What would it take for you to never to speak to your child again? What would it take for you to say, “you are dead to me”?
What if your five-year-old spilled her milk, you were already late for work and you had to spend five minutes you didn’t have cleaning up the mess and helping your daughter change into clean clothes for kindergarten.
What if your ninth grader got a D in algebra and lied to you about it, hid his report card, thinking—naively and absurdly—that you would never find out about the bad grade. Would you be disappointed that his chances of being accepted to your highly competitive alma mater had decreased significantly. Would you be more outraged about the duplicity—lying—or the stupidity—thinking that the D grade would somehow disappear.
What if your 19-year-old daughter told you she was gay. Would you stop paying her college tuition. Would you try to insist that she enroll in a conversion camp. Would you not speak to her unless and until she promised not to be attracted to women.
What if your 22-year-old daughter told you that she was engaged to be married to an unemployed man who was from a different social class, a different race, a different religion. And that she was pregnant. Would you tell her she was out of the will, that you never wanted to see her again, that you would prefer never to meet your grandchild?
What if your 25-year-old son, the father of your grandchild, told you that he did not believe in vaccines and would not be inoculating said grandchild against measles, mumps, rubella, COVID, or the flu. What if your son believed that vaccines cause autism or implant monitoring devices in children’s arms?
What if your 27-year-old son told you that he supports the political candidate whom you do not favor, that he was going to campaign for the person you find to be morally repugnant and protest against the candidate you prefer.
What if your 30-year-old child was pulled over with a blood-alcohol level of .09? What if that adult child harmed someone with their car? What if the cost of your family’s insurance increased as a result of his reckless driving and your assets were at risk.
What if your 35-year-old daughter told you that she supported the Palestinians in Gaza whereas you felt strongly about embracing the Israeli position. Or conversely that she agreed with Israel while you were sympathetic to the Palestinians.
Note that I write about parenting and families. This is not a column about politics. My opinions on intermarriage, abortion, Israel/Palestine do not appear in my columns. If you are interested in my actual thoughts on any of the above, you’ll have to take me to lunch. There are many forums available for discussing these critical issues; this is not one of them.
I have spoken to families lately in which the generations do not speak, have not spoken in years, likely will never speak again. The policies of the current president and the war in Gaza are the most common volatile, family-splitting topics, although sexuality and women’s rights also push hot buttons. I don’t pretend to have anything like a representative sample and I am conveying anecdotes rather than research. But I do have a hypothesis to share.
I think that parents who would be willing to cut off a young adult are more likely to have a young adult whom they will have a reason—real or imagined—to separate from. Similarly, I suspect that parents who communicate that the parent/child bond is more important than any disagreement are less likely to have children with whom they disagree.
The following two examples may serve to suggest that there is some validity to my conjecture although again, I don’t pretend to claim anything approaching scientific proof. I ran this idea of a self-fulfilling prophesy by a buddy of mine whose daughter is a complete joy to him and a gem by any standard. What would it take for you to turn your back on your daughter, never speak to her again? He looked at me like I were criminally insane. Impossible was his reply. It could never happen.
I spoke to another mom who was estranged from her adult son. What happened? I asked. How is it that you and your son don’t speak? She replied, He didn’t follow the rules of the house. So I told him he had to live elsewhere.
I actually know the son fairly well. Seems like a nice enough kid to me–substance free, good student, polite and pleasant to me anyway. I’m thinking that his mom was anticipating that there would come a time when she and her son would not speak, that she was waiting for him to do something that, to her anyway, seemed inexcusable, that no matter how accomplished and nice the kid was that there would be a blow up.
That these two nice people will not have a relationship, won’t communicate for the rest of mom’s life made me so sad that I forgot to ask what it was that the son had done or not done that caused the rift that could never be mended. So I don’t know what happened. But I’m thinking it’s likely that when the son was younger, he had done something like spill his milk and caused his mom to be late for work.
