Abigail,
My 21-year-old daughter pretty much hasn’t spoken to me or my wife in one year. I say “pretty much” because she has exchanged short texts on practical matters, and she did agree to see us when we offered to let her say goodbye to the family dog, who was dying. But otherwise she won’t tell us anything about what she’s doing or where she’s living. She has blocked us on social media, but we know from other family members that she has a job, has declared personal bankruptcy, and is living an hour and a half away.
Yesterday she wrote to ask if I would bring her one of her belongings that she left behind in our house. She’s doing an internship in a few days and wants the item for the new job. She called the request “a shot in the dark,” and described her behavior over the past year as “an active effort to distance myself from our family.”
Doing her this favor feels like giving in. But not doing it feels petty, as does trying to use it as leverage to get her to open up about her reasons for walking away. I’ll spare you the full details, but she had an argument with her mother that ended with her calling the police and leaving in an ambulance (nothing physical had occurred between them—she essentially used the ambulance to get a ride off our property). When we subsequently refused a “safety plan” to allow her to return home, she basically went “no contact,” as the kids say.
Now she’s asking us for this favor, and I just don’t know what to do.
—Kidless in New England, 51
Dear Kidless,
Enter the Foreign Service or the Merchant Marine. Run away to the circus. Go West. Join the Peace Corps. Each was an attempt to put down stakes on a tract of adulthood.
The calling was always the same: to go where your parents can’t follow.
Today, young adults don’t leave their parents’ home—not really. From the time they were little, we conditioned them to life inside the cage: tracked, monitored, and, by the standards of past generations, unimaginably tied to their mothers’ apron strings. Even in college, they check in constantly via text. This is the first generation to hand their phones to a professor or boss, with Mom waiting on the line to argue on the ostensible adult’s behalf.
The anxious over-involvement of today’s parents turns out to be intimately connected to the rise in estrangement—young adults going “no contact” and cutting off their parents.
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