” offers a glimpse of what goes on at more private forums. “Suddenly I was a horrible human being because my political views did not line up with her ‘progressive’ views and I was called a racist, a bigot, homophobic, transphobic, you name it,” complained one poster, who said one son “dialed it down” after she threatened to throw him out.
One poster wrote, “What is wrong with this generation?! They feel so empowered so entitled now!” adding that her son “got ‘covid’ supposedly last year” but cut her off after she sent him anti-vaccine articles.
Another post suggested disinheriting children, and deploying “your thoughts about the estrangement in the will as a last word.” This poster added, “It is very sad where we are in this country because respect is disappearing and has to be enforced at an early age.” Another attributed her daughter’s queer identity to being “brainwashed by her environment,” comparing her situation to “Hitler youth.” Another person wrote, “What is wrong with this generation?! They feel so empowered so entitled now!” adding that her son “got ‘covid’ supposedly last year” but cut her off after she sent him anti-vaccine articles.
Jolie Robertson, a YouTuber who has created videos defending kids who go no-contact, said she attributes these reactions to “the expectation of dishonest harmony in families.” She added that “politics and morals are pretty intertwined at this point, and a difference of morality” has always been a factor in “loss of community.”
Authoritarianism starts at home
Most estranged children and their defenders use intuitive arguments to defend their belief that the personal and political are intertwined. Social science, however, backs them up. One of the best predictors of authoritarian political beliefs — and likely Trump support — is how a person answers questions about the most desirable traits in children:
independence vs. respect for their elders
curiosity vs. good manners
self-reliance vs. obedience
being considerate vs. being well-behaved
People who prefer obedience over curiosity, independence or consideration tend to have authoritarian personalities. As political scientist Matthew MacWilliams found, authoritarians are more likely to be strong Trump supporters. This linkage makes sense, MacWilliams told Salon, because authoritarianism is all about in-group versus out-group thinking. In that worldview, children are expected to “conform to in-group norms, be obedient, be orderly, be disciplined.”
MacWilliams added that it’s not surprising to see politics become intertwined with personality issues in family estrangement cases. He characterized authoritarianism as a “worldview, a predisposition” more than an ideology, adding that “values and worldview drive politics,” not the other way around. Authoritarian values, he said, are the “poison root” from which far-right politics and regressive attitudes on child-rearing both flow.
In her new book “Wild Faith: How the Christian Right Is Taking Over America,” journalist Talia Lavin devotes the second half to exploring the widely-read marriage and parenting manuals of Christian nationalist subculture. These books or websites explicitly argue for hierarchical relationships, with women and children chastened to live their lives in unquestioning submission to patriarchal authority. As Lavin lays out in painful detail, this worldview is frequently enforced through violence, at least on children. The parenting manuals treat physical discipline not merely as an aspect of parenting, but as a parent’s main tool.
Want more Amanda Marcotte on politics? Subscribe to her newsletter Standing Room Only.
“They see violence and authoritarianism as normal, in both the private and public spheres,” Lavin told Salon. “When you’re raised seeing violent authoritarianism in the family sphere and come to accept and embrace it in adulthood, you’re the model authoritarian subject: someone for whom violence and authority are intertwined, who accepts and expects brutalization of the most helpless.”
Whether they faced physical abuse or not, the estranged children who spoke with Salon mostly spoke of a long process of unlearning the worldview in which they had been raised. For Maureen, having daughters made her “a million times more pro-choice.” For Ellie, disability caused by medical neglect as a child was part of her journey, especially as “my dad told me a couple of years ago that maybe I wouldn’t be so sick if I believed in Jesus.”
“When you’re raised seeing violent authoritarianism in the family sphere,” said Talia Lavin, “you’re the model authoritarian subject: someone who accepts and expects brutalization of the most helpless.”
Many children cited strong relationships outside their families as bridges away from the more authoritarian worldview. Paul has multiple degrees and says the people he has met at work and in his personal life have deepened his appreciation for diversity. Christine spoke of her stepfather, who divorced her mother long ago, as an anchor of tolerance, acceptance and more liberal values.
Writing for Politico in 2020, MacWilliams noted that “approximately 18 percent of Americans are highly disposed to authoritarianism,” according to his survey data. “A further 23 percent or so are just one step below them on the authoritarian scale.” He told Salon that the way these attitudes manifest depends on whether and how such authoritarian values are “activated.” Donald Trump serves as a powerful catalyst, unleashing such individuals’ preferences for “authority, obedience and uniformity over freedom, independence and diversity.”
This model of “activated” authoritarianism may help explain the apparent escalation of politics-related estrangement. As Coleman said, Trump’s political rise offered “permission” for people to unleash authoritarian tendencies, including in their personal lives and family interactions, with the unique stress factors of the pandemic adding to the tensions.
Trump’s message, MacWilliams said, was, “If you don’t agree with him, you’re an enemy of the state. He’s made it seem that the differences are dangerous,” and in that context some Trump voters will apply that hostility to their closest family members.
“The relationship between two people is like a dance”
Mainstream media coverage of the estrangement phenomenon tends to minimize or ignore the role played by authoritarian attitudes and values, instead leaning into such trending topics as social media, “therapy culture” and liberal intolerance. A New Yorker article by Anna Russell, published last August, followed “Amy,” a woman who went no-contact with her evangelical parents and recounted alarming details about how they had treated her over the years. Her parents contacted the administration at her university, for example, to express “displeasure about Amy’s transformation” toward more liberal views. They skipped her wedding, refusing to be vaccinated against COVID-19. They’ve told Amy she is going to hell. Still, in a familiar effort at journalistic balance, Russell cited Reddit forums as a primary factor, writing that “posters are not exactly unbiased” and tend to “advocate a slash-and-burn approach to complex relationships.”
“What is lost when we render our families optional?” Russell worried, in the rhetorical equivalent of leading the witness. “As a new parent myself,” she continued, “I felt scared at the idea that I might somehow screw up, and my child would reject me.” This article angered many posters at r/EstrangedAdultChild, where some said that Russell’s article “discounts emotional abuse” and that she seemed to agree “with the idea that children should allow themselves to be disrespected for their parents’ emotional comfort.”
A similarly-themed New York Times article published in July, headlined “Is Cutting Off Your Family Good Therapy?” leaves the reader with little doubt that Ellen Barry, the paper’s mental health reporter, believes the answer is no. Barry writes that “promotion of estrangement as a therapeutic step is clearly on the rise, thanks mainly to social media,” adding, “Whether or not mental health clinicians should encourage this practice is hotly debated.” The Economist, The Atlantic, NPR and the Guardian have all published articles hitting similar notes, drawing the ire of estranged adult children on Reddit.
Nouri, the therapist at SMU, expressed skepticism that her profession is pushing clients to go no-contact. “Our job is to bring people together, not to create division,” she said. The goal of therapy is to help clients foster “the connections that we need in order to be healthier.”
Nouri added that she rejects the basic premise of the media debate over whether it’s acceptable to go no-contact, and would rather focus on how to support individual people in their specific situations. “I tell my clients the relationship between two people is like a dance,” she said, “and if one person is not willing to take the steps in this dance, it’s not going to happen.” Many family relationships can be mended, she believes, but if one person feels “powerless” and unable to speak without being “put down,” then “creating distance is an act of self-care.”
Maureen didn’t agree that estrangement is a “trend” brought on by social media, although she agreed that online forums can make it easier to walk away. But she sees the issue less in terms of social contagion, arguing that it’s simply that “more conversation leads to more acceptance.”
“I don’t feel like social media made me do it,” she said. Instead, she felt the forum offered support for her decision.
Stein also rejects narratives that blame social media or therapists. “Parents in these relationships tend not to think that the children are making a well-informed choice,” he said, noting they will blame partners, social media, friends or media brainwashing, rather than accept that a child is “deliberately and intentionally choosing” to separate themselves. Even Coleman, who has described family estrangement is “a social contagion that happens through Instagram and TikTok and Reddit,” spoke in more measured language to Salon, saying he tells clients their child “wouldn’t be doing it unless they felt like it was good for them.”
“I tell my clients the relationship between two people is like a dance,” said therapist Farnoosh Nouri, “and if one person is not willing to take the steps in this dance, it’s not going to happen.”
All this raises the question of whether the media discourse around parental estrangement qualifies as a “moral panic,” a phenomenon described by its leading theorist, Stanley Cohen, as occurring when “a condition, episode, person or group of persons emerges to become defined as a threat to societal values and interests.” Sometimes the underlying episodes or trends that spark the panic are real and sometimes they’re not — as was the case with the ritual child abuse panic of the 1980s, for instance — but in either case, the threat is wildly exaggerated. Cohen’s original example was the 1960s moral panic in the U.K. over “mods” and “rockers,” when the emergence of rival youth subcultures was treated as the downfall of British civilization.
Media coverage of parental estrangement has gotten entangled with other buzzy topics like “cancel culture” or articles scolding young women who are unwilling to date Trump voters. A Washington Post editorial lamented that “someone will need to compromise” in that standoff, although it wasn’t exactly clear why. In the “Hysteria” episode about whether it was acceptable to banish Trump voters, the one panelist who strongly supported such actions, Erin Gloria Ryan, complained that Democrats “have been feminized in this way, where we are expected to just be tolerant and forgive over and over again,” with no reciprocation from the right.
Stanford professor Adrian Daub, author of “The Cancel Culture Panic,” has pointed out that moral panics are typically about preserving social hierarchies: If a Starbucks barista gets fired for expressing a left-wing opinion, no one calls it “cancel culture,” but if a right-wing pundit is heckled by undergraduates during a campus speech, our constitutional freedoms are under threat. In an earlier interview with Salon, Daub argued that accusations of “cancel culture” are typically aimed at younger or lower-status people, specifically so higher-status folks don’t have “to reflect on their own practices.” It’s “cancel culture” when Elon Musk or JK Rowling is criticized for transphobic rhetoric, but not when billionaires or Republican politicians focus public anger on ordinary people who don’t conform to gender norms.
The outrage at no-contact adult children appears to follow the same model. In his videos denouncing this trend, Dennis Prager says, “The Bible never commands us to love our parents, but it does command us to honor them.” Cohn, the parent influencer, says that her daughter “didn’t want for anything, materially,” and mentions an occasion when she prevented her daughter from choking, seemingly as evidence that she has earned a continuing relationship.
It’s “cancel culture” when Elon Musk or JK Rowling is criticized for transphobic rhetoric, but not when billionaires or Republican politicians focus public anger on ordinary people who don’t conform to gender norms.
Similar logic is echoed throughout anti-estrangement articles, such as the New York Times noting that “estranged children are likely to lose access to financial and emotional resources.” No equivalence is drawn the parent side, even though it’s also true that a parent who refuses to make peace with an adult child runs the emotional risk of losing that relationship permanently. Once again, the implicit assumption is that the lower-status person has a duty to maintain or restore harmony.
It is clearly true, as Coleman has argued, that the growth of individualistic values and greater economic freedom have created a context in which adult children can cut off contact with their parents, something that was often impossible for earlier generations. It doesn’t follow, however, that such people have given up on “connectedness and interdependency and mutual reliance,” as Coleman told NPR.
Most adult children who spoke with Salon did not seem lonely or disconnected from life. Most cited strong relationships with friends, other family members and romantic partners as giving them the strength to separate from parents they felt were harmful. Many spoke warmly of Reddit, which provided connections to other people in similar situations. On the estranged-parent forums, the term “found family” is sometimes uttered with evident contempt. Many of the adult children say they have simply found community.
Read more
from Amanda Marcotte on the new Trump era
