'It's not selfish or a trend': Why millennials are cutting off their parents.

"We've been blocked on social media and on the last two birthdays, using an unidentified mobile number, we've tried to just sing happy birthday over the phone, only to be hung up on as soon as she recognised my voice," explains Max*, whose 27-year-old daughter hasn't spoken to him or his wife since the beginning of the pandemic.

"Things seemed to be going well in her life - she was living in a shared house, had a job and had made the decision to transition from male to female. Meaning to say, "No matter what, you'll always be our child and we'll always love you", her mum accidentally used the words 'no matter what, you'll always be our son and we'll always love you'.

"Within two weeks, everything was shut down," he continues.

"She hasn't spoken to either of us since. We've heard that she's been diagnosed with autism since being away, but never had any similar diagnosis prior, although apparently that's our fault too."

"It's confusing and feels like a slow grief that never really allows any closure. You're robbed of the opportunity to make it right."

Family estrangement— the official name given to the silent epidemic of close family members cutting contact with one another—affects around one in 25 Australians, according to research by social worker and academic Dr Kylie Agllias, who has been studying how family estrangement manifests in different situations. Dr Karl Pillemer, who wrote the book Fault Lines: Fractured Families and How To Mend Them, estimates it may in fact be even more common than this Stateside, affecting 25 per cent of Americans at some stage of their lives.

Watch: The toxic things parents say to their children. Post continues after video.

And while many parents whose adult children have decided to cut contact claim they don't fully understand why such extreme measures were necessary, the children on the other side of the situation often cite years of toxic behaviour and unresolved trauma as the slow catalyst for this final straw.

"I haven't spoken to my father in a year, and finally, I feel a lot lighter in myself," says Emma*, who spent years navigating controlling behaviour, and what she says was a refusal on her father's part to respect any boundaries she put in place.

"I'm exhausted," she admits, "and I have children, who I want to model healthy, respectful relationships for. My dad constantly ignored my boundaries, and I was sick of undermining myself and my own values."

And while research on generational factors in family estrangements is limited, anecdotally it seems to be an increasingly common issue between Millennials and their parents in particular - or at least one we're hearing more and more about thanks to social media.

The reasons millennials are cutting off their parents.

"I agree," says Emma, "I think we as Millennials are very sick and tired of having to carry the burden of emotionally immature boomer parents who don't understand confrontation, disagreements, emotions, relationships and how to have healthy relationships, and what emotions are, and I'm just honestly exhausted from it."

She name-checks two books in particular that helped her through the painful process of deciding to cut contact with her father: Dr Ramani Durvasula's It's Not You: How to Identify and Heal from NARCISSISTIC People and Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents: How to Heal from Distant, Rejecting, or Self-Involved Parents by Lindsay Gibson.

So what is really going on? Is this a form of avoidance, as psychologist Joshua Coleman, author of Rules Of Estrangement: Why Adult Children Cut Ties And How To Heal The Conflict, suggests?

"I think there's a kind of a social contagion that happens through Instagram and TikTok and Reddit where cutting out your toxic family member is becoming sort of an act of personal expression and identity," he told NPR last year, "rather than what it often is, which is an expression more of avoidance."

Or is it instead the result of a pressure-cooker generation, increasingly aware of the limits necessary for maintaining their mental health, clashing in values with a generation who never really stopped to identify their own?

"I've certainly seen that we've got changing dynamics across generations," agrees Tamara Cavenett, former president of the Australian Psychological Foundation.

"There seems to be a larger gap between the older and younger generations in terms of changing attitudes and their cultural and societal beliefs that are starkly different than it was just a generation or so ago," she says. 

"I think that gap is potentially causing a lot of friction in family dynamics because people have two such vastly different views on what's important, what they want to achieve in life and what they value."

Perhaps then, after identifying the dysfunctional patterns in our parents' relationships and mental health, the need to protect ourselves from repeating them has become more important than maintaining those familial bonds?

The pathologisation of family relationships.

Another element Cavenett warns of is the tendency to pathologise of family members using terms and disorders that have become popularised online. 

In many conversations with adult children who have cut contact with their parents, words like 'toxic', 'gaslighting', 'narcissistic' and 'emotional negligence' come up. Words that, for better or worse, our parents' generation never understood.

"I do think millennials are more open about mental health challenges," says Cavenett.

"They use those various different terms a lot, and in many ways, that is a really positive thing, because it means they have a greater understanding of mental health. But it does mean that there is a danger of over-applying some of these terms."

"The danger with any short description of a mental health condition or even any medical condition that you might hear a lot about on TikTok is that the true diagnosis is much more complex than just whether or not you have the presence of a couple of symptoms," she continues.

"One of the things that happens with family estrangement is that the angrier you are, the deeper the emotions, the more likely your behaviours are to come off looking like a certain condition. Now, it doesn't mean that they're not there, they may well be in some circumstances. But it also means that you need to be aware that some of the conditions that people use and throw around as terms, they can often be behaviours that everybody does, or that everyone does in extreme situations, when emotions are running high."

Karen*, who has only spoken with her adult daughter Lilly* once in the past five years, believes some of the terms that are common parlance for emotionally-aware Millennials have been wielded unfairly in some instances.

"Oh, Lily's called me everything under the sun, and she insists I am emotionally abusive and narcissistic," she says, "and while I accept I wasn't perfect when she was growing up, I can't help but feel I'm being held to an impossible standard and if I defend myself at all I'm accused of changing the narrative or gaslighting her," she says.

"I feel like she pigeon-holes me into these terms and I'm playing catch-up. I feel like the younger generation is so quick to just write people off. I want to scream at her, 'I watched you sleep when you were a baby just to make sure you were breathing!' I'm so hurt, and yes, angry and resentful of her too."

Listen to Fill My Cup, Mamamia's mental health and wellness podcast hosted by Allira Potter. Post continues after podcast.

Choosing emotional safety over obligation.

For all the confusion on one side of the fence, there is real pain and trauma on the other side, too - in many cases, pain that ageing parents are either unwilling or unable to take accountability for. Just because someone is unable to understand that they've hurt you, doesn't make the pain any less damaging.

"There seems to be this prevailing idea that Millennials and Gen Z are 'too sensitive' or 'too soft' and can't deal properly with conflict," says Bilal*, whose only contact with her parents is a brief phone call at birthdays.

"But I went through decades of damage to my mental health before I made the decision to distance myself. I developed a severe eating disorder from the body shaming I received growing up, and my parents refuse to acknowledge my diagnosed mental illness as anything more than 'entitlement'. At what stage do I simply protect myself? It's not selfish or entitled or a 'trend' to remove yourself from people who actively endanger your mental health and refuse to take accountability."

Cavenett agrees that taking control of your mental health needs to be a priority, and also that particularly in cases of abuse and severe trauma, going 'no-contact' can be necessary.

"If you're on the end of a relationship where you've decided it's so toxic, and so unhealthy for you, I think [cutting contact] is a valid option," she says.

"I also think that there are a lot of shades of grey, and having some people in your life, even in a manner that has a lot of boundaries and doesn't necessarily have the high frequency of contact, can be really good for us to learn how to achieve."

And for those on the other side of things - parents who wish to be reunited with their adult children, the clinical psychologist has this advice to share:

"The biggest thing I usually say to people who are estranged and want contact is to work to really see the other person's point of view, because then when you do come together, you can have a really authentic and genuine apology, at a bare minimum for the impact that some of the things you did or said had on the other person," she says.

"Because what we often do is try and push our view, and get the other person to see it our way. And it can be really helpful to work through how being on the receiving end of some things might feel if you are from different generations, or had a different set of experiences or interpretations of that."

For Max, who still holds out hope that one day his daughter will come back around, it's something he's been spending a lot of time reflecting on.

"I just hope that one day, she'll want to even just talk to me, just to call and say 'I'm really pissed off that you did this, this and that', and I can say: 'You know what? I think you've got every right to be, and I'm really sorry, I never meant to hurt you,'" he says.

"If she'd just talk to me, then I could start figuring out how to fix it."

*Names have been changed due to privacy purposes.

Read more of our articles about estrangement:

• 'You will feel relieved.' 4 things they don't tell you when an estranged parent dies.
• We asked 12 women why they're estranged from their parents. This is what they said.
• 'My estranged sister died alone in her apartment. It's a complicated grief.'

Feature image: Getty.