Estrangement Ideology – Part 40. Do Adult Children Truly Know Their Parents?

Exploring the limits of adult child perception, the illusion they truly understand their parents and solidifying impact of estrangement.

This is the fortieth in a series of articles concerning Estrangement Ideology. Key concepts are introduced in Part 1. Tenets, Goals and Methods; Part 2. Transgressions, Moral Certitude and Traditional Values; and Part 3. The One-Sided Path to Redemption. Other parts can be found here.

One of the core paradoxes of estrangement is that adult children often seem to believe they fully understand their parents, despite only ever knowing them in one phase of their lives—the period in which they were raising children and some brief time thereafter. In reality, parents had entire lives before their children were born, shaped by experiences, struggles and evolving worldviews that inevitably remain largely unknown to their offspring. Many Estranged Adult Children believe they know their parents’ character, motives and history, yet their understanding is necessarily limited to their own perspective, experiences and memories—which are, by nature, incomplete.

The Missing Years: What Adult Children Never Witnessed

A child enters their parent’s life 15 to 45 years after it began, meaning that the parent's childhood, youth, personal struggles, relationships and historical influences remain largely unknown and to a large degree, unknowable, to them. Wars, political movements, economic hardships, social shifts and technological advancements—all of these shaped the parent before they ever took on the role of raising a child.

Beyond personal experiences, many of today’s parents were born in the post-World War II optimism, experiencing economic recovery, the birth of the new middle class and the expansion of tertiary education to a broader demographic for the first time. Some were the first to have a tertiary degree in their family—ever. Huge numbers became engaged with or were affected by the fevered days of the Vietnam anti-war movements of the 1960s and 1970s, the counterculture and hippy movement, early waves of feminism and the sexual revolution. Others witnessed and participated in civil rights struggles such as anti-apartheid activism and labour rights protests. Having a child out of wedlock became uncontroversial—if not actually normalised—much to the shock and horror of their own parents and grandparents. Young men had long hair and wore sandals, young women wore scandalously revealing skirts and tops. These formative experiences deeply shaped their values, priorities and perspectives, often in ways their children may not fully grasp or appreciate.

Most parents had aspirations, disappointments, friendships and personal growth before they had children. Many adult children never seriously consider how these factors shaped the people who raised them. Instead, they seem to assume their parent was a static figure who came into existence fully formed at the moment of their birth, fully dedicated to raising them as a “life choice” for which no gratitude or reciprocal obligation is due. They are “Boomers” or “GenX” or some other ginned up stereotype designed to box and divide generations. The result is that a parent’s choices, beliefs and behaviours are often judged without context—without considering the pressures, hardships and personal sacrifices that may have driven them.

The Therapy Culture Overlay: Rewriting and Recovering Childhood

In recent decades, therapy culture has played a significant role in reshaping how childhood is remembered and interpreted. Many adult children have engaged in therapeutic processes or been exposed to subcultures that encourage the reinterpretation of their past, sometimes in ways that recast normal parental mistakes or generational differences as serious emotional harm. Concepts such as “repressed memories”, “inner child healing” and “cyclebreaking” encourage adult children to revisit their childhood experiences through a new lens—often one influenced by modern views on trauma, boundaries and psychological harm.

This shift presents challenges for parents, who may struggle to reconcile how their past parenting, once seen as ordinary, responsible or even protective, may now be re-examined and judged as damaging or oppressive. What was once considered firm discipline or responsible guidance in past decades may now be labelled “toxic control”, “emotional neglect” or “overreach.”

Further complicating matters, social mores around parenting have changed dramatically. Many parents raised their children in a time when strict discipline, independence-building and resilience were valued, whereas today’s norms favour gentler parenting, extensive emotional validation and the avoidance of discomfort for children. This leaves many parents bewildered by shifting definitions of acceptable parenting, where actions they took with good intentions are later framed as harmful, without acknowledging the social context of their time.

The Hidden Decisions Parents Made in a Child’s Best Interest

Another aspect often missing from an Estranged Adult Child's understanding of their parents is the many unseen decisions made about their upbringing. Parents frequently navigated complex and difficult choices regarding their child’s education health and emotional well-being, often behind closed doors and without the child’s awareness. These included verbal and often unrecorded consultations with doctors, teachers, medical specialists and psychologists—decisions made in what was believed to be the child's best interest at the time.

Hindsight often allows for judgments that fail to acknowledge past limitations. With modern advances and interpretations in psychology, medicine and education, what was once considered best practice may now seem outdated or even misguided. However, parents were making these decisions based on the best available knowledge at the time, often without the privilege of future insights. Many estranged children may now reinterpret these decisions through today’s standards and norms, assuming neglect or incompetence where, in reality, their parents were simply doing their best with the tools, information and financial resources they had at the time.

Parental Fears of Aging and Social Change

As parents age, they often experience a sense of diminishing relevance, both within their own families and in society at large. They witness rapid cultural and technological changes that redefine what is acceptable in parenting, discipline, relationships and social interactions. Many also feel anxiety about their children’s futures, concerned about the impact of social movements, changing moral values, economic instability and shifting cultural expectations.

Where once they felt confident in the lessons they passed on, they now find themselves questioned or even vilified for not fully adopting modern social perspectives. This widening gap in values, combined with the challenges of redefining relationships in later life, often leads to misunderstandings that can fuel estrangement. If parents voice concerns about social movements, shifting family dynamics or their fears about their own aging and dependency, they may be dismissed as “out of touch” or “fear-mongering”, rather than acknowledged for their valid, experience-based concerns.

Additionally, in an era where identity and values are increasingly politicised, many parents may struggle to find grounding. Some may double down on past beliefs, while others gravitate toward new ideological or spiritual frameworks that promise stability and meaning. This may include political movements such as MAGA or QAnon, religious revivalism or alternative social communities that reinforce traditional values in reaction to perceived cultural decline. The era of covid, the Ukraine war, Palestinian rights and the current drive to global conflagration have sharpened and exacerbated these factors as highly emotive red-lines with deep moral judgements attached.

For some, new affiliations serve as a psychological refuge, a way to make sense of a world that no longer aligns with the one in which they were raised. However, these shifts can further alienate them from their adult children, particularly if those children hold opposing social or political views. The result is an intensified polarisation, where both generations see the other as having "lost their way"—the parent viewing the child as swept up in progressive ideologies, while the child views the parent as stuck in outdated or extremist beliefs. These shifts are amplified in mass media and social media and the effects of online echo-chambers.

Rather than bridging these generational gaps through dialogue and mutual understanding, estrangement cements these divisions, reinforcing the idea that the other party is beyond redemption. The irony is that both parent and child may experience the same disillusionment and uncertainty about the world, but arrive at opposing conclusions on how to navigate it.

Parents’ Limited Understanding of Their Adult Children

Just as adult children may not fully understand their parents, parents themselves may also struggle to truly know their adult children. A parent's understanding of their child is deeply shaped by their experience of raising them, which often leads to an idealised or static perception of who their child is. Parents remember their child as they were in earlier life—the dreams they had, the struggles they faced, their childhood temperament and how they interacted within the family unit. However, as children grow into adulthood, they develop private lives, independent social influences and personal struggles that may not be fully shared with their parents.

Many estranged parents feel blindsided by their child’s decision to sever contact, often because they did not see their child's internal struggles, evolving worldview or therapeutic reinterpretation of childhood experiences. If an adult child begins to view their past through a new ideological or therapeutic lens, but does not communicate this shift to their parents, the parent may be unaware that their child is reinterpreting their upbringing in a radically different way.

Furthermore, as adult children immerse themselves in different cultural, academic or social environments, they may develop perspectives on family, personal identity and relationships that are alien to their parents. The child may hold grievances or feel disconnected in ways that the parent does not recognise, leading to growing resentment on one side and confusion on the other.

Additionally, the parent-child relationship itself may evolve in ways that neither party fully anticipates. Parents often expect that the bond they built during childhood will continue into adulthood, whereas adult children may develop an entirely new sense of self—one that sometimes excludes the parent. Just as adult children may assume they fully understand their parents based on their childhood experiences, parents may fail to recognise the full complexity of their adult child’s emotional and psychological journey.

Estrangement Freezes Perceptions and Prevents Understanding

One of the greatest consequences of estrangement—particularly when it involves “Low Contact” or “No Contact”—is that it prevents the evolution of mutual understanding. If both the parent and the adult child hold incomplete or outdated views of each other, the lack of meaningful communication ensures that these misperceptions remain fixed rather than being corrected over time.

By locking both parties into static interpretations of who the other person is, estrangement prevents the normal process of growth, dialogue and relationship evolution. If a parent is judged for who they were decades or even just a few years ago and the child’s struggles or changing worldview remain invisible to the parent, then neither side is given the opportunity to revise their understanding of the other.

Additionally, estrangement reinforces confirmation bias—without direct interactions, both parties rely on past assumptions and external narratives to explain the estrangement, rather than engaging in direct dialogue that might challenge or update those beliefs. The parent may see the estranged child as ungrateful or manipulated, while the adult child may see the parent as unchanged or incapable of self-reflection.

The absence of engagement ensures that old wounds never heal, past misunderstandings remain unresolved and each side views the other through a permanently distorted lens. Estrangement does not create clarity—it solidifies old perceptions and deepens division, making reconciliation or even a clear understanding of the other’s reality, increasingly difficult.

Conclusion: The Problem of Assumed Certainty

Discussions of estrangement in Estranged Adult Child forums often seem to be fuelled by certainty—the belief that the adult child fully knows their parent and has rendered a final judgment on their character, motives and worthiness of continued connection. Yet, absent actual abuse and serious harm, this certainty is inevitably built on an incomplete, often flawed perception of the parent’s past and present, the complexity of their identity and the ways in which they have continued to evolve and will continue to change into the future. Similarly, parents may also struggle to fully understand their adult children, holding onto memories of their childhood selves rather than recognising the independent, evolving individuals they have become. Estrangement freezes these perceptions, locking them so that no progress towards repair is even remotely possible.

Without continued communication, space for evolution, and an openness to seeing one another beyond childhood roles, estrangement risks not being about the present reality of the parent-child relationship, but about a past that no longer exists.

But is this perception gap truly insurmountable? Can reconciliation ever take place if both parties remain convinced of their fixed views of each other? Or is the certainty that defines estrangement simply another form of misunderstanding waiting to be undone?

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Note: This article was developed with assistance of ChatGPT, used as a structured analysis and writing tool. All ideas, interpretations and final outputs were authored, verified and edited by me. The model was conditioned to reflect my reasoning, not to generate content independently.