CALLING HOME with Whitney Goodman, LMFT - Is There a Link Between Therapy Culture and Childlessness?

Episode Date: June 5, 2025

In this solo episode, Whitney critiques a New York Times opinion piece claiming therapy culture is linked to declining birth rates. Drawing from her work with populations of estranged adults and research for her upcoming book on parent-child estrangement, Whitney addresses harmful misconceptions about why adults choose to limit contact with parents. Whitney Goodman is a Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist (LMFT) and the founder of Calling Home, a membership community that helps people navigate complex family dynamics and break harmful cycles.  Have a question for Whitney? Call in and leave a voicemail for the show at 866-225-5466 Join the Family Cyclebreakers Club Follow Whitney on Instagram Follow Whitney on YouTube Order Whitney’s book, Toxic Positivity Learn more about ad choices. Visit podcast.choices.com/adchoices This podcast is for informational purposes only and is not a substitute for professional mental health advice. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Reading, playing, learning. Stellist lenses do more than just correct your child's vision. They slow down the progression of myopia. So your child can continue to discover all the world has to offer through their own eyes. Light the path to a brighter future with stellus lenses for myopia control. Learn more at SLOR.com. And ask your family eye care professional for SLR Stellist lenses at your child's next visit. Hello and welcome back to the calling on podcast. I am your host, Whitney Goodman. I am not doing a Q&A episode today because I read an article in the New York Times that really got me heated and we have to talk about it today. So today I'm going to be breaking down this article called There's a link between therapy culture and childlessness. This was a opinion piece in the New York Times and

I think they got so much of it wrong. Let's go ahead and dive in. If you can't read the article because it's behind a paywall, I am going to go through all of the details. I'm going to read you some quotes, tell you my thoughts, and we'll go from there. Okay, so basically at the heart of this episode, she is trying to make the argument that while there are plenty of plausible explanations for why people aren't having kids, and a lot of the ones that she brings up are accurate and I believe them and I think they're backed up by

data are that it's too expensive. They can't find the right partner. They want to prioritize their careers. They're thinking about the state of the world. The idea of bringing children into this planet right now is depressing or they're swearing off parenthood or their commitment phobic. Like all of these are plausible theories to some degree that I think can be backed up by data about why millennials specifically it seems to be who she's talking about in this article and maybe some older Gen Z are not having kids. And I just want to remind you that I am a parent. I've chosen to have children. I am a therapist. I run groups with estranged adults every single week for calling home and also adult children of emotionally immature parents. So if you are interested in joining one of

those groups. You can join the Family Cycle Breakers Club at Calling Home.co. I'm also in the process of writing a book about adult children who are estranged from their parents. And I have been interviewing, serving, researching. Like, I am in this population. I also am not estranged for my parents. And so I do not feel like this is some type of like personal vendetta for me or something that I am doing because I want to get back at my parents. Like, I genuinely am so endlessly curious about this population. And I think it is such a severely misunderstood issue. And this article got me so heated because it is, it is so opinion based and not factual

that it's like hard to believe some of these arguments. So that being said, let's get into the first. argument. Okay. Basically, the author is arguing with some weak support from a couple of other quotes that over the past few decades, Americans have redefined harm, abuse, neglect, and trauma and have expanded those categories to include emotional and relational struggles that were previously considered unavoidable parts of life. Let's talk about this, okay? I recorded a TikTok about this the other day because it is a consistent, argument that I hear lately in these spaces. And I do not enjoy the belief that we have just

expanded the definition for no reason, right? The definition has been expanded because there is data and evidence to show that these types of actions and types of trauma lead to the same types of consequences that big events like war, starvation, all of that lead to. So it's not just that somebody woke up one day and was like, I think we'll redefine trauma. There was a process that led us to that decision, right? And the comparison that I made in one of my earlier videos that makes most sense to me in my mind is that we, as a culture, used to smoke cigarettes. And we used to not believe that cigarettes were bad for us.

There were campaigns about this. There was a lot of public pushback on this. And we see this with alcohol, too, today, that even in the face of evidence, we will say that thing is not actually bad. It's okay for us. People used to be able to smoke on planes that doctors were smoking in their offices. Like, this was a phenomenon that was very hard to get past, right? And now today we're like, no, we know that.

cigarettes cause cancer. And if you choose to smoke them, like you're doing it, knowing those risks, right? That doesn't mean that all the cigarettes that were smoked before we knew that that information weren't dangerous, right? That they weren't causing harm. They were. We just didn't have the information or the knowledge. And so we can't say now that, well, we didn't call it trauma then. So we can't call it trauma now because it doesn't really matter. what we were calling it. What matters is the impact and the outcome. And there are so many adults who feel a certain way, have certain things happen to them. They are sick. They are suffering. And they are wondering what could have led me to this, right? What could have caused this outcome?

And that doesn't mean that it's very much like a A plus B equals C thing. But there are a lot of adults who are looking back at their childhood and saying, wow, I was abused, and this type of abuse can lead to this outcome in my adult life. And we're going to get to more of that later when I clear up some of these arguments. Now, she also goes on to say that adult children seem increasingly likely to publicly, even righteously cut off contact with a parent, sometimes citing emotional, physical, or sexual abuse they experience in childhood, and sometimes things like clashing values, parental toxicity, or feeling misunderstood or unsupported. I hate the way that these things are combined in this sentence because I don't know about you, but when I'm reading this,

it really sounds like sometimes citing these things. So maybe they happened, maybe they didn't, and combining them with things like these buzzwords like toxicity, feel. feeling misunderstood or unsupported, somehow really made this sentence feel like to me, like, we're not really sure what they're claiming here. And maybe it's true and maybe it's not. And maybe that wasn't the author's intention. But that's really how it came across to me. The next part goes on to say, this cultural shift has contributed to a new nearly impossible standard for parenting. Not only must parents provide shelter, food, safety, and love, but we their children also expect them to get us started on successful careers and even

to hold themselves accountable for our mental health and happiness well into our adult years. I genuinely don't know who's saying this. Like I have been begging people to come and talk to me if they believe this. If you genuinely have parents who loved you were there for you, you have a close bond with them, but you don't have a good job or you're not totally happy in the world and you're blaming your parents and you think that it's their fault, I would love to speak to you because that is not the population that I'm hearing from. I'm talking to people who experienced really horrible stuff in their households. This has nothing to do with like blaming their lack of getting into an Ivy League on their parents or saying like, oh, I would

be happier if my parents got me a golden retriever puppy. Like it's just, it is not rooted in any reality. And I don't know where this massive population of really like overly dramatic adults are that have cut off their parents for these reasons. Because like I said, I'm interacting with this population. I'm watching all the TikToks, all the Instagram videos. I'm reading all the articles. I'm reading the books and like, I can't find them. So if you're listening to this and you feel like, you know what, that is the reason why I'm really mad at my parents is because I'm just not that happy and they didn't get me what I wanted for Christmas. I would love to speak to you. But again, I think this is a bad faith argument that is not rooted in the reality of what's actually going on.

here. I also believe that, yes, parents have to provide their kids with food, safety, love, and shelter. That is the bare minimum of having children. That is like the lowest denominator that I hold myself to. And that doesn't mean that parents are going to be perfect, but those are things that we have to live up to, right? Shelter, food, safety, love. I really think, that should be the standard. And I don't think that's an impossible standard. Now, of course, families go through crises and can experience homelessness and can have food insecurity. Like, absolutely. And the thing that I find in those situations, when I talk to adults who have good relationships with their parents and their parents were not always able to

keep a roof over their head or give them food or have a job. Or have a job. have a home. It's that they felt loved by those parents. They felt close to them. And they felt like their parents took responsibility for what was happening in their life. And so their parents said to them, I know that this is hard. I know that what we're going through right now is really difficult as a family. And I love you and I'm going to be there for you. The problem is when families experience things like that. And then the child says, you know what, mom, it was really hard for me when we were living out of our car and we didn't have access to food. And the parents, says, get over it. I had it so much harder. I had to live on the floor for weeks and they try to

dismiss what that child went through. That really has been such a defining factor in these relationships in the conversations that I've been having. So this is when we really get to like the argument here in this article. And the author goes on to say, I want to suggest that there's another reason my generation dreads parenthood. We've held our own parents to unreachable standards. Standards that deep down maybe we know we ourselves would struggle to meet. Okay. I want to know more of what the standards are because we just did a month at calling home about parenting after childhood trauma and a lot of, a lot of our members and the people that I'm interviewing for my book and that I'm talking to are parents who might be estranged from a parent or have a difficult relationship with their parent. and I really don't feel like they're holding themselves to impossible standards.

You know, when I get feedback from these parents, a lot of it is about like, I want to make sure that I'm apologizing, that I can manage my emotions, that I'm not making decisions that endanger my child's life. So I agree that a lot of like what we see online about parenting. can be very overwhelming, very confusing. There is so much information. I'm a mom of young kids, and sometimes I'm like, oh, my gosh, there's just too much. You get overloaded with it. But I don't think that that is the same thing as what adults who have become parents and they are estranged from their own parents are talking about.

They are talking about breaking a generational cycle, being better than what came before them and not being perfect, but being aware and open and always trying to learn and do better and be there for their children. And I actually think that I was surprised to hear how few people I've spoken to have decided not to have children for this reason. Like it's just not something that I'm hearing a lot. And I, again, I know that there is some like sampling bias here with the population that I work with and who I'm talking to and I take full responsibility for that and I recognize it. I just think that there's actually a lot more hope in this population. There's actually a lot more adults saying that like, no, my parents really didn't even meet the bare

minimum. And so they, I can be better and I can do better. And I know that when I mess up, I'm going to repair. And that's really at the core here. I don't know. know that it's necessarily about like, I feel like I have to do all these other things for my kids. I believe we're seeing that in other populations of young parents, but I don't know if that's necessarily what we're seeing here and if that's related to adults who are estranged or adults choosing not to have children. She then goes on to quote a sociologist who says that parents continue to be blamed for their children's hardships of a Lubinous academic literature has minedia of childhood experience to find the sources of personal

and social problems and everything from how parents feed their children, bottle or breast, spoon or baby lid weeding, to how many words they say before an ever lowering crucial age. Guys, this kind of stuff has never been brought up in a single conversation that I have had about adults being estranged from their parents. Like, it's literally not being discussed. this type of little stuff. And I hate when this conversation is framed this way because it makes it seem like people are saying, I'm estranging from my parents because they've formula fed me. It's like, I just don't think it's rooted in any reality that I've ever experienced. And again, if that's your reason, please come find me because I haven't heard anyone talk about that.

There's also a sociologist that is continuously quoted this exact quote many, many times in a lot of these articles about estrangement that I think try to frame estranged adults as being very flippant and cold and emotionally neglectful and just like cutting off for no reason. And it's this quote that I'm sure some of you have heard that says, what is a dysfunctional family? A family where one's needs are not met. And how does one know that one needs were not met? in childhood simply by looking at one's present situation. And the author goes on to say, it is as if every current difficulty rather than being addressed on its own terms is seen as an

ex on a treasure map, a clue to dig for childhood drama that had long been buried. I think that it's really, really disingenuous to report that every single thing in adulthood is being traced back to some type of childhood trauma when we know that yes it can be because of that it can also be because of personality genetics what's going on in the world yes the family is always an influence in my opinion but it is not always the sole root cause right but the way that the family handles a lot of things can play a huge role in how bad it gets, how it plays out, how it's handled, et cetera. But to say that adults who are not succeeding in life, who had wonderful, loving, great, supportive families are sitting down and saying, okay, I couldn't get a job.

So now I'm going to look back at how I can blame my parents. I think is really not a good argument. I don't think it's rooted in reality. And for a lot of these adults, their parents are to blame. Their parents are the ones who hurt them, harmed them, abused them, were their first bully, were tyrants in their life. We are not being honest about how many children in this country get abused in their own homes. I feel that sometimes when we are having these conversations about estrangement, we are referring to this mythical large body of adults who grew up in like picture perfect middle class, like leave it to beaver type of households. And they just grew up. And one day they just woke up and said, my life's not

how I want it to be. And so I think I'll blame my parents. And I will admit that there's probably there's probably a population of those people. They exist. I think in sometimes in young adulthood, when people are struggling and they can't figure things out, like, sure, but that is not the vast majority of what is going on here. And I will take that belief to the grave. I just am not seeing the evidence for it. I'm really not. The author then goes on to make the point that some of today's parent-child estrangements are a welcome result of society that is more aware of physical and sexual abuse and unwilling to demand that people maintain relationships with those who have deeply harmed them. And I'm glad that they said this and I fully agree.

But then they go on to say, but it is also true that many of today's adult children often cut parents off for what a generation ago would have been viewed as venial sins. She then goes on to quote another author of an article in the New York Times who interviewed estranged families, Anna Russell, sorry for the New Yorker, found that reasons for estrangement included that people felt ignored or misunderstood by their parents or believed that a sibling had always been the family's favorite. Several described a family member as a classic narcissist or toxic. And I think these details are being included here as if like being ignored for a lifetime by your parents is like a flippant thing. When we know that there's a large body of research on ignoring children and how

that is neglect, especially when it happens across the lifetime. There's also a lot of data on how one child can be picked out as the scapegoat and one as the golden child and how this can create extremely toxic and dysfunctional dynamics in a family. These are not just like little complaints that people have. These can be lifelong, deeply entrenched dysfunctional behaviors within families that are not being pulled out of thin air. She then goes on to discuss some research from the Council on Contemporary Families, how this used to be more of a mutual exchange of duty between parents and their children. And I agree that that has shifted tremendously. But it hasn't shifted, I think, in the way that's being framed here. So parental duties, she says, might include

things like feeding and clothing their children, disciplining them and educating them in the tasks and skills that they would need in adulthood. Yes. Those are the duties of parenthood because who else is going to provide that? Like, that's the duty of the parent when you decide to have a child. I very much fall into the camp that then children form their attachment with their parents and become much more compelled to engage in those reciprocal duties because of the attachment, right? Even when children are abused by their parents, they try to do things to sustain and maintain that attachment and see the parent in positive life.

And she goes on to say that children in turn had duties to their parents to honor and defer to them to help provide for the family or household and to provide grandchildren. And yes, this is true. But not because these adult children were so like, like virtuous and dutifully committed to their families. A lot of it was because they could not leave. They had nowhere else to go. They had to provide labor for the family. They had to work for the family. People were not moving away. Like it wasn't as if a lot of these children had options to leave their families if their family members were being abusive or harmful to

them. They were stuck. So I think what we frame now as this like duty and commitment, a lot of times was just a lack of options. It's very much the same argument as saying like people used to stay married before women were allowed to get divorced or get a mortgage or have their own credit card, right? That they just didn't have options. It wasn't because there was so much more like duty and faith and commitment at the time. And she goes on to say that today parents still have obligations to their children. Yes, because children cannot meet those obligations themselves. But it seems the children's duties have become optional. The children's duties, once they had options, were always optional. The idea is that if you can form this attached solid

relationship where there is a reciprocal exchange between you and the child, that then they will feel compelled to engage in those duties, right? Now, that being said, I want to clarify here that I see estrangement falling into a lot of different buckets. I don't think that it's just like you were a terrible parent and your kid cuts you off. And that's the only reason for estrangement. we of course know that there are so many other reasons why an adult might not have a relationship with their parent. Some of those are about how the kid was parented, right? We also have adults who are struggling with their mental health. We have addiction. I don't necessarily always view those things as being quote unquote traditional estrangement. In this episode,

I am referring to adults who have told their parents, I cannot have a relationship with you because of these reasons or they have reasons that have to do with their parents' behavior now today or things from the past that the parent refuses to take accountability for or apologize for. And I think that's what's missing from the conversation here is that the majority of adults who have ended relationships with their parent in adulthood that I have spoken to. which has been thousands at this point, say that if their parent could change their behavior in the present, they would excuse what happened in the past. And so this idea that adults today are waking up and saying, my life isn't very good. I think I'm going to find a way to blame my

parents and then cut them out of my life because that will fix my life. I just think, is totally not rooted in reality. And again, I am willing to be proven wrong. I am willing to discuss this with people. I'm just saying that I have not had this type of experience of interacting with those types of estranged adults. And I feel so compelled to speak on this when I see articles like this, because I know that adults ending relationships with their parents is so taboo. And it's so against everything that we've been taught. But in the same way that we would not expect someone to stay in an abusive marriage, can't expect them to stay in a relationship with anyone, including family, that is harmful to them. So that is my rant and analysis.

of this article. I really hope that we think long and hard before publishing opinions like this that tend to frame a population in such an unfavorable light without any real evidence to back it. I don't think it's right, especially when we know that so many children suffer abuse at the hands of their family members every year. And I know that we don't want to admit that as a society and as a culture. And I know it's painful to think that it's not like a stranger in the bushes and that it's more likely to be your dad or your mom or your uncle. But it's the reality.

And I think we have to wake up to that so that we can do something about it and make sure that this doesn't continue to happen in families. Thank you all so much for listening. Also, if you were watching this on YouTube or Spotify, we now have video of the podcast. This is very exciting. So in order to keep this going, please subscribe to the podcast on YouTube. Give us a follow, likes, whatever it's called on whatever platform you're listening to this on, and leave us a review. It really, really helps. I also go and read all of your comments on the podcast. I reply to them personally, so I would love

to hear from you. Thank you all so much for listening. I promise I'll be back with another Q&A episode next week, but I felt like this was important, and I was just dying to talk about it. Thank you all so much for listening, and see you next time. The Calling Home podcast is not engaged in providing therapy services, mental health advice, or other medical advice or services. It is not a substitute for advice from a qualified health care provider and does not create any therapist, patient, or other treatment relationship between you and Collingholm or Whitney Goodman. For more information on this, please see Calling Holmes' terms of service linked in the show notes below.

Thank you.