This holiday, heal your family rifts

I received this letter from a mother who had been cut off by her 28-year-old daughter several years ago:

“I know there is always a chance she could come back to me, but that is a hard way to live just waiting and hoping. I pray for that every night. There is not an hour in the day when I don’t think about her and miss her with my whole heart and soul and I will never, ever stop loving her. Now with the holidays, I am just doing what I have done every year since she left. Just praying for a Christmas miracle that she will come home.” — Kathleen, Massachusetts

I get a lot of letters like this from parents who are desperate, heartbroken, suicidal, enraged. Some are honest and open in their acknowledgment of the ways that they let their children down and contributed to the estrangement. Many are desperate for anything that will increase the chance of some reconciliation.

Other parents are so defensive and bitter and morally outraged that you feel protective of the child who had to grow up in the home where those feelings were played out. Many parents want their estranged child to see the situation from their perspective, but haven’t done the hard work of seeing it from the child’s. Some parents who did real damage to their children believe that if they just keep denying it, that their child may one day forget that it ever happened, much in the way that they have suppressed it themselves.

There is a silent epidemic of parents who are struggling with these issues. It’s silent because what parent wants to admit to others that their own child wants nothing to do with them? Who wants to say, “I don’t have a picture of my grandchildren because I’ve never met my grandchildren” or “I haven’t the faintest idea how my son is because he won’t return my calls and he sends back all of my presents unopened.”

There has been a radical change in parenting attitudes and our view of children in the past century. Prior to the 20^th century, we saw them as robust and resilient. We believed that the stresses and rigors of life would strengthen them and build their character. Today, as a result of parenting advice, smaller families, fewer pathways to adulthood, increased household dangers, the ability of the Internet to instantly broadcast dangers, we view our offspring as fragile and requiring a kind of carefully tended childhood in order to become successful adults.

In the 1920s, parents wanted their children to respect them — if not fear them — and to be upstanding, church-going, conforming members of society. Today’s parents want their children to be independent — and they want their children to love them. In other words, where it was once the child’s job to earn the parent’s love and respect, it is now the parent’s job to earn that from the child.

Some of these role reversals stem from the prevalence of divorce. For many adults, their relationship with their children may be the one long-term relationship that they can count on. Or so they hope. Divorce may be one of the biggest causes of alienation between parents and their children. After a divorce, children sometimes blame one of the parents more than the other for causing the divorce, and withdraw from that parent as a result. In addition, some parents are quite intentional in poisoning the child’s feelings about the other parent. Kids don’t always like their parents’ new romantic partners or the idea of new romantic partners, and that can cause children of any age to reject a parent.

All in all, families have become more fragile and it’s a brand-new playing field between parents and their adult children. It requires new rules of engagement and new methods of conflict resolution. The following are suggested as some guidelines:

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