Estrangement and the "Good Parent"
The beliefs that are protected at the expense of relationship
Image credit: Adobe Stock
“I was a good parent. I did everything I could for my child. I don’t deserve this.”
Some version of this is not only a common refrain in estranged-parent commentary and discussion threads, it tends to be THE refrain. Often alongside the equally pervasive, “They never told me why, and I deserve to know.”
Estrangement contains contradiction upon contradiction.
The adult child has agency, but the deferential “honor thy mother and father” should prevail. The relationship is now asserted to be a two-way street, but narrative control about the relationship only flows one way. Parents claim ignorance to the issues while adult children say they conveyed them ad nauseam. Parents insist they would do anything to repair the relationship while rejecting the very information their adult child says must be understood for repair to happen.
That last contradiction is perhaps the most revealing.
Parents describe the loss of the relationship as utterly devastating and say they would do anything to have their child back. Yet many won’t go as far as to truly examine their own beliefs about themselves, their parenting, or the experience their adult child says they had in the relationship.
Why?
There is a profound difference between being a good parent and needing to remain someone who believes themselves to be a good parent.
“I was a good parent” is not simply a self-evaluation. It is an identity.
We wouldn’t evaluate performance in any other role solely on the basis of the person doing it saying they did it well. Yet parenting seems to be the one “job” where the parent’s self-evaluation is routinely treated as evidence enough and where the evaluation of those most qualified to convey what their parenting was actually like is treated as inherently suspect.
When adult children attempt to describe the experience of being parented within that relationship, they are continually accused of “rewriting history.” What they actually experienced is treated as inadmissible when it conflicts with the parent’s account or challenges their self-perception.
That hierarchy of whose account is granted authority has a name: childism.
Childism is the automatic assumption of adult superiority and authority over children, reflected in the deeply ingrained societal habit of treating the adult perspective as the norm.
There is a great deal of cultural discourse around marginalized groups and the systemic underlying, permeating belief systems that continue to sustain and enforce their oppression. One group is rarely, if ever, mentioned or recognized AS marginalized and oppressed.
Children.
It is so ingrained in patriarchal society to see children as possessions of the parents with lifelong obligations to them that their right to be recognized and respected as their own, separate human beings with their own agency doesn’t even register. Add in hierarchical religious systems that also dominate culture and that lack of recognition of their humanity is compounded exponentially.
Variations of this graphic depicting family “order” with associated roles are easily found within Christian religious “teachings.” But the underlying assumptions about parental authority, hierarchy, and children’s placement and obligations within that “order” extend well beyond Christianity, or even religious parenting frameworks.
In estrangement, childism manifests in the refusal to acknowledge the adult child as an equal adult with agency within the relationship. It is a rejection of their right to maintain it at whatever level they decide is best for them, or to leave it altogether. All while paying lip service to “they are adults now,” and deflecting away from the relational asymmetry with the ever present refrains of “it is a two-way street,” “they need to be accountable too.”
Within this dynamic and as it relates to estrangement, there are other behaviors and psychological mechanisms that also intersect:
There is belief perseverance, the tendency to maintain established beliefs even when presented with contradictory evidence. And when those beliefs concern who we understand ourselves to be, questioning them can become deeply threatening. Our beliefs about what makes someone a good parent are shaped over a lifetime, often reinforced by cultural expectations that treat parental intentions, sacrifice, and authority as evidence of good parenting.
“I was a good, loving, sacrificing parent therefore your account of the relationship cannot be accurate.”
No evidence, no discussion, no sharing of lived experience can penetrate the intense need to hold onto this core belief.
This is now where identity threat enters.
“I was a good parent” isn’t simply a belief about how they parented when their children were young. It is an integral part of who the parent understands themselves to BE. Accepting their child’s account requires them to re-evaluate their entire self-concept, their parenting and the family they created.
Then there comes self-verification.
When information consistently threatens that established self-concept, the parent actively seeks to preserve it, favoring confirming information, rejecting contradictory accounts, and attempting to get others to see them as they see themselves.
Image credit: Adobe Stock
Rather than examining those beliefs, they seek explanations and sources that allow their established understanding of themselves as parents to remain intact.
“They are too sensitive. Their therapist put this in their head. Everything was fine until their spouse entered the picture. They are rewriting history. Everyone makes mistakes. It’s a trend promoted by social media.”
There is no shortage of “experts,” “coaches,” or estranged parent communities to provide that verification
And there is another layer to what is being protected: moral identity.
Seeing themselves as good, loving, caring parents is integral to their moral identity. Within that absolutist self-concept, acknowledging the harm they inflicted upon their child becomes incompatible with maintaining it. It is unimaginable that two realities could be simultaneously true: they sincerely endeavored to be a good parent while also inflicting significant harm that ultimately led their adult child to leave a relationship they, and society, deem permanent and unalterable.
Peel back yet another layer and there is the legacy threat. “I’m not going to be around forever — how can my child do this to me when I have so little time left?”
They complied with the cultural mandate to have children, raised them and made choices and sacrifices in the process for which they feel they are owed recognition.
Their children and their children’s children represent their continuity after they are gone. This is one of the reasons there is so much angst and consternation over lack of access to grandchildren in estrangement.
With their estranged adult children no longer positioned to carry forward their values, ideals, or loving family narratives, grandchildren represent another opportunity to preserve that legacy — particularly before they are old enough to critically evaluate the family history themselves.
There is a term for that too.
Terror management.
It is the human awareness of inevitable death that creates existential dread and which then leads to the desire for symbolic immortality.
They want to be able to repair the relationship with their adult child to maintain the legacy continuum, but doing so requires accepting information that is most threatening to their parental identity.
Accepting that information would also mean recognizing their adult child’s authority over their own experience rather than maintaining control of the narrative.
Grandchildren, however, don’t carry that same relational history.
They offer a substitute relationship in which the grandparent can establish themselves as a cherished figurehead, with young children serving as relational sponges who readily reflect back affection, admiration, and reverence without the critical perspective to challenge the identity being presented to them.
To the emotionally immature estranged parent, their adult child reneged on the covert contract they never fully recognized the parent was holding over them.
The expectation that because the “loving, caring” parent sacrificed, because they successfully delivered their child to adulthood, that child now must fulfill their end of an agreement they never entered into.
To be grateful. To maintain relationship. To allow them access to THEIR child. To put them on that reverential pedestal of grandparent that is the cultural crown jewel of relational esteem and anticipated deference.
Image Credit: Adobe Stock
The narcissistic ego injury to not receive their “just reward” is profound.
There is no recognition that the parent’s choices were their own, made in fulfillment of obligations they voluntarily assumed. Yet the adult child is expected to repay those choices through gratitude, esteem, continued relationship, and access to their own children — obligations they never agreed to assume.
The child didn’t choose the relationship, negotiate its terms, or agree to provide compensation for the “privilege” of being born and raised.
Another person’s decision to become a parent doesn’t become the obligation of the human they decided to create.
Having fulfilled their parental role, they believe they are owed its rewards: continued relationship, access to grandchildren, and a venerated place in the family hierarchy.
Intersecting with that concept of covert contracts and providing yet another layer to be peeled, is “just-world” fallacy — a cognitive bias developed by social psychologist MJ Lerner beginning in the 1960s which posits that “a belief in a just world fulfills a need to live in a predictable environment in which one’s investments are rewarded, presumably in accordance with what one deserves.”
However, when reality contradicts that belief, people may interpret events and assign responsibility in ways that preserve their understanding of what is fair. A critical underpinning of this bias is the need to believe that the world is just for their own personal wellbeing.
“I was a good parent. I did everything right. I gave everything to my children. I don’t deserve this.”
Their beliefs about themselves and their parenting, what they believe they deserve as a result, and what their adult child conveys about their actual lived experience cannot coexist within those intersecting frameworks.
This is where childism continues to play a role. If the child, regardless of now being an adult, is disallowed full articulation and recognition of their own experience, it can be discounted and dismissed in favor of preserving the parent’s narrative.
Layer on deeply ingrained cultural expectations around marriage, family, parenting, and grandparenthood, reinforced by indoctrinated religious frameworks, and the perceived threats to identity compound even further.
Enter the discursive rhetoric of the estranged-parent-focused “experts” and content creators.
Research has consistently documented, and estranged-parent communities overwhelmingly reflect, parents’ insistence on attributing estrangement to external influences rather than their own behavior or the relational history their adult children describe.
These “experts” and content creators reinforce those very explanations, supplying an endless, repetitive stream of deflection narratives that validate the parent’s existing beliefs while persistently discrediting the adult child’s experience.
Cultural programming and pedestalling of parenting already primes them for the messaging.
The prevalence of authoritarian frameworks around parenting reinforces the entitlement to the relationship and the dismissal of the adult child’s experience as valid.
The combined threats to parental identity, social standing, and legacy create the conditions in which those “expert” voices become the only ones they are willing to believe. Belief perseverance is reinforced by a cultural framework that makes alternative interpretations nearly impossible to consider.
Image credit: Adobe Stock
The combination of pervasive social influence and identity protection creates a deeply entrenched sense of entitlement that manifests as an intense sense of victimhood when the adult child exercises their own agency.
First, by attempting to convey their lived experience of the relationship, they present a direct challenge not only to the parent’s authority over the narrative, but also to the moral identity bound up in their childist expectation of being the ultimate arbiter of the relationship and its status.
This also explains the aversion to “therapy language.” In their mind, it inverts the hierarchy. It puts the adult child in a position above the parent in interpretation of the relationship itself and of their parenting.
That is unacceptable.
Then, when those attempts fail, by leaving the relationship altogether, they take with them not only the relationship the parent believed they were automatically owed, but also access to their children, who represent the ultimate culmination of the parent’s role, the social recognition and belonging that comes with it, and the familial legacy they expected their adult child to carry forward.
The result of all this?
Zero ability to engage in meaningful repair. Endless circular accusations by estranged parents that they were never told why, while estranged adult children refuse to keep losing their voices repeating what they have already conveyed over, and over, and over again.
And a cultural conversation that remains at a standoff, with estranged-parent “experts” and content creators continuing to actively, reinforce the very beliefs that keep it there.
In the end, the desperate need to maintain their belief of being a good parent prevents them from actually being one.
Comments