How to Start Over: 'Parents Are Not All Good and All Bad'

June 6, 2022·29 min·2 clips

Dr. Coleman explains how being 'too loved' by parents can lead adult children to estrange themselves.

1. How to Start Over is a podcast from The Atlantic, hosted by Olga Hazan and produced by Rebecca Rashid; this episode addresses why family conflicts with parents can stall and how to navigate deep disagreements without full estrangement. 2. The episode features Dr. Joshua Coleman, a clinical psychologist and senior fellow at the Council on Contemporary Families who published Rules of Estrangement in 2021, and Alex Lee, a therapist in Fremont, California who specialises in therapy for Asian-Americans with challenging family relationships. 3. The episode's core question is why adult family tensions persist and sometimes escalate to estrangement, and what adults can do to navigate that middle ground short of cutting off contact. 4. Hazan opens by noting that the pandemic forced many adults to move back with parents, and that family tensions that seemed manageable at a distance re-emerged — including conflicts over pandemic-era issues such as vaccine refusal. 5. Coleman identifies five pathways to estrangement in his research: childhood trauma or abuse, mental illness in parent or child, spousal influence pushing the adult child to choose sides, divorce as a statistical predictor, and — paradoxically — being over-parented. 6. The paradox Coleman highlights is that intensive, anxious, guilt-ridden parenting of the past three to four decades can produce adult children who feel so enmeshed with their parents that the only way they know to feel separate is to cut contact. 7. Coleman's 1,600-parent survey through the University of Wisconsin Survey Center found approximately 70% of estranged parents had a prior divorce, making marital dissolution one of the strongest structural predictors of estrangement. 8. He describes a typical estrangement as beginning with a 'no-contact letter' listing the parent's failures; the parent either becomes defensive or is given no actionable path to reconciliation. 9. Coleman argues that modern parenting expectations have fundamentally shifted since the mid-19th century: where the early 1900s demanded conformity and respect for elders, today the standard question is whether a relationship promotes personal growth and happiness. 10. He links this to rising individualism — 'does this relationship promote my happiness?' — and notes that on therapeutic TikTok, cutting out anyone who causes upset even once is framed as a courageous act of self-care. 11. Coleman came to this research through personal experience: his daughter cut off contact for several years in her early 20s after feeling displaced when he remarried and had twins, and he describes the period as the most painful experience of his life. 12. He and his daughter eventually reconciled, and he recommends that estranged parents write a detailed amends letter acknowledging specific failures, both for the child's benefit and as an act of self-compassion. 13. Alex Lee explains family systems through the mobile metaphor: every family maintains homeostasis, and when one member changes — setting a boundary, responding differently to a controlling comment — the entire mobile shifts and then tries to snap back. 14. He describes the common defensive parental reaction to boundary-setting — 'what are you, the thought police? I bought this house' — as the family system's attempt to restore familiar equilibrium. 15. Lee teaches clients to empathise before enforcing a boundary: reflect back what the parent is feeling, get grounded, then act from that place rather than from reactive emotion. 16. For immigrant families specifically, Lee notes that apparent control or pressure often has a survival rationale: parents who sacrificed for a child's success in a new country genuinely cannot see unconditional approval of any career path as compatible with the family's material survival. 17. Molly, an adoptee and atheist whose devout evangelical parents saw her adoption as a pro-life statement and a mission, describes discovering she had stopped believing at age 11 and hiding it for years out of fear of becoming 'a disappointment' to the family. 18. Molly does not describe herself as estranged — she describes a relationship that is 'a little less open, a little different,' with calls driven by guilt, but sustained by not wanting to sever ties entirely. 19. The episode has a warm, confessional tone — Hazan volunteers herself as a case study for Lee's boundary-setting analysis and narrates her own reactions throughout, making the material accessible rather than clinical. 20. People managing ongoing family friction, especially adult children of immigrants or those in religiously mixed families, will find the frameworks here directly applicable.

As heard by us

A measured look at family stalemates, boundaries, and the possibility of repair.

This episode treats family conflict as a stalemate that can linger into adulthood, especially when parents and adult children carry different ideas about what the relationship should look like.

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Why you'd press play

You want a steadier way to handle parents who still know how to push your buttons.

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