Joshua Coleman — Parent-Child Estrangement: How Does Divorce Affect Children?

The Michael Shermer Show Archives

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Labeled a silent epidemic by a growing number of therapists and researchers, estrangement is one of the most disorienting and painful experiences of a parent’s life. Popular opinion typically tells a one-sided story of parents who got what they deserved or overly entitled adult children who wrongly blame their parents. However, the reasons for estrangement are far more complex and varied. As a result of rising rates of individualism, an increasing cultural emphasis on happiness, growing economic insecurity, and a historically recent perception that parents are obstacles to personal growth, many parents find themselves forever shut out of the lives of their adult children and grandchildren.

As a trusted psychologist whose own daughter cut off contact for several years and eventually reconciled, Dr. Joshua Coleman is uniquely qualified to guide parents in navigating these fraught interactions. He helps to alleviate the ongoing feelings of shame, hurt, guilt, and sorrow that commonly attend these dynamics. By placing estrangement into a cultural context, Dr. Coleman helps parents better understand the mindset of their adult children and teaches them how to implement the strategies for reconciliation and healing that he has seen work in his forty years of practice. Rules of Estrangement gives parents the language and the emotional tools to engage in meaningful conversation with their child, the framework to cultivate a healthy relationship moving forward, and the ability to move on if reconciliation is no longer possible.

While estrangement is a complex and tender topic, Dr. Coleman’s insightful approach is based on empathy and understanding for both the parent and the adult child.

Joshua Coleman, PhD, is a psychologist in private practice and Senior Fellow with the Council on Contemporary Families. A frequent guest on NPR and Today, his advice has also appeared in The New York Times, The Atlantic, the Wall Street Journal, CNN, Chicago Tribune and other publications. A popular conference speaker, he has given talks to the faculties at Harvard, the Weill Cornell Department of Psychiatry and other academic institutions. Dr. Coleman is co-editor with historian Stephanie Coontz of seven online volumes of Unconventional Wisdom: News You Can Use: a compendium of noteworthy research on the contemporary family. He is the father of three adult children, has a teenage grandson and lives with his wife in the San Francisco Bay Area. He is the author of The Marriage Makeover: Finding Happiness in Imperfect Harmony. His latest book is Rules of Estrangement: Why Adult Children Cut Ties and How to Heal the Conflict.

Shermer and Coleman discuss:

• Coleman’s personal experience with estrangement
• marriage and divorce: generational trends
• Haidt’s The Anxious Generation, Shrier’s Bad Therapy, Twenge’s Generations
• finding happiness in imperfect marriage
• When should couples stay together for the kids or divorce?
• What does it mean to be estranged?
• parent’s perspective vs. the adult child’s perspective
• divorce and estrangement
• causes of estrangement:
  • rising rates of individualism
  • an increasing cultural emphasis on happiness
  • growing economic insecurity
  • historically recent perception that parents are obstacles to personal growth
• narcissism and parentification
• mental illness and addiction
• psychotherapy: good and bad
• gender identity, sexuality, religion, politics, personality clashes
• sons-in-law, daughters-in-law
• cult of one
• estranged siblings
• estrangement and inheritance
• estranged grandparents
• reconciliation and abandonment
• how lives turn out.

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