Joshua Coleman
Appearances
Today, Explained
Breaking up with your parents
And so she eventually shut down contact for a while until I You know, kind of learn to just be quiet and be, more importantly, not to just be quiet, but to learn how to be empathic and take responsibility and find, you know, listen to her perspective and hear her out and be able to tolerate the mistakes that I had made and empathize with her rather than to defend myself.
Today, Explained
Breaking up with your parents
Okay, so it sounds like this was a bit of a trial and error experience for you. You discovered the wrong things to do as well as the right things to do. Tell us more about the right things to do.
Today, Explained
Breaking up with your parents
The right things are to take responsibility and to show empathy and to find the kernel, if not the bushel, of truth in your child's complaints, to not be defensive, to not get mad, to assume that... One of my methods is to have parents write what I call a letter of amends.
Today, Explained
Breaking up with your parents
And I say you should always start your letter of amends by saying, I know you wouldn't do this unless it was the healthiest thing for you to do. Because from the adult child's perspective, it is the healthiest thing for them to do. It may not feel that way to the parent. The parent's therapist may not feel like it's the healthiest thing for the kid to do, but it doesn't really matter.
Today, Explained
Breaking up with your parents
You know, the goal is to be in alignment with what your child's values are, particularly today because nothing compels an adult child to have a relationship with a parent unless they want to. Can you help us understand...
Today, Explained
Breaking up with your parents
How common estrangement is becoming or what the rates of estrangement are these days?
Today, Explained
Breaking up with your parents
The most recent study was out of Ohio State with a sociologist named Rim Resnick and colleagues, and she found that 26% of fathers are currently estranged. Wow. Which is huge, right? Now, she found 6% of mothers, but other people have found something closer to 10% to 12% of mothers are, which I think it's more in that camp. And then another study by Carl Pillemer at Cornell, he found that 27%.
Today, Explained
Breaking up with your parents
of adults over 18 are estranged from a family member, not necessarily a parent, but a sibling or other family members. So it's pretty darn common. And what's driving that? What's making it more common? Oh, it's a number of factors. I think that this moral shift that I was talking about where parents
Today, Explained
Breaking up with your parents
Relationships are purely predicated on the basis of whether or not the relationship is good for one's happiness and mental health and personal expression and identity. In the United States, we have rising rates of individualism that have occurred over the past half century, increasing atomization, increasing tribalism.
Today, Explained
Breaking up with your parents
Socialism, the the incursion of therapeutic narratives in the way that we define ourselves, Instagram and social media, which we could spend an hour talking about divorce. So there's a lot of reasons why it's on the rise.
Today, Explained
Breaking up with your parents
Explained. Emmy Nietveld is estranged from her mother. We asked her how she described that absence in her life, and we were rather surprised by her answer.
Today, Explained
Breaking up with your parents
And are all those factors from social media to politics to increasing individualism positive? Are they driving people to choose estrangement over maybe working through problems? And that's not a judgment. I'm just trying to understand it.
Today, Explained
Breaking up with your parents
Well, I think so, because I think that, you know, it's become considered sort of virtuous to cut off toxic people and to have boundaries.
Today, Explained
Breaking up with your parents
You know, I think in our society we have a very rich and developed language around boundaries and diagnoses of other people and the like, and a kind of impoverished language around interdependency and compassion and empathy and understanding the other person's perspective. So I think that has fueled this idea that cutting off people is considered a really assertive self-care, active self-care.
Today, Explained
Breaking up with your parents
And in fact, it can be. I mean, there are genuinely hurtful, destructive family members. So I'm not here to say one should never do that. But I do think people in general are too quick to do it. And I also don't think that younger generations are as empathic as I wish they were about, A, how hard it is to be a parent. The parenting is often a fog of war.
Today, Explained
Breaking up with your parents
or B, how the absolute immiseration they're causing when they cut a parent out of their lives.
Today, Explained
Breaking up with your parents
You know, parents in my practice are suicidal. They're miserable, particularly those who've been cut off from grandchildren. Many of these parents were loving, involved grandparents. And they're not being cut off because of their being bad grandparents. They're being cut off because of conflict between the parent and the adult child.
Today, Explained
Breaking up with your parents
We heard from Emmy earlier in the show that had it not been for texting and email, she probably would still have a relationship with her mother. It was the sort of, you know, over communication that she felt she had with her mother that made her relationship with her mother over. unsustainable. Do you see that a lot in your practice, in your research?
Today, Explained
Breaking up with your parents
I really do. And I'm glad that Emmy raised that because I do think that, well, I think there's been several factors. One of the changes that we've had in the past four decades or so is parents have become much more anxious, much more involved. The studies by economists show that in countries with high social inequality, like the United States or China or
Today, Explained
Breaking up with your parents
Parents do have to become much more involved, much more tiger mothers or helicopter parents, because it's the only way to guarantee or at least increase the probability that their child is going to have a safe landing into adulthood.
Today, Explained
Breaking up with your parents
In other countries with low social inequality, say, for example, Japan or the Scandinavian countries, parents can feel more secure that their children are, you know, without enormous parental investments, still going to do okay in life. And so parents have been much more intensive and much more involved. So parents have become much more enmeshed.
Today, Explained
Breaking up with your parents
But then you add cell phones onto that, where parents can track their kids when they're young, they can know where they are. And then once the kids leave home, they can reach them at any time of day from any part of the world. And so many adult children, the phrase that I see in every single letter from every single estranged adult child is, you need to respect my boundaries.
Today, Explained
Breaking up with your parents
And I think that's because boundaries between parents and children and have become much more diffuse.
Today, Explained
Breaking up with your parents
Is there another way, or is this a necessary trend and movement?
Today, Explained
Breaking up with your parents
I mean, I wish there was another way. I mean, my whole mission is to give parents the tools to learn how to communicate to their adult children in ways that help them to feel cared about and understood.
Today, Explained
Breaking up with your parents
And I do think most of the first-person narratives and first-person essays that you see in the media are written from the perspective of, well, I cut off my abusive parent and I'm better off and I'm happier. Very little, quite frankly, I think is written about how absolutely immiserated the parents are. So thank you for having me on your show. Thank you for joining us.
Today, Explained
Breaking up with your parents
You know, you don't have to agree with everything that your family believes in order to capitalize or have to remember what's good about them as people and parents. politics is only one part of our identity.
Today, Explained
Breaking up with your parents
And it's, you know, for some people can be an important part, but we should kind of be big enough people just to look around those sorts of differences and remember what's good about the people that we grew up with or that raised us or that are our children, because it is a cause of estrangement these days. For example, I have a
Today, Explained
Breaking up with your parents
younger brother who's a self-admitted conspiracy theorist and so whenever i talk to him on the phone he starts to go there i go we're not going there and he just laughs and we you know because i love him and i don't want to i just don't want the conversation to get trashed in the way that it used to i'm never going to believe the videos he sends me from you know andrew tate or something and he's not going to believe the research articles i'm going to send him so you know we're just in different worlds so why why go there i mean if you like to fight fine fight but you know
Today, Explained
Breaking up with your parents
There's ways to respectfully disagree, but we've sort of lost the art of that, I think.
Today, Explained
Breaking up with your parents
Psychologist Dr. Joshua Coleman, he's got a private practice in the Bay Area, and he's the author of When Parents Hurt, Compassionate Strategies When You and Your Grown Child Don't Get Along, and Rules of Estrangement, Why Adult Children Cut Ties, and How to Heal the Conflict. Victoria Chamberlain.
Today, Explained
Breaking up with your parents
Made our show today, even though it's her worst nightmare, she was edited by Miranda Kennedy, fact-checked by Laura Bullard, and mixed by Rob Byers and Andrea Kristen's daughter.
Today, Explained
Breaking up with your parents
The rest of the best that today explained includes Matthew Collette, Halima Shah, Patrick Boyd, Abishai Artsy, Miles Bryan, Hadi Mawagdi, Amanda Llewellyn, Peter Balanon-Rosen, Amina Alsadi, and of course, my co-host, Noelle King. We use music by Breakmaster Cylinder. Today Explained is distributed by WNYC. This show is a part of Vox.
Today, Explained
Breaking up with your parents
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Today, Explained
Breaking up with your parents
The holidays are basically here. It's the happiest time of the year for some, and for others, the opposite.
Today, Explained
Breaking up with your parents
There's an increasingly popular option for all the people who don't love seeing their parents during the holidays or any other time of the year. You can peace out.
Today, Explained
Breaking up with your parents
Does it bum you out that your daughter isn't going to know your mom?
Today, Explained
Breaking up with your parents
We're going to take a deep breath and then we're going to talk about parental estrangement on Today Explained.
Today, Explained
Breaking up with your parents
Let's say in like 15 years, you know, God forbid, I'm not wishing this upon you, but I'm just asking, if your daughter maybe now has this idea that estrangement is kind of normal because you did it, if she decided, for example, she didn't want to talk to you anymore, how would you react? Do you think because you've had this experience, you'd try to understand it?
Today, Explained
Breaking up with your parents
Today explains Sean Rahm's firm, but enough about me. Dr. Joshua Coleman is a clinical psychologist and the author of multiple books about parental estrangement. It's an area of expertise he was forced into.
Today, Explained
Breaking up with your parents
I was married and divorced in my 20s and have an adult daughter who I'm very close to. But there was a period of time in her early life.
Today, Explained
Breaking up with your parents
where she cut off contact with me for several years, largely as a result of my becoming remarried and having children in my second, which is my current marriage, and her feeling in some ways displaced, that she felt kind of pushed to the side in certain ways, that she got in some ways a worse quality of life and childhood and family life than my
Today, Explained
Breaking up with your parents
twins from my current marriage got, which, you know, in many ways is a fairly, it's a kind of a reasonable assessment. But at the time when she raised it, I wasn't really prepared to hear it, how hurt she was or how displaced she felt or in certain ways neglected. And I responded defensively and maybe even angrily at the time. And, you know, of course that made it worse as it often does.