For every parent and child that have a good relationship with each other, there are those who don’t speak to each other. But have you ever wondered what happened in those relationships?
One person on Reddit seems to think that in cases like these, it’s ALWAYS the parent’s fault that they don’t talk, and never the child’s. They recently wrote a post that’s getting a ton of ridicule with people who disagree.
In the post, she begins, “You were the adult when they were a child. If their first instinct, as soon as they get out from under your thumb, is to completely ignore you forever, you need to own the fact that you messed up as a parent at several, consistent, points along the road throughout your child’s upbringing. They hate you for a good reason, and they’re probably better off without you in their lives.”
The poster also goes into her own experiences on the topic: “I have friends who don’t talk to their parents because the strictness was so suffocating, and friends who don’t talk to their parents because they were lazy bums who never took an interest in their child’s life,” she writes. “There are tons of other reasons kids abandon relationships with their folks, but the one thing that stays true through all of these experiences for me is that it’s always the parents fault.”
Not everyone agrees, however. In fact, the post has received thousands of comments with people who have some deep thoughts about this, especially the son or daughter who have stopped speaking with their parents. Here are some of those thoughts!
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Sanity is Important
“I haven’t talked to my parents since 1999. That’s to preserve my own sanity and peace of mind. In truth it was the smartest thing I’ve ever done and I have no regrets disavowing two malignant narcissists. I have a list of grievances with them as long as my leg. So long in fact it’s a wonder CPS didn’t take me away from them when I was a child.”
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A Lonely Soul
“As an adult, I feel like my mother needs more from me emotionally than she’s ever provided. It’s a hard thing to explain. But 4-hour phone calls where I might get three sentences in? Every time I visit she wants to keep me awake until the sun rises, talking about herself? Woman needs a friend or a therapist and I’m not ready to be either.”
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Needs Need to Be Met
“There is this thing called the Social Exchange Theory that states that if a relationship’s costs outweigh the benefits then it will likely break off as it is not interdependent nor healthy. When parents fail to realize that they are costing their kid more than they are providing for them (this includes time, emotional, health, and material costs/benefits) then their kid isn’t going to want to be in that relationship. And In parent-child relationships it is even more crucial that the kid’s needs are being met and that they are being presented more benefits than costs. Take it from me, as someone who has been royally fucked up by my parents and whose relationship with them has slowly deteriorated- there are MANY ways that a child can be neglected.”
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Love Wasn’t the Word
“My dad has never said I love you. I don’t think he’s ever even hugged me with a real hug. I told him I loved him once while going through a rough time. He said “I know”. I haven’t seen my parents in 2 years. It took me 38 years to realize my mom is a complete narcissist and my dad is her enabler. She never calls me. My dad rarely calls. I’m no longer answering and ignore their calls. I’m 40. There’s no happy family anymore. There never was. It was just an illusion. I know they don’t have many years left. I’m sure when they are gone I will have regrets. But they are not a part of my life nor have they been for as long as I can remember. I consider them already gone.”
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Too Much Effort
“People heat that I don’t talk to my mom and immeadiatly assume its because I did something bad and we got in fight. In reality I just hated fighting to grt her to answer phone calls, acknowledge anything that happened in my life without making it about her, etc.”
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A Second Chance
“Both my parents had their shortcomings, my dad wayyyy more than my mom, but since I’ve moved out, they’ve both been actively trying to be better parents and I couldn’t be more grateful for that. My dad and I will always but heads but he’s trying and that’s what matters to me.”
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An Abuse Cycle
“I had an abusive alcoholic mother. She used to beat us daily, put cigarettes out on me, mentally abuse us and try and turn us against our dad. When I told my dad about it at around 8 he tried to get custody of us. The courts decided the best course of action would be to keep us with our mother and assign a social worker to ‘help her be a better parent’. Well it didn’t work and the abuse carried on.”
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Closure Is Hard
“Living through a lifetime of people telling you it’s your fault, it’s hard to deprogram yourself that it isn’t the case. I’m still in the middle of deprogramming that mindset. What eats away at me is that a lot of people aren’t in my life anymore (due to distance, ailment/death, etc). There is never any closure even if these people aren’t in your life anymore. It’s always a battle to fight for your mind and sense of self.”
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Too Much Negativity
“I live 2 hours away from my family and only see and speak to them on holidays and I’m even thinking of ending that. I can only be brought down so many times before it gets too difficult to stand back up.”
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Too Much Control
“The ability to string guilt, disappointment, personal shortcomings and at the time my financial reliance on them. Wasn’t until I had my own life that I felt I had room for my parents. Really a shame, outside parenthood they were dedicated honest people. Something about raising the next iteration just got to them, especially my dad.”
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Other Things Were More Important
“My father had a dog that was more important than me or my children. He and my mother would always have these weird, backhanded ways of letting me know all these other people and things were more important than me. I finally believe what they’d been telling me about themselves when I was 35. I haven’t spoken to them in over six years now.”
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Never Good Enough
“I’m 15 and my parents can’t look past IISc or IIT. JEE looks like such a sham to me like there are so many students taking the exam and only the top 50 or 60 get to the best colleges, there is so much competition and it’s not like there is a huge difference between the kid who comes 10th or the kid who comes 150th. It’s just 1 mark difference that can throw you off hundreds of places. This coupled with the outdated reservation system, which does more harm than good, completely makes a ridiculous thing out of this and it’s even more frustrating to see people pinning their hopes, their entire lives, on performing in this circus of an exam.”
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Sometimes There’s No Reason at All
“My daughter and her family became Jehovah’s witnesses, since I and the rest of my family refused to renounce our church she won’t/can’t talk to us…I did nothing to her at all.”
These experiences really tug at the heart strings, don’t they? Do you know any parent or child who doesn’t speak to one another? What happened in their relationship to cause this?
