Going no contact: Why more adult children are estranged from their parents

Laura Wellington was dumped - by her own daughter.

 In 2024, the Old Saybrook resident said she broke off ties with her adult daughter after her daughter told her she did not want her to come to her wedding. Within months, the retired tech entrepreneur and children's programming creator began posting videos on TikTok and Instagram about the estrangement under her new moniker, "Doormat Mom."

"I was just completely devastated," said Wellington. Her daughter, 27, "had been given the world," she said. "To me, the most important thing that I could do is to be a mother to my children, especially after losing their father." Being cut off from her daughter's life, "is a type of pain you can't describe, and you're the harshest judge and jury of yourself. But I swear on my life I could not have done more."

A YouGov poll released last year found that bout 16% of Americans are estranged from a parent. Karl Pillemer,  a researcher at Cornell University has put the figure at 10%. Now, more people on both sides of the estrangement are sharing their stories on social media sites like Instagram or TikTok, where Wellington has amassed over 151,000 followers, to whom she offers advice. In video clips, she insists that parents learn to accept the estrangement. She has been interviewed by outlets from the Wall Street Journal, to Fox News to People.  

To outsiders, the reasons for the rupture can range from arbitrary to justifiable, said one Yale expert. "It ranges from no good reason at all - I mean there's always a reason - to a very good reason," said Dr. Yann Poncin of the Yale Child Study Center. "There are never any absolutes." 

Most family fissures are neither as explosive nor as public as Wellington's, said Dr. Sabooh S. Mubbashar, a psychiatrist with Nuvance Health. "They are the result of what one might call a thousand small injuries that never healed," he said. Outside of physical or sexual abuse, he listed several reasons adult children might stop speaking to their parents: "Chronic humiliation. Persistent criticism. A parent who cannot tolerate disagreement. Intrusiveness into marriages or parenting decisions," he said in an email exchange. "Favoring siblings and not resolving conflicts because of a lack of apology or change in behavior can also lead to a rupture."

Pillemer's book, "Fault Lines: Fractured Families and How to Mend Them," includes findings from his 10-year Cornell Reconciliation Project. According to his research, 65 million Americans suffer such rifts. About a quarter of the U.S. population is estranged from a close relative at any given time, 85% lasted a year or more, and half had gone on for four years or more. Pillemer calls family estrangement "a massive, hidden phenomenon."

"What it comes down to is that a child has determined that their parent either does not validate them, does not understand them or does not respect them," said Poncin. 

That's what happened with Southington's Lonnie DiNello. Nearing 40 and entering therapy herself, she decided to cut her father out of her life. "I just started recognizing all the same symptoms I had in him," DiNello said. "The overly emotional blaming everybody else…and how nobody understood him and everybody else was wrong."

So DiNello who said she has battled with depression, PTSD and ADHD, told her father to stop calling. "He wasn't there for me growing up," said DiNello. After her parents divorced when she was a girl, she said he often failed to come during his visitation days. "Most of my early childhood memories are of him not showing up" on Saturdays, she said. "I would get dressed up; I'd be sitting at the window. Every car that drove by I'd be looking for him. My mom would be calling him on the phone he wouldn't answer and then the whole day would go by, and he just wouldn't show up." Such scenes left DiNello feeling unloved and unlovable, she said. 

Wellington calls family estrangement an "epidemic." She does not believe her social media activity will hinder a possible reconciliation with her daughter. "We obviously didn't have the relationship that I thought," Wellington said. "The reality is, she could be gone one year, 10 years, 20 years. I may never see her again. Then you have the opportunity to help other people who are struggling with that same issue. The quieter this remains, the broader it grows." She considers herself a crusader against what she insists is a festering issue in society. She has been estranged from her daughter since June 2024.

In an email exchange, Pillemer said adult children typically initiate the break and "often feel relief at first," largely because "the initiator frames the pain of estrangement as preferable to the pain of staying." However, over time ambivalence sets in, he said. "Guilt about the other person's pain, worry about missing a chance to reconcile before a death, uncertainty about whether they made the right call. The suffering on both sides is real."

Mubbashar agreed. "Human beings are wired for attachment," he said. "Prolonged, unresolved conflict carries physiological cost. For older adults in particular, family rupture can increase isolation." 

Nevertheless, he said, "Many people describe the decision as self-protection - protection from chronic anxiety, destabilizing conflict, relapse in depression or substance use, strain on a marriage or exposing their own children to a dynamic they experienced as damaging."

Poncin said fissures in family relationship often occur when young people start college or jobs and compare their childhoods with those of their contemporaries. "Often it's feeling controlled by the parent," he said. "Perhaps the parent has imposed expectations that a person feels are controlling them or doesn't fit their needs. Sometimes it's just personalities,  he said. 

"Estrangement is often not about relief. It is about containment," Mubbashar said. "It is what people reach for when every other attempt at boundary-setting has failed. Estrangement is usually not about revenge. It is about exhaustion."

Poncin added that some LGBTQ adults have conflicts over their identities with their parents, as do adult children who disagree with their parents' politics. "It's core identity issues that a parent is interfering with or criticizing that leads to a rupture, typically," Poncin said. "The most sad is when a child is like, 'Look I'd really try to be with my family but they just never understand me. They don't accept me, they don't accept my partner and they don't like my lifestyle,'" he said. "'When we get together I just end up having these really negative experiences, and I'm just not going to do that anymore,'" he said. 

Dr. Javeed Sukhera, chair of psychiatry at Hartford's Institute of Living, said transient lifestyles and digital communications, make schisms easier. "People don't actually have to engage with the same depth and nuance on a human-to-human level," he said. "When there's an opportunity for an out, people can take it. It's much more socially acceptable to cut people off."

Mubbashar added that there is less of a stigma to being estranged from family. "There is far less cultural pressure to preserve family hierarchy at all costs," he said. "We live in a psychological culture that places a premium on boundaries, trauma language and personal safety," he said. "That does not create estrangement out of nowhere, but it gives people a vocabulary and a moral framework to justify it."

Does the break help? "In the short term, many do feel relief," Mubbashar said. "The fighting stops. Anticipatory anxiety drops. Sleep improves. There is less emotional volatility."

But Pillemer disagreed. "Estrangements allowed to harden through years of non-contact become progressively harder to reverse, not because the underlying issues worsen, but because inertia sets in and the psychological cost of re-opening the wound begins to feel greater than simply continuing the silence," he said. 

Although local therapists say relationships can be repaired, Mubbashar cautions, "people underestimate how hard it is."

He said it's key to establish boundaries and not rehash arguments. "Trying to prove who was right, who remembers correctly, or who sacrificed more almost never works," he said. "Repair does not hinge on winning the narrative. It hinges on whether something will be different going forward."

DiNello's estrangement lasted nine years. She and her father reconnected last Christmas, she said. "I needed him to just get out of my head so I could sort out who I was from who he wanted me to be," she said. "Once I was clear on my own identity, it allowed me to relate to him as a human being, not just my Dad." Since they have reconnected, she said she the relationship with her father has improved.

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