Difficult parent-child relationships can feel confusing and painful, whether you are the parent or the adult child.
Love and hurt can live in the same relationship. If that sounds like your relationship – whether you are the parent or the child – you are in the right place.
We are not here to push any particular decision – not No Contact, not Forced Reconciliation. We want to help you understand what is happening and explore your options.
Whether you are a parent trying to understand why your child has pulled away, or an adult child trying to figure out how much distance you need – this article is for you.
A strained relationship with a parent or child is painful. It shows up in phone calls you dread, visits that leave you drained, and the gap between what you hoped this relationship would be and what it actually is.
There is a lot of content telling people to cut off contact with difficult parents. There is also a lot telling adult children to be more patient and forgiving. Both can be right in the right situation. Neither is a universal answer.
These relationships are complicated. The hurt is usually real on both sides. Most people are not looking for permission to walk away – they are looking for a way through.
Two People, Two Experiences
If you are an adult child reading this, you may be carrying years of unmet needs – times you reached out and were met with criticism, silence, or dismissal. You may feel guilty for wanting distance from someone you also love. That guilt does not mean you are wrong. And if what you experienced was more than difficult – if there was real harm – that matters too, and this article speaks to that as well.
If you are a parent reading this, you may feel blindsided. You worked hard, sacrificed, showed up the best you knew how – and it still was not enough. That hurt is real.
Parent could have genuinely tried and still caused harm. An adult child can love a parent and still need space from them. They feel like contradictions. They are not.
Understanding Where Parents Are Coming From
This section is not about making excuses. It is about context, and context matters when you are trying to figure out what comes next.
Many parents, particularly those who immigrated to Canada or grew up in other countries, raised their children using the tools they had. In many cultures, emotional openness is not how love is expressed. Love shows up as sacrifice, hard work, discipline, and provision. A parent may have worked double shifts, skipped meals, and given up their own dreams – and genuinely believed that was enough. That it was everything.
They may not have known how to say “I’m proud of you” because no one ever said it to them. They may have been harsh because harshness was all they experienced growing up. They may have held impossibly high expectations because, in their world, those expectations were how children survived.
None of that makes the impact on a child less real. Emotional distance still hurts. Harsh criticism still damages. But understanding where a pattern comes from can change how you relate to it – and sometimes that is where things begin to shift.
Dr. Lindsay Gibson, in her book Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents, notes that many parents who struggle emotionally are not malicious – they are limited. They are often carrying unprocessed pain of their own, repeating patterns they never had the support to examine. A parent who was never comforted as a child may not know how to comfort. One who grew up in a home where conflict meant punishment may have never learned to sit with someone else’s hurt without shutting down or getting defensive.
Some parents genuinely do not know the impact they had – not because they did not care, but because no one ever showed them what it looks like to care differently. That does not make the harm less real. But it does mean that in many cases, what felt like rejection or indifference was not a choice. It was the ceiling of what they knew how to do.
That is not an excuse. But it is important information.
When Distance Is Necessary
There are situations where creating distance – including no contact – is the right and healthy choice. If a relationship involves ongoing abuse, serious manipulation, or behaviour that is genuinely harming your mental health or the well-being of your own family, protecting yourself is not selfish. It is necessary.
No contact is also sometimes temporary. People step back, do their own work in therapy, and later find a way back to a different kind of relationship. It is not always permanent, and choosing it does not mean you have given up on the relationship forever.
If you are in that space, this article is not here to talk you out of it.
When You Are Looking for a Middle Ground
Many people are not in a clear-cut situation. Their relationship with a parent is painful, but not abusive. It is exhausting, but there are also good moments. They want things to be different but are not sure if walking away entirely is right for them – or even possible given their family, their culture, or their own values.
If that sounds familiar, here are four options worth exploring.
- Setting Healthy Boundaries
Boundaries are not about punishing someone. They are about defining what you are and are not available for – emotionally, physically, and in terms of your time.
In practical terms, this might mean avoiding certain topics that always end in conflict, limiting the length or frequency of visits, choosing not to be alone with someone who is difficult in group settings, or being clear about what you will and will not discuss.
Dr. Henry Cloud and Dr. John Townsend, authors of the widely-read book Boundaries, put it this way:
“Boundaries define us. They define what is me and what is not me… Knowing what I am to own and take responsibility for gives me freedom.”
Boundaries work best when they are clear, consistent, and communicated calmly – not as ultimatums, but as honest statements about what you need. For example:
- “I am not comfortable talking about that topic. Can we talk about something else?”
- “When visits run long, I find them hard. I am going to start heading home after a couple of hours.”
- “When you comment on my parenting in front of my kids, it puts me in a difficult position. I need you to raise those concerns with me privately.”
For parents who are on the receiving end of new limits from an adult child, it can feel like rejection. It is worth asking: is this person trying to hurt me, or are they trying to find a way to stay in the relationship without getting hurt? Those are very different things.
Our companion article walks through the practical steps of identifying, communicating, and maintaining boundaries – including how to follow through when they are not respected.
Want Practical Help with Boundaries? Read: How to Set Healthy Boundaries: A Practical Guide: https://cornerstonefamilycounselling.com/how-to-set-healthy-boundaries/ |
- Shifting Expectations
One of the hardest parts of a strained parent-child relationship is hoping for something that may never come. We want the parent who finally understands, who apologizes. We want the child who comes back and sees our efforts. When that does not happen, it hurts – and it keeps hurting.
Shifting expectations is not about giving up. It is about asking a more honest question: what is this relationship actually capable of, given where we are right now?
That process usually involves a few steps:
- Naming the unmet need – affection, approval, safety, emotional presence
- Grieving the loss of what was not there – this is real grief, and it deserves real space
- Asking what is realistically possible right now, not what you wish were possible
- Redirecting your energy toward relationships that can give you what this one cannot
Dr. Gibson notes that many adults stay frozen waiting for a parent to change. Many parents stay frozen waiting for their child to come around. The way out is not waiting for the other person – it is deciding what you want your own life to look like, regardless of what they do.
A 2018 study in the Journal of Family Psychology found that adults who actively work through unresolved issues with their parents are less likely to repeat those same patterns in their own relationships. The work matters – not just for you, but for the people around you.
One concept that is useful here – though often misunderstood – is radical acceptance. It is not about excusing what happened or pretending things were fine. It is about stopping the internal fight against a reality that is not going to change. The parent who was not emotionally available is not going to become a different person by you continuing to grieve who they were not. The child who has pulled away may not return on your timeline, or at all. Radical acceptance means acknowledging that reality clearly, without adding layers of self-blame or fantasies about what should have been. That is not giving up. It is putting your energy into what is actually in front of you.
This does not mean the grief goes away. It means you stop being surprised by it.
- Low-Contact Relationships
Low contact is exactly what it sounds like. You do not end the relationship, but you significantly reduce how much of yourself you put into it. This might mean texting on birthdays and holidays instead of regular calls. It might mean keeping visits short, structured, and infrequent. It might mean only seeing each other at larger family gatherings rather than one-on-one.
For adult children, low contact can offer enough breathing room to protect your mental health while keeping the door open. It also models something important for your own children – that you can love someone and still have limits with them.
For parents, understanding that low contact is not permanent rejection may make it easier to accept. Sometimes a child stepping back is not the end of the relationship. It is an attempt to preserve it.
- Therapy and Mediation
Therapy gives you a space to sort through your own side of things – what you feel, what you need, and what you want to do about it – without needing the other person to be ready or involved.
Individual therapy helps you work through old hurt, understand your patterns, and get clear on what kind of relationship – if any – you want going forward.
Family therapy or mediation, when both people are open to it, can create a structured space for difficult conversations that tend to go sideways on their own. A trained therapist is not there to assign blame. They help each person hear the other more clearly than they usually can alone.
In practice, family therapy does not look like a confrontation. Sessions are structured, and a trained therapist manages the pace. The goal is not to relitigate the past or reach a verdict on who was right. It is to create enough safety that each person can say what they have not been able to say, and hear what they have not been able to hear. That alone can shift something – even when the relationship stays complicated afterward. If full reconciliation is not possible or not wanted, mediation can be a more limited but still useful option for establishing clearer terms around contact, especially when children or shared family events are involved.
Resolution does not always mean closeness. Sometimes it means two people finally understanding each other – and that being enough.
There Is Room for Hope Here
Some of these relationships do not get repaired. That is a loss, and it is okay to name it as one. Not every estrangement ends in reconciliation, and not every reconnection lasts.
One thing worth naming for both parents and adult children in this situation: the weight of guilt and regret is real, and it deserves attention. Parents who look back and see clearly what they missed or got wrong can be carrying a kind of grief that has nowhere to go. Adult children who have needed to step back often carry guilt that sits alongside their pain. Neither of those experiences means you are a bad person. They mean you care about something that did not go the way it should have.
Self-compassion in this context is not about letting yourself off the hook. It is about applying the same basic fairness to yourself that you would extend to someone else in the same situation. You would not tell a friend who grew up without the tools to parent well that they are simply a bad parent. You would not tell a friend who needed distance from a painful relationship that they are cruel. Extending that same fairness inward is what makes it possible to keep doing the work.
But many do change. A parent who genuinely asks how their child experienced their childhood – and sits with the answer without getting defensive – can change the entire tone of a relationship. An adult child who comes to understand what their parent was carrying – the migration, the survival, the unprocessed losses – often finds they can breathe a little more freely, even if the relationship stays complicated.
That is what therapy is for. Not to tell you what to decide, but to help you decide clearly.
Whatever your situation, you do not have to figure it out alone.
At Cornerstone Family Counselling Services, we work with individuals and families navigating exactly this kind of complexity. Whether you are ready to talk or just starting to think things through, our therapists are here.
Sources
Gibson, Lindsay C. Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents: How to Heal from Distant, Rejecting, or Self-Involved Parents. New Harbinger Publications, 2015.
Haydon, Katherine C., Roisman, Glenn I., & Burt, Keith B. “Early family relationships and romantic attachment styles in adulthood: A developmental perspective.” Journal of Family Psychology, Vol. 32, No. 1, 2018, pp. 20-30. DOI: 10.1037/fam0000345
