CALLING HOME with Whitney Goodman, LMFT - Is This Why Young People Are Cutting Off Their Parents?

Episode Date: May 27, 2025

In this episode, I discuss one reason young people end relationships with their parents: their desire for differentiation. You will learn why differentiation is crucial for healthy family dynamics, why adults may need to establish strict boundaries with their parents, and how relationships are formed based on role vs. relationship quality. May at Calling Home - Grieving Complicated Relationships: ⁠https://callinghome.co/grieving-complicated-relationships ⁠ Have a question for Whitney? Call in and leave a voicemail for the show at ⁠866-225-5466⁠. Follow Whitney on Instagram: ⁠www.instagram.com/sitwithwhit⁠ Subscribe to Whitney's YouTube: ⁠https://www.youtube.com/@whitneygoodmanlmft⁠ Order Whitney's book, ⁠Toxic Positivity. ⁠ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

When you're with Amex Platinum, you get access to exclusive dining experiences and an annual travel credit. So the best tapas in town might be in a new town altogether. That's the powerful backing of Amex. Terms and conditions apply. Learn more at Amex.ca. www.ca slash ymex. Hey, everyone, and welcome back to the Calling on Podcast.

I'm your host, Whitney Goodman. I am excited to be back today. This is one of those days where I had an episode planned for the podcast. I was going to be talking about something, and things have come up this week that I want to talk about instead. And that's the beauty of this show, is that I have full control of it, and I can kind of mix it up when I want. Some of you know this, but I'm writing a second book that is called The Parent You Have. And this book is a little bit different because I'm talking directly to

all of you who are estranged from your parents. And I'm not using like just my clinical experience with clients for this work, but your stories. And when I put the request out there to meet with adults who are estranged from a parent, I expected there to be some response, but not the level of response that I've gotten. And I have been knee deep in these interviews. I have been conducting like four hours of interviews a day, every day for the last couple of weeks. And I am doing these until mid-July. I think I have over 200 hours of interviews set up. and then around almost 3,000 of you have completed my survey for adults who are strange from a parent. And I want to talk about some things that I am kind of fleshing out as I meet with you and listen to your stories and look at the survey results and see how you respond to this.

because I'm ultimately looking at this book as, like, really a collaborative process, and that's kind of how I have attacked any course, anything at Calling Home that I've put out there is from the perspective of, like, let me get my thoughts together, give them back to you, hear what you think about them, get the feedback, make sure that this is moving in the direction that is most helpful for you and most accurately portrays your experience, and then get that back from you and make some changes to it, make it more helpful, make it actually fit what's really happening in the world with all of you and your relationships with your parents. So something that continues to come up in my conversations with people about a

adult child and parent estrangement and online, just like on TikTok and stuff, the comments that I get are about young people and about this being something that consistently happens with quote unquote young people. And I appreciate how young some of you think I am online and I appreciate the compliments, but I don't really consider myself to be part of this demographic of quote unquote young people. I am talking. I am talking more about a population, particularly of like 18 to 28 year olds, maybe even 18 to 25 year olds, that I would lump into this group of being like young people who are really in the process of differentiating themselves from their families and from their parents. And actually the

majority of people that are completing the survey that I put out there and that are meeting with me are way older than that. Definitely not 18. A lot of them over the age of 35. Some of them in their 50s and 60s. And so this rhetoric that this is an epidemic of people like 18 to 25, it isn't really what's showing up, at least for me. I of course see these people online because who's going to be making like TikToks about being estranged from their parents? It's going to be people who make TikToks already, which is going to be 18 to 25 year olds, right, for the most part, or even younger, like I feel old when I'm on that app. And yeah, there are like a group of estranged parents also making videos. But I think when we think about who's comfortable

sharing about their life on the internet and telling their stories on the internet, it's going to be young people. So it's going to look like that's the majority of. stories, it's going to look like that's the only people that are talking, but that's not really accurate. Those are just the people that are coming on the internet and sharing about it. So when we think about why younger people might be becoming estranged from their parents, and if we think about this as something that is happening among young people, I think that we're really missing the mark here. And I've talked about this in other formats before I have videos on TikTok and on Instagram about how adults react when their parents still see them as children

in adulthood. And I was interviewing a woman today who is both an estranged daughter and an estranged parent from her own daughter. And she was talking with me about this dynamic, about parenting a child between the ages of like 18 and 25 and how she feels like this messaging of adult kids only walk away from bad relationships with their parents is a little bit misleading and that sometimes they're just trying to figure out their life and all of that. And I actually completely agree with this and I want to talk about this. there's something in that we talk about that you learn about when you become a therapist it's part of bowenian family systems if you've been in any graduate class for a marriage and family therapy degree this is talked about right and it's the concept of differentiation and families that have healthy levels of differentiation are made up of individuals who are able to be themselves and they can see where they end and another person begins.

Differentiation at its core, for me and my mind, is really the opposite, the healthy opposite to emmeshment or codependency. When we are at a healthy level of differentiation, we can have our own interests, our own hobbies, we can set boundaries, we can be our own people, we can say no. and it's respected, are not seen as an extension of older generations in the family or of parents in the family. We are really seen as like, you are Whitney. You are your own person. My child is my child. They are their own person. And young people for a lot of their life, children, they actually see themselves as extensions of their parents, whether their parents are

trying to impose that or not, it's part of the developmental process is like your kid can't see themselves as being separate from you, particularly infants and young babies, like they think that they are their mothers for a period of time. And as children get older, they go through this slow, like methodical path, process, I should say, of becoming differentiated from their parents. And in healthy family systems, this happens throughout time, sometimes consistently and sometimes in spurts. And there's different ways that you see it showing up, right? In a toddler wanting to have control over certain things in their life, whether that's what they're wearing or what they're eating, you know, they're trying to assert their independence in the only ways that

they often have control over. As the child's ages, we see this happening more and in different ways, A pre-team is really centering their life more around their peers. The teenager is wanting more independence, more space from their parents. And in healthier families, families where there is healthy levels of differentiation, the parents can tolerate the child taking small little pieces of distance away from them. And they know, this is the key piece. They know that their child's seeking distance like that is not an insult or rejection of them, but a healthy part of a developmental process, right? And so they can see their teenager doing that and be like, this is great. This is what they're supposed to do. It doesn't mean that they don't have

feelings about it, that like, you know, there are times, I'm sure all of us, myself included, will be like in bed at night talking to our partners and saying, oh my gosh, they're starting to like not want me around or it's really. sad that they're changing and you can have these feelings as a parent, but you don't put them on your child and you're not saying to them, like, I can't believe that you're doing this. And when we see it families where cohesiveness is a value at everybody's expense, you have to be a certain type of way. You have to follow a certain religion. You have to marry a certain type of partner. You have to dress a certain way. You need to go to this school. You need to have this

major and those things are prioritized over like the personhood of who the person is in the family it is very hard to differentiate in these families and so sometimes what you see is that you have a kid walking down the path of their life and they start to push the envelope a little bit and they say okay i'm going to try to address differently i'm going to try to be interested in different things that no one in my family likes. I'm going to try to have a different kind of friends or date this person. And they start to learn that whenever I step out of the line a little bit, I get in trouble. I get punished or my mom cries a lot or she tells me like, I can't believe you would do that or says that I'm bad or I'm wrong. And I start to internalize that like I actually

can't be different. I can't be my own person. I'm not allowed to. It's not safe. Something bad happens when I do. And kids will respond differently to this, depending on their personality and the makeup of the family when we look at sibling position and the makeup of, are the parents divorced? Are they together? Where do they live? And also the personality of the child. This is all going to play into that where you're going to have some kids that when met with that are going to say, I will not step out of wine again. I will stay the path. I will follow the rules of this family and I will not threaten my level of acceptance or love.

You have some that maybe fall in the middle and are like, I feel safe testing it here, but not over here. Or maybe I feel safe disappointing this parent, but not that parent, whatever it is. And then you're going to have the kids who are like, oof, you want to try to keep me in a box. I am going to go like balls to the wall, like I am going to just disappoint the hell out of you, right? And those kids often in families where differentiation is seen as a big threat, they get scapegoated, right? And so maybe if you're listening to this, you can think about like, did you fall into one of those categories? Did you notice that your siblings fall into one of those categories? And how hard did your parents or other members?

and the family, even your siblings, fight to keep that person in line. And then I think we also have these families where it's not dysfunctional, but people just got really lucky. And I speak about these lucky families a lot because I think we think sometimes that there are certain families that just did everything right. And that's why their kids are all best friends and they have the same career paths and they married people that all get along. And yes, there are probably a lot of things that those parents did to make that a healthy family unit. And there's also sometimes just like this stroke of good luck that no one really died any traumatic deaths in that family. Maybe they've lost a grandparent. Parents never lost their job. There was no food insecurity,

no homelessness, no major upsets. You know, they, the kids all went to the same schools. Nothing traumatic or overwhelming happened while they were at those schools. Kids were able to perform pretty well. Like the family just kind of kept moving throughout the life cycle without anything disrupting them or really like throwing them off the path. And that happens sometimes. I put up a story about this that I got a lot of responses to the other day that sometimes trauma and chaos breed dysfunction. And that then adds more trauma and chaos to the family. But if you are a family unit where, for the most part, like, you just got lucky. Like, no one's addicted. No one is addicted to drugs. No one is going to jail. No one is, you know,

has cancer, has gotten really sick. Like, your parents have pretty good, like, people skills. They have decent jobs that have been steady. They haven't been fired. Like, yes, some people did things to create that in their family, but a lot of people didn't. Some of this is just bad luck. Like some of you, you know, experienced trauma in your life that had nothing to do with the way that your parents were handling things. It was just like wrong place, wrong time. And then the family gets kind of thrown into this chaos cycle. I'm thinking, you know, about some families that I've talked to recently where maybe one of the children has gotten sick and died and or had serious health complications and that has increased the level of stress within the family

and the parents were not equipped to handle that. And so things get thrown off. And so a lot of these things that make families look really healthy and wonderful again are sometimes just good luck. Sorry, I went off on a little bit of a tangent with that one. Let's get back to this differentiation conversation. So when we're thinking about those two extremes that I talked about where there are children who are able to, like, slowly pursue and become who they are with very little pushback or control from the parents outside of, like, keeping them safe and teaching them things, right? And then you have a family where any time a kid steps out and tries to be themselves, they are put back into the box. What I sometimes am finding is that for that family where the kid has

always been put back in the box, when they become adults, they are given their first taste of freedom at being able to truly separate themselves from their families. And when you have for your entire life been kind of trying to become your own person and being told, that's allowed, you can't do that, you have to do this, and you get fed up, sometimes those kids, implement very strict boundaries. Maybe their relationship is still quote unquote intact, not estranged, but they don't go home as much. They don't share what's going on in their lives. They start to dress differently. They leave religious groups or join other religious groups. They find other ways to find community. They get really deeply involved in other types of community because they have

been so starved for that ability to just, like, spread their wings. And sometimes in that process, they make really bad decisions. They start using substances. They date people that are not great for them. And because they have been told consistently throughout their life that you actually don't know what's best for you. And I am not going to let you attempt or try. to do different things, when a parent tries to step in at that age and then say, you shouldn't do that, that's bad. Don't hang out with this person. Don't date that person. Don't join that group. It sometimes becomes for some kids, like, you can't control me anymore. I'm going to do it. And they try to push and push even more. And so when we see adults who are really fed up with being treated like children, they will sometimes estrange themselves, not because their parents are necessarily abusive or bad or horrible or they hate them, but because that is the only way that they could be themselves. They cannot seem to strike this balance where they are able to be who they are while being in relationship with their parents.

And sometimes it is an absolute brutal overcorrection. But once they get that feeling of like, oh, well, I like being accepted and I like being myself and I like this version of me if they're doing healthy things, right? They sometimes don't want to go back into the family where they can't be themselves. And then you're also going to find, and this is where I think with parents who have these types of estrangements, right, where their adult child is dating someone that is not good to them. You know, they're in an abusive relationship. Or they have joined a group that is, you know, high control or it's influencing them in some way. They're in a cult. You know, they're hanging out

with people that are not being actually kind to them or not being good influences. I think at that point, it is very, very hard for the parent to come in at that stage and say, look at all this bad stuff you're doing because sometimes the adult child then looks at the parent and says, well, you are in an abusive relationship or your marriage is terrible. I don't want to take advice from you anymore. Or I don't like that the groups that you are a part of, but you want me to take advice from you on what groups I should be in. And this is why I always say that like this pattern did not start today. These kids are did not just wake up at 18 and have this feeling. Even very well-intentioned, good loving parents can cage their children in sometimes as a means of protection

or control or love, whatever we want to call it, but their kids ultimately end up feeling like if I want to be in a relationship with you, I have to do X, Y, and Z, and I don't want to do it. And even if they had performed that, their whole life, they went to, you know, religious services with you or they didn't or they participated in political conversations about this thing. Like, it can still happen when they get older and they realize for the first. time that this is a time where I can reject what you're telling me and I'm not in danger. I am paying my own bills. I'm living in my own place. I have a partner. I have friends or I'm living in another state. And they get this feeling of like, this is the first time that I can

really step out and be who I want to be, even if that is not maybe even the best version of me. Sometimes that just feels good. And so this is why I always say that sometimes what is happening in these early years of the adult development of identity, let's say between the ages of 18 and 25, is actually differentiation, not necessarily estrangement. And the way that a parent responds to this period of time can make it or break it. and it is so it is such a difficult transition like i get it guys like i really to any parents listening i deeply understand this because i am a mother i'm also an oldest child and an oldest daughter and i have felt this even with my siblings that i'm sure you know ask my siblings how it how it felt to have me as a sister i'm sure that at times they would say that i was

trying to control or wanting them to be a certain way and I would say oh my gosh it was so out of like protection and love and guidance right a lot of things that parents say but it's you're not letting someone be themselves and figure it out and I really promise that when I talk to adults who have felt this way they have been feeling this way for a long time and maybe it's not even that they've just been feeling that way in relationship with their parents, but they have felt that way in their community at large. They've felt that way with their siblings, with their friends, and they are desperate for these space to be themselves. And sometimes when we try to cage people in and we treat them still as like these little children in those moments, we end up losing them

even more. The other thing that's coming up for me in conversations about differentiation and moving into being an adult relationship between adult children and their parents is this idea of role versus relationship. And so in some families, the role is the most important thing. That means I am your mother, you are the child. And so we define our relationship based on these roles. We know how to interact with one another and what to do because of these roles.

And that works for a while, usually, you know, especially in families where there's like this very clear hierarchy and you're kind of operating from the perspective of like kids are supposed to do what parents say that works for a little bit when kids are young. But as they start to differentiate like we talked about, and become their own people, you then have to start really focusing on the relationship. And I think when we look at like attachment parenting and all the research on parenting, you should be focusing on that relationship from day one and then you don't really have to

make this transition. But I find that for some families where it was all about the role, they have a big, they have a lot of trouble switching in to a relationship-oriented relationship in adulthood rather than a role relationship. Because for a lot of adults now, especially today, where the landscape of how families interact with one another has changed simply because the world has changed, like people are living further from their families, they're having less kids, they don't need to rely on their families to provide them with the infrastructure to live. In fact, a lot of people's families don't have the means to support them. And if you also come from a family where there's very

little differentiation, you cannot be yourself, you have even more of a reason, as we've discussed, to like pull away and become your own person. So if you are wondering, like, why do I struggle so much to relate to my parent in adulthood, or if you're a parent that's saying I'm really struggling to relate to my adult child, it might be because you are focusing so much on the role and not the relationship. And you're so focused on like, I'm your parent. So you need to do X, Y, and Z, you need to listen to me. You need to follow my advice. You need to do what I'm saying. You need to live here, do that versus the relationship is more about like, How do we get to know each other as human beings? Do we have anything in common? Are there

interests we can talk about hobbies that we can do together? Like, whatever it is. But that's more about you and I finding a common thread between the two of us that isn't just about me having power over you and you being subordinate to me. And if the only thing you've focused on is the role and your adult child starts to assert themselves as their own person, then it's really scary. And it can feel like to that parent that their child is totally slipping away is no longer in their grasp. They cannot relate to them because that's all that was there. And when you lose that control in adulthood and you have no way to enforce it in the ways that you did in childhood, you're left with nothing. And so I really see this as being such a major problem between adult children and their parents, especially those younger adults that are trying to become their own people.

And I think that the ones that are able to successfully make that jump and bridge that gap are the ones that focus on the relationship. They try to let each other be their own people and they really give each other space and knowing that we will come back to this event. when we are maybe more aligned or more like living the same type of life. And you see this with children and their parents that you go through seasons where like things are harder. You're not spending as much time together or it's harder to have things in common, you know, depending on how old you are and what stage you're at in the life cycle. So those are the thoughts that I've been having lately about this topic, especially because I've been talking to so many estranged children over the last couple of weeks, and I'm

looking forward to learning for more of you. But if any of this resonated with you, if you feel like I am on to something here that would be helpful for you to hear more about, please leave a comment or a review on the podcast, send me a DM, send me an email. I'm always looking for feedback from all of you. And as always, please make sure that you like you like. and subscribe this podcast. That is what helps us keep it going and what helps us reach more people and helps this be a free resource that's available for all of you. I really appreciate you listening and I'll be back on Thursday with another episode. Thanks, everyone. Bye. medical advice or services. It is not a substitute for advice from a qualified healthcare provider

and does not create any therapist patient or other treatment relationship between you and Colin Colm or Whitney Goodman. For more information on this, please see Calling Holmes Terms of Service link in the show notes below.