Why do people cut off contact with their parents? (last updated 2 May 2026)
About a hundred years ago, an ancestor of mine, who I’m not very proud of, left his wife when she was dying of cancer and pursued a relationship with a new girlfriend. Their 16-year-old daughter was disgusted by her father’s behaviour and never spoke to him again. I would probably have reacted in the same way if this had been my father.
And I do of course acknowledge that there are people who have faced serious abuse, neglect, homophobia, racist disapproval of partners, difficult childhoods through parents having addictions and mental health problems, among other regrettable situations.
However, in recent years, the definition of the word ‘abuse’ seems to have broadened considerably and I don’t think it’s a coincidence that psychology is now the most popular degree course at undergraduate level in the UK https://thinkstudent.co.uk/most-popular-degrees-in-the-uk/, or that psychological therapy is an under-regulated profession, https://post.parliament.uk/regulation-of-psychological-professionals/. There are a lot of holders of a BA or BSc in Psychology out there, following a 3-year course, whereas it takes at least a further 4 years to earn a Doctorate in Clinical Psychology (DClinPsy). People are also becoming accredited as counsellors and therapists in under 3 years through other, shorter courses from a range of providers.
In my opinion, the lack of training leads unsuitably qualified members of staff (my child's main contact at Oxford Health was a nurse and we had an occupational therapist allocated in the role of a so-called 'link worker', a sort of family liaison officer) to sometimes conclude that the people they are counselling have suffered abuse from their parents in situations where a more highly-qualified counsellor would involve the parents in the conversation and would not reach the same conclusion. I think that some of the under-qualified clinicians who became involved with my child lacked curiosity and an awareness of their responsibilities to work in the child’s best interests; their main aim seemed to be to form a close bond with the child themselves. (If you have landed on this page first and you are a parent in Oxfordshire, I recommend that you read this website's Home page, where I provide a summary of my family's very poor experience with Oxfordshire Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services.)
From the perspective of parents, expressed in social media posts that I’ve read (which do provide some solace and a feeling of solidarity for thousands of cut-off parents like me), the reasons they believe they were cut off are many and varied; some are listed here. Some of these motives for such a drastic course of action may portray the adult children in an unsympathetic light, but it is notable that there are very few scenarios listed here where the child or young adult has made the decision to the cut off their parents on their own.
Resentment through rumination can happen through therapy or exposure to social media content, or can happen to people of any age who in retrospect disapprove of aspects of their upbringing:
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‘I had tiger parents’ Some people appear to happily pursue every opportunity offered to them while they’re growing up: after-school sports, choir, music tuition, coding, drama (or similar). They may go to fee-charging schools or receive private tutoring to help them achieve good grades, get into a university with a good reputation, funded wholly or partly by their parents, graduate with a qualification which enables them to get a first job with a decent salary and pay their own rent. At this stage, they inform their parents that they now feel they were controlled and suffered with anxiety because of pushy parenting and they cut one or both parents out of their lives.
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Or the converse, ‘Mum and Dad had no time for me’, where a young adult compares themselves with others and comes to resent the time they spent in after-school and holiday clubs or having free time to manage themselves, while both parents worked to provide the best standard of living they could.
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Others have remarked that their child or sibling who cut them off seemed to have grown into the sort of person who liked to think of themselves as a survivor who has overcome a difficult childhood, while no-one else in the family has any recollection of the adversity and it was never clear what they were making reference to.
Divorce is a big risk area for estrangement, particularly following marriages where the spouses were of unequal status or where they don’t both work together to co-parent responsibly. The cut-off may come several years after the divorce and be preceded by a long period of diminishing contact, as part of a pattern of ‘parental alienation’. This is a very unsettling and confusing experience for the alienated parent, if they are more thoughtful, responsible and would not themselves resort to alienating their children against their former spouse.
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Stay-at-home mums seem to be particularly susceptible to being cut off, or any parent who has taken a career break or reduced their working hours to look after their family, is the lower earner or less confident socially than their ex. The higher earning parent, or the wealthier grandparents, can afford a more expensive barrister if the children are young, as well as a more comfortable home, holidays, experiences, birthdays, etc.
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Conversely, if one parent has stayed at home to look after everyone and the home, their children may sympathise with them in a divorce and complain that the full-time working parent wasn’t around enough. They are still young and don’t value the main wage earner’s contribution to the family’s living standards and wellbeing.
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There’s a divorce because either Dad or Mum feels that the other spouse is consistently inconsiderate towards them, or are no longer willing to tolerate the housework, childcare and mental load imbalance, or other behaviour that they find intolerable. The parent initiating the divorce has finally snapped after years of putting up with the situation so as to not break up the family. The children haven’t noticed the initiating parent’s frustration, so regard the divorce as having come out of the blue and are resentful of the initiating parent.
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Mum gets involved in an affair and cheats on Dad. The children sympathise with Dad, blame Mum for the marriage breakdown and for betraying Dad and don’t warm to the new step-parent. This could of course equally work the other way around (Dad cheats on Mum).
A new spouse or partner for the adult child sometimes leads to one set of parents being cut off:
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A wealth disparity between families, leading to different lifestyle expectations, seems to present a risk to the not-so-wealthy parents and they can find themselves cut off, disinvited from events or gradually frozen out over the years.
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A new partner for the young adult child is very close to their own family and the adult child over time gets sucked into that family’s orbit and becomes harder to contact. The new young couple don’t alternate Christmases between families and in-laws, but it’s somehow taken for granted that they will always spend holidays, Mother’s Day, etc., with the in-laws.