AARP The Magazine - April/May 2012

hosts on her website, nearly one in
three parents estranged from their
children reported having contem-
plated suicide. That’s almost 10 times
the annual average rate for suicidal
thoughts, according to the Centers
for Disease Control and Prevention.
“There’s a primal bond between a
parent and a child,” Vagnoni points
out. “When that’s broken, parents
feel they’ve failed as human beings.”
In Vagnoni’s survey, 61 percent of
alienated children said they would
like to resume relationships with
their parents, but only under speci-
fied conditions. Sixty percent wanted
an apology. Nearly half of the young
adults said they bore “no responsibil-
ity” for the estrangement.
close or distanced based on how im-
mediately fulfilling the relationship
is. What concerns me is, what are we
sacrificing for that freedom?”
For Steve Sayre, 53, a San Francisco
marketing director, the freedom was
worth the sacrifice—until, one day,
it wasn’t. Afraid to tell his parents in
person that he was gay, Sayre came
out to them in a letter in 1982. “I was
24 years old, and I was a child of my
mother’s Chinese reticent ways,” he
explains. But Sayre’s mother never
saw the letter. His father told Sayre
he had thrown it away—which trig-
gered an estrangement that lasted
a year. Sayre and his parents hardly
spoke at all.
Finally Sayre summoned his cour-
man—that’s when I became an adult.”
But even if a family splintering is
fed by a child’s immaturity, experts
agree that the best way for parents to
facilitate reconciliation is to change
their own behavior and take respon-
sibility for their own mistakes. (See
“When Your Kid ‘Divorces’ You,” on
page 59, for additional tips.) When
Deborah Jackson was able to do that,
it opened a crack in the door her son
had slammed in her face. “Looking
back on it,” she says now, “I saw that
while I was going through my di-
vorce, Marcus needed more emotion-
al support than I was able to give.”
She called Marcus and apologized,
and he responded. “I seem to have

Today, people are free to abandon
unfulfilling relationships, says
one therapist, but “what are
we sacrificing for that freedom?”
Of course, some of those children
are right. Manhattan therapist Irina
Firstein says backing away from a
parent is sometimes the best option:
“When a grown child gets nothing
but disapproval from an overpow-
ering and controlling parent, he or
she needs to separate to develop a
healthy sense of self.”
But are psychotherapists partly
responsible for the increase in family
fractures? Joshua Coleman says it’s
possible. “The role of the 21st-century
therapist is to help the individual
experience deeper feelings of free-
dom and well-being,” he says. “Today,
people decide whether to remain

age and invited his parents to his
apartment, where he said aloud that
he was gay. “My mother reached for
the box of Kleenex, weeping, and
said,‘ What did I do wrong?’ ” he re-
calls. But one month later she sent
him a letter. “She said, ‘ You’re my son.
I gave birth to you, and I’ll always
love you for whatever you are,’ ” he
recalls. “That was really nice.”
Sayre pauses, then adds pensively,
“The challenge for all children is
figuring out how to grow up. That’s
what I was going through the year
I didn’t speak to my parents. And in
that moment when I told them my
truth and stood up for myself as a
moved forward with my son,” she
says. “I think partly it’s due to my
decision to let him live his life, and
partly to his own understanding
and growth.

Meredith Maran is the author of 10
nonfiction books. Her first novel, A
Theory of Small Earthquakes, was
published this year.

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