When family becomes disposable

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NICK EICHER, HOST: Good morning! This is The World and Everything in It from listener-supported WORLD Radio. I’m Nick Eicher.

LINDSAY MAST, HOST: And I’m Lindsay Mast. Next up: Broken bonds.

More adults are choosing to cut contact with their parents, and many say they’re getting professional encouragement to do it. The language is therapeutic: boundaries, self-care, emotional safety.

NICK EICHER, HOST: WORLD commentator Janie B. Cheaney explores this “no-contact” trend, where it came from, why it’s spreading, and why treating family bonds as optional comes with real costs.

JANIE B. CHEANEY: Have you heard of “going no contact”? 

Dr. Lindsay Gibson has done as much as anyone to mainstream that phrase in her 2015 breakout book, titled Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents: How to Heal from Distant, Rejecting, or Self-Involved Parents. 

Gibson’s basic recommendation for wounded adult children to heal is to become distant, rejecting, or self-involved themselves. At least where their parents are concerned. Her book recounts stories of unhappy Gen-Xers and Millennials—mostly women, but a few men—who were “not being sufficiently emotionally responded to as a child,” which led to their feeling “emotionally lonely,” or “emotionally unseen.”

In an interview with the New York Times, Dr. Gibson described what an emotionally immature parent looks like:

LINDSAY GIBSON: They cannot enter into the reality of their child’s emotional truth, their emotional experience. It just doesn’t make sense to them. 

Maybe it’s the teenager who wants to talk to their parent about their girlfriend or boyfriend. And then the parent says, ‘Oh, tell me about it, that reminds me of your father. Let me tell you what he did yesterday.’ And suddenly, we’re back talking about the emotionally immature person’s issues with no sense of sticking to the subject of the other person.

According to Dr. Gibson, emotionally mature parents are always sensitive to their child’s feelings, always ready to affirm them, always open to honest conversations. She admits that, “Emotional loneliness is a vague and private experience, not easy to see or describe.” 

But that doesn’t let parents off the hook: If you feel emotionally lonely, she says, “it comes from your family.”

No reasonable counselor would suggest maintaining a close relationship with toxic or abusive parents. But Going No Contact has become an epidemic, with as many as a quarter of young Americans, by some estimates, breaking off from Mom or Dad or both. This is not just tolerated; it is often encouraged. 

Psychologist and author Dr. Joshua Coleman is alarmed at the trend among counselors who serve as “detachment brokers,” exploring the subjective swamp of emotional loneliness. Normal parenting mistakes are reimagined as abuse; exercising discipline becomes trauma; insisting on family standards is gaslighting. The solution is to establish “boundaries” or separate entirely. 

Parents often don’t know what hit them.

Christians are not immune. After raising her children in a loving two-parent home, my friend was heartbroken when her married son and daughter-in-law decided neither set of grandparents would spend unsupervised time with the grandchildren. A few months later, the young family moved halfway across the country with no plans for holiday get-togethers or summer vacations. 

That’s just one Christian homeschooling family I know. I could name at least five more. 

In some of these cases, it was a church counselor or youth leader who encouraged an anxious and confused young person to cut ties, even before knowing all the facts.

In a culture that prizes self-fulfillment and self-care over loyalty, separations naturally follow. For natural relationships like family, we substitute so-called “communities” of like-minded and affirming individuals (which break up when affirmation falls short or minds begin to differ). 

Some millennials raised in Christian homes may also be reacting against the idealization of Christian families as the last best hope of the nation. They don’t want to save America; just themselves.

But idealization of the self will not heal emotional emptiness. We are made and shaped by others as much as by individual personality traits. Seeing ourselves reflected in close, sometimes difficult bonds helps us understand who we truly are.

God, who is a relationship in Himself, means to shape us in relationship, beginning with our mother’s arms and father’s voice. 

“Honor your father and mother” is a weighty command. To break that connection for self-centered reasons makes us weightless.

I’m Janie B. Cheaney.

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