Thread by @AmSolidarity

There’s a lot going on in this fascinating (and sad) piece on how more adults than ever before are estranged from mom or dad.

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theatlantic.com/family/archive…

TLDR: In the past, people tended to think of the parent/child relationship as a set of reciprocal obligations. The parents take care of the kids and one day the kids take care of the parents (of course people still sometimes think this way, especially in immigrant communities)

In mainstream American culture, though, that sense of mutual obligation has been weakened considerably, and what exactly adults are looking for in their relationship with their parents has been in flux.

Increasingly people think more in terms of their individual psychological well-being.

So the questions become less “do we take care of each other” in practical terms, and more about “do they support my dreams and values,” “do they respect my boundaries,” and so on.

And of course that’s not all bad, and every individual case is different. Some people really do have toxic parental relationships.

But what the researchers found is that even many parents who love their children and want to be a part of their adult lives have trouble with how.

To some extent that seems to because psychological well-being is a very lofty goal that can put a lot of strain on a relationship. It’s one thing to expect your parents to love you and provide for you, but another for them to make you happy and well-adjusted.

On the other hand, the culture of hyper-invested “helicopter parenting” in the upper-middle class has also put so much pressure on some kids as they grow up that they may experience disconnecting from parents as a liberation.

One statistic jumped out at us though; 70 percent of the parents who were alienated from a kid in the survey were divorced. So the breakdown of parent-child relationships and the breakdown of marriages are deeply connected.

As the authors suggest, one thing that connects them is that we place higher expectations than ever on *both* marriage and parenthood.

That can be good when it works. Parents today spend more quality time with their kids than they used to, for instance.

But it also has costs.

One reason many of us invest so much in the nuclear family–both on the marriage side and the parent/child side– is precisely because our other relationships are so much weaker than our grandparents and great-grandparents. We have fewer friends. We have weaker neighborhood ties.

We have weaker extended family connections (if we even have much of an extended family, given lower birth rates). Fewer of us belong to religious communities, or local associations, or work for the same employer for a long time.

All of that puts more weight on spouses and parents to help us define ourselves and make our way in the world.

But exactly the reason that we place so much emphasis on high-investment marriage and parenthood (I.e., weaker social connections elsewhere) is one big reason that those relationships are harder to sustain.

Often, they can’t bear the weight.

And more of us end up alone.

One big consequence of this change is the increase in inequality. Stable nuclear families were once the norm across the socioeconomic ladder, but are increasingly a marker of the credentialed middle class and above.

...and that’s a big deal, because the people that can hold the traditional family unit together (and of course, the people that have the cultural and economic resources that help them do that) are giving their kids a huge advantage.

What used to be normal has become a privilege.

When the Right talks about this problem they tend to emphasize culture and values, while the Left wants to talk about economics.

From our perspective, they’re like the blind men touching different parts of the elephant.

We have parties that want to use the state or the market to empower individuals.

What the duopoly is missing is an agenda that wants to empower all those vital relationships that stand between the individual and the forces of corporate capitalism and state bureaucracy.

In brief,