Cutting Off Your Parents Is Identity Politics, Not ‘Boundaries’By: Noelle Mering
January 05, 2026
The practice of severing family often takes on an authoritarian tenor that presumes the adult child cutting contact is always right.
Family estrangement has moved from the margins to the mainstream and this shift is now visible across popular culture and media alike. Oprah recently gave airtime to the “rising trend” of adult children who have severed ties with their parents. The New York Times offered suggestions for how to cope with family estrangement, especially around the holidays. While some people sever family ties out of genuine necessity, the practice has exploded into broader and lesser justifications in recent years and often takes on an authoritarian tenor, one that presumes that the adult child cutting contact is always right and righteous.
A recent Wall Street Journal piece, “These Moms Are Done Being Doormats for Their Estranged Children,” chronicles how that absolutism appears to be provoking a counterreaction. Journalist Elizabeth Bernstein describes what she calls “the pissed-off parent pushback,” profiling one mother who started a TikTok account to connect with others whose adult children, in her words, have become “ungrateful little bastards.”
To understand this peculiar moment, it helps to situate this newer version of family estrangement within the latest iteration of identity politics, the logic of which invites us to recast all relationships as adversarial. Such black-and-white thinking is full of moral clarity but lacks moral complexity. It therefore tends toward excessive corrections that sacralize entire victim classes. Just as the #metoo era slogan “believe all women” functioned as an overcorrection categorically condemning men and granting infallibility to women, so too has the emerging impulse to believe all adult children in the no contact movement.
A Cycle of Competing ClaimsBut membership in a “victim class” no longer carries the cachet it once did. Many are realizing that it is a devilish way of sorting people. The framework is too blunt to account for individual responsibility or context, and it inevitably relies on emotional coercion. As that coercion becomes more visible, it provokes a backlash. Those on the receiving end learn to use the same language of grievance in response, turning a politics of identity into a cycle of competing claims.
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Source:
https://thefederalist.com/2026/01/05/cutting-off-your-parents-is-identity-politics-not-boundaries/
