When your child stops talking to you
Rufus T Firefly
Shipmate
in Epiphanies
We have two adult children. When we moved to Canada in 2014, our son stopped communicating with us. Nothing. We kept in partial contact through his then girlfriend. My wife even flew back after a few years and spent a week tracking him down and trying to resolve matters. We thought that this had succeeded, especially when we then paid for him to fly out to us in Canada. His visit seemed to go well but as soon as he returned, he shut us off again and we didn't hear anything.
When we returned to the UK, he suddenly got in contact, asking for money to clear some debts. We had to say no, as we were still getting our lives sorted out and we had to buy a house. After that, nothing again.
We were then contacted by his now ex-girlfriend, who told us that he had suddenly cut off all communication with her. She had a lot of his stuff and wanted to know if she should send it to us. In the end, nothing came of that and I have no idea what had happened to this stuff.
About 12 months later, she contacted us again. Our son had still been working for her brother. He had not turned up for work for a few days and so the brother got worried and called the police, who went round to check on where he was living. They got back to him later simply to say that they wouldn't be taking the matter any further.
So right now we have no idea where he is or what he is doing. And it is highly doubtful that he know where we are, as we moved house 18 months ago.
When he cut us off completely after his visit to Canada, I had a long chat about this with my bishop. He told me that a similar thing had happened to him and his wife - one of their children vanishes for months or even years at a time. Then, out of the blue, he will turn up for a few days and then wanders off again. My bishop was very open about how he and his wife coped with this and it was very helpful for us.
Funnily enough, over the course of the next few months, I came across a number of other people who had experienced the same sort of thing - a child who had just cut off all contact and whom they never knew where they were or what they were up to. In some cases, there was a clear breaking point; an incident that had resulted in the split. But in the majority of cases, it was like us - no real discernible reason for being cut off.
One of the ways we have had to learn to cope with this is by simply not talking about him unless someone else mentions him. We can't spend our whole lives wondering what is happening or why he has done this - not just to us but to others too. But we have had to make other arrangements, as well. For a variety of reasons, we decided to amend our wills so that he will not inherit anything when we die. Most will go to our daughter and some will go to two "chosen grandchildren". In addition, our daughter and the mother of the chosen grandchildren (who is a very dear friend) will be co-executors and also have power of attorney. We have instructed the friend that her role will primarily be to act as buffer between our daughter and our son (should he come looking for an inheritance).
But what will we do if he decides to get back in contact with us? That's difficult to think about. For a start, we are agreed that there will be no financial bail-outs. We have done this before and I know my daughter would be outraged if we did it again, especially as we paid for him to visit us in Canada and yet every time she visited us, she paid her own way (and was happy to do so).
I think that, after all this time and all that we have been through, we would have to be careful about how we let him back into our lives. I would be very wary about him moving in with us, for example. And I would want to know that he was serious about addressing some of the things that he has done - not just to us but to his ex-girlfriend and to his sister. I suspect that we would also need a lot of family counselling to work through all sorts of issues.
I could go on about some of the aspects of all of this but will leave it here for now. But I wanted to raise it here because I am very aware that more people than we realise go through this sort of thing and often keep it hidden, partly through shame and partly because you just don't want to talk much about such a painful thing. But I do know that talking to others who had experienced similar family breakdowns was helpful for us - if just to get the reassurance that we weren't the only ones and that we weren't such bad parents after all.
When we returned to the UK, he suddenly got in contact, asking for money to clear some debts. We had to say no, as we were still getting our lives sorted out and we had to buy a house. After that, nothing again.
We were then contacted by his now ex-girlfriend, who told us that he had suddenly cut off all communication with her. She had a lot of his stuff and wanted to know if she should send it to us. In the end, nothing came of that and I have no idea what had happened to this stuff.
About 12 months later, she contacted us again. Our son had still been working for her brother. He had not turned up for work for a few days and so the brother got worried and called the police, who went round to check on where he was living. They got back to him later simply to say that they wouldn't be taking the matter any further.
So right now we have no idea where he is or what he is doing. And it is highly doubtful that he know where we are, as we moved house 18 months ago.
When he cut us off completely after his visit to Canada, I had a long chat about this with my bishop. He told me that a similar thing had happened to him and his wife - one of their children vanishes for months or even years at a time. Then, out of the blue, he will turn up for a few days and then wanders off again. My bishop was very open about how he and his wife coped with this and it was very helpful for us.
Funnily enough, over the course of the next few months, I came across a number of other people who had experienced the same sort of thing - a child who had just cut off all contact and whom they never knew where they were or what they were up to. In some cases, there was a clear breaking point; an incident that had resulted in the split. But in the majority of cases, it was like us - no real discernible reason for being cut off.
One of the ways we have had to learn to cope with this is by simply not talking about him unless someone else mentions him. We can't spend our whole lives wondering what is happening or why he has done this - not just to us but to others too. But we have had to make other arrangements, as well. For a variety of reasons, we decided to amend our wills so that he will not inherit anything when we die. Most will go to our daughter and some will go to two "chosen grandchildren". In addition, our daughter and the mother of the chosen grandchildren (who is a very dear friend) will be co-executors and also have power of attorney. We have instructed the friend that her role will primarily be to act as buffer between our daughter and our son (should he come looking for an inheritance).
But what will we do if he decides to get back in contact with us? That's difficult to think about. For a start, we are agreed that there will be no financial bail-outs. We have done this before and I know my daughter would be outraged if we did it again, especially as we paid for him to visit us in Canada and yet every time she visited us, she paid her own way (and was happy to do so).
I think that, after all this time and all that we have been through, we would have to be careful about how we let him back into our lives. I would be very wary about him moving in with us, for example. And I would want to know that he was serious about addressing some of the things that he has done - not just to us but to his ex-girlfriend and to his sister. I suspect that we would also need a lot of family counselling to work through all sorts of issues.
I could go on about some of the aspects of all of this but will leave it here for now. But I wanted to raise it here because I am very aware that more people than we realise go through this sort of thing and often keep it hidden, partly through shame and partly because you just don't want to talk much about such a painful thing. But I do know that talking to others who had experienced similar family breakdowns was helpful for us - if just to get the reassurance that we weren't the only ones and that we weren't such bad parents after all.
Comments
My elder daughter didn't speak to me nor respond to messages for over a year after my late-wife's mother died. She lives on a narrowboat and I had no idea where she was on the canal network other than which county she was in.
Then, one day, whatever it was lifted and she got back in touch and things are a lot better now.
Now she is gone, I am responsible for a lot of Dad's paperwork and I guess soon enough his care, and when I visit (a lot more often than was possible when Mum was alive, even when he resumed speaking to me - I still feel guilty about this but I don't think I could have done anything about it) I get to listen to him reminiscing on how he and Mum never had a disagreement or shared a cross word. There's no way to do anything other than nod and smile.
I'm sorry for your situation @Rufus T Firefly . It must suck the other way around, too.
This is quite a good book if you want an evidence based approach to working on relationship dynamics.
She has got some fixed ideas about us, which are just not true, and tries to interact with us accordingly. (E.g. when our children were school age, our household income for two adults and two children was over double her income as a single woman. She was convinced we were rich because we had over twice her income. When we said that raising children was not cheap, she didn't believe us. She still thinks we are rich now because she assumes we were saving throughout. We simply don't have the vast savings pot she thinks we have. We are not the rich relatives she thinks we are.)
I'd really like things to improve between us, but don't know how.
Yes - we know that there are mental wellbeing issues involved but we have also become aware in recent years that his behaviour (especially towards his sister) was really awful in many ways. So there are very long-standing issues that need to be addressed, even if he is willing.
My family (unlike my wife's) has always been rather semi-detached. My siblings and I moved to different parts of the country (or even abroad) and we only kept in contact sporadically. That's just how we are. But what we are experiencing with our son is a whole different level. At least with my siblings, I always knew where they were and we could talk about stuff (especially care of our parents in their later years).
My brother told me he was going to Korea to avoid paying child support for his two children. He was still in the Air Force at this time, and I had hoped he was saying that to distract us from what I guessed was another secret mission. Nope. We went over ten years without knowing if he was dead or alive. Finally, my parents contacted our congressman who did find him and told Mom and Dad that he was alive, but that he couldn't give us any more information than that.
Not long after that, he contacted my parents and eventually came to visit us with his new wife and their son.
His children from the first marriage will never forgive him; I think with good reason.
I do not want to imply this is happening in any of the above stories, This is just the story of my famly.
Hm. I'm having some feelings about this, being an adult who is working on getting back in touch with his dad in his 40s.
And given the kind of emotional labor I'm doing right now, the timeliness of this thread is really something. So this might be a sort of tale from the other side of that chasm.
And let it be said that I seriously honor my father and my mother, even as I deeply understand the struggles I'm going through with them. And they were generally good to me, so I'm a mild case as far as abuse goes (though there's some abuse I don't want to get into because I do honor my parents, mostly because my parents had too much on their plates dealing with each other.) Really, these days the line between "less than ideal" and "abuse" is hard for me to draw sometimes. Whether I was subjected to emotional abuse or not really depends on where you think the line is. I could see reasonable arguments on either side. *shrug*
There's a social expectation that you "grow up" and become "an independent man" according to a certain mold and...if you don't, what the fuck are you? Nobody. Nothing. A shameful blight, stain, and a drain on your family.
My father didn't fit the mold his father set and I think they never really got along after he grew up, even though my dad did eventually marry, settle down, and get a job. He was the first born and caught more of the questionable child-rearing tactics of his parents. His younger siblings had a more positive relationship with their parents, and did a better job of following in the family footsteps. There is still some rancor for that, I think, though it's hard to suss out unless you look closely, compounded by my father's choice to marry a disabled woman in a family that stressed Christian Science. Do the math. It made me very angry as a kid. Strange that my father lived closer to his parents than his brother and sister did, and took care of his mother in her old age. As an adult, I wonder at that. Scratch that, he earnestly believes in doing the right thing until it hurts...and beyond. I'm trying to work on that.
So, to me, I followed in my father's footsteps and floundered a lot as an adult. I've mostly gotten lucky in marrying someone who had better fortunes in life than I have. By the old standards of patriarchy, I'm a failure, living on my spouse's good fortune, even though I have a good degree and am obviously pretty intelligent.
So, if I go back home, who am I? What value do I have? Why should I even go back with anything to prove?
Maybe the son doesn't want to go back until he has established himself, and the present global economy isn't conducive to men establishing themselves in the way they were told they had to to become proper "men."
I get along with my parents. I honor them, and I do come by to visit once a year. But communicating is hard. The standards for parenting have gone up a lot since I was a kid and I think a lot of people like me are looking back and shaking our heads in disbelief at the things we were forced to put up with. And shaking our heads in disbelief at the economy we have inherited. And we are a little angry that the folks who set up this bloody world for us are looking at us like it's all our fault if we're still floundering into middle age.
If my father were less understanding, I'd probably drift away with more force than I have. You can't take your kids for granted. If you treat children like investments that you're entitled to cash in on when they're older, they might feel that's a little cynical and feel the same.
I think I might be a little older than you. My Dad was very difficult (and I really struggled as a result) up until he started to lose himself to some kind of slowly developing senility in his late 70s, when I was about 50. He seems to have forgotten to be angry and resentful most of the time, and (perhaps being unkind) I imagine some kind of self-interested neediness now plays into his greater concern (well, you have to know him to notice this sometimes) not to piss people off. I had a friend whose father became much more difficult in such a time, and I guess as time goes by, mine may well revert to type or something much worse. Whatever - I enjoy seeing him these days, mostly, and that's a gift I am grateful for. I hope that's a trajectory that works out for you too, in time.
And for what it's worth, I'm having *knock on wood* generally good emails with my dad. I think the anxiety is mostly on my end, feeling like the global economy has kind of screwed over my generation.
So, if some kids don't want to go back because their fortunes have floundered...I can relate to that. If my father were a harder man, I would definitely have a harder relationship with him.
And maybe that's what gets me. My dad is a great guy who had an overwhelming situation to deal with when I was growing up. I can't fault him. And I still find it kind of hard to stay in touch, even under good circumstances.
After a while, aren't your parents and your children just so many more adult relatives, and don't we make our own choices about continuing relationships?
It appears to be often (perhaps usually?) true that the burden of maintaining family communication falls on women. I can point at any number of examples of married women who are responsible for all the communication with their parents-in-law.
It depends very much on the family.
In my own immediate family, there are three of us, and we're very much blessed because all three of us really like each other. We'd spend time together even if we were not related. (Which seems to be causing our host congregation's pastor some consternation--I'm not sure, but he seems to find it unnatural of our son to sit with us in church, though I could be wrong.)
In a case like that, why shouldn't the family members go on associating? Even though the relationship is transforming into a more equal one. Proximity has been the cause of many a close friendship at work or school. If one is lucky, one might find a similar friendship with one or more of one's immediate relatives (drat pronouns!).
When a person becomes senile, the ethics of lying become very strange. I've had some heavy reflections on the very careful phrasing of "do not bear false witness against thy neighbor." That's something more specific than "don't tell lies." It's a careful, adult business.
I've always struggled with social performance (as some have observed here.) It's a thing.
But it seems to me that a complete breakdown of close familial relationships is always a tragedy, regardless of the reasons. Falling out with friends happens and is sad but family breakdowns seem to be on a different level - and this is coming from someone whose own family (as I said earlier) has always been rather semi-detached.
I'd agree. I think that there are different stories being told by different actors in each tragedy. And if you want to get into the depths of the situation, "my children don't talk to me" is one story. "I couldn't meet my parents' expectations" is another.
These are all truly sad tales, I think they're quite common these days. When I was a kid, I think some of my relatives tended to elide these kinds of stories, and other relatives lived in them. And the conflict between these approaches kind of defined my childhood in a certain sense. I have some feelings.
At the end of WWI (he had joined the Canadian Expeditionary Force), he remained in the UK but never seems to have reconnected with his family. We grew up thinking that he was the only member of his generation to have children, only to discover in recent years that he had loads of nephews and nieces.
It's too late to find out what happened (though I have some suspicions) but I sense a deep sadness in it all.
I feel like that's such a big problem in these relationships. So often money becomes a corrupting influence. And it can go either way. "My child expects my economic support when I can't afford it." "My parents didn't give me a good start and now I'm floundering."
Come to think of it, Jesus did make a parable based on this exact situation, of course one that is based on a father's generosity.
My father in law did that, at my husband's suggestion. As my husband wanted his sister to inherit, that caused no rift.
Part of the reason my husband was keen that his sister get the inheritance was because we knew we could stand on our own two feet without inheriting, but we also knew we couldn't afford to have any financial responsibility for her.
So when my husband asked his father to prioritise his sister, it was partially a means of distancing himself from her.
My first thought was, maybe he felt like you had abandoned him.
My aunt (mom’s older sister) buggered off to South Africa just as their mother (my grandmother) started developing Alzheimer’s, leaving my mom to manage the whole damn situation by herself. It didn’t result in a complete rift, but there was a lot of resentment going on and we definitely don’t see them anywhere near as often as my other aunt and uncle.
Although our daughter was delighted and excited for us making this huge leap. And I should make it clear that he was in his 30s at the time and living with his girlfriend. It wasn't as if we had kicked him out of the house!
Looking back, I see that he was already showing signs of disconnecting. He rarely initiated contact with us and it was up to us to go and see him.
So I guess my answer is that it'll be time to be just another relative when and if the child in question indicates that.
*No more than I do over any other human at least
I think that's about where my relationship with my parents went a little strange. I'm not sure I made that transition smoothly, and partly it's because my own relationship with "adulthood" has been a bit strange.
I think my father might've been regarded (unfairly) as not really making it in that regard, and for that reason never really connected with his father. And he tried to avoid repeating that pattern with me, which created a somewhat different situation (plus other stuff, family is complicated.)
There's a lot of "not entirely optimum" in child-raising that can create situations where it's not that circumstances were awful, but there are shortcomings, so - either for faulty parenting or personal failure - you don't feel like you're quite meeting the bar. And if you're not meeting the bar, it's really hard to feel like you're worth communicating with.
I read an article recently, one of those pop psych articles of questionable virtue, opining that there was a difference between people who understood themselves as the focal point of trauma and people who saw themselves as being channels for trauma, participants in some larger story. The latter might make it easier. Say, I don't blame my parents for missing certain things that made it harder for me to properly launch into early adulthood (as my father did) and they don't blame me. And that makes it less likely for us to become estranged, even if we might feel economic pressure.
And separating emotional pressure from economic pressure is a serious challenge. Based on some posts, I think that's fairly in play. Son doesn't want to be a burden or a debtor, parents don't want to bail the son out. Son doesn't think he can take on parents as they're aging into the age of need, parents don't want to rob their grandchildren with their dotage. These are painful situations, and with social welfare disintegrating, I'm afraid they're going to become reality for a lot of families. "Sound financial planning" only goes so far. I hardly think I'm in the worst straits and I can see how these situations can get painful.
I feel an obligation to look out for my elderly father, especially since my mother died. This is somewhat ironic given how poorly we often got along; but life is packed with ironies like that (a close friend's brother, fiercely proud of his professorial intellect (!), dead of early-onset dementia; another friend, yoga expert and Mr Poise, now starting to shake a little with Parkinsons). I think the short answer is that if I left him to fall apart alone, I would feel like a c***. If this confuses empathy and co-dependency (something I have been wondering about lately) I think I'm going to just get on with it and not worry too much.
Yep. I get those ironies. What's funny is that my dad and I are very distant in a way, but we're so similar that talking to him is like talking to another iteration of myself, and I wonder if it's the same at his end. It's one reason we don't talk much. We're both pretty boring.
And while I have issues, I can't complain. He took on too much when I was a kid, that doesn't give me the right to hold anything against him.
Before she departed, I was encouraging my daughter to refer to me by first name in order to signify how I regarded her as a peer and equal adult. She never did.
I'll never hear her voice say my name, as my parents never heard their name called by me. There is something so sacred about hearing your name pronounced by someone you love. I think it's one of my chiefest regrets, and I don't have many.
AFF
My grandkids all call Mrs. Gramps by her first name. It is very close to a common phrase for "grandmother" anyway.
Just the other day 3-year-old grandson realized his mother has a first name. Guess what he is calling her now.