They Say “We’re Ghosted by Our Own Kids” — but Who Set the Stage?

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Do you remember it? That look across the dinner table when something innocent triggers an old wound. The phone call that ends abruptly. The text message left on read for days that stretches into weeks.

“Kids these days don’t respect their parents anymore,” says the woman at the grocery store, loudly enough that everyone in line can hear her grievance. “My son hasn’t called me in three months.”

Who wants to be ghosted forever?

Not me.

Yet we live in an era where “children ghosting their parents” has become a cultural talking point, fodder for think pieces and morning show segments where experts diagnose an entire generation with ingratitude. The narrative seems fixed: ungrateful adult children cutting contact with the very people who gave them life.

But narratives have authors. And sometimes we need to question who’s holding the pen.

I met Mana at Vasantotsav ( a spring festival in my hometown)last year. Warm, thoughtful, quick to laugh. Over lunch, she mentioned offhandedly that she hadn’t spoken to her mother in five years.

“My relatives assume I’m heartless,” she said, stirring her chai. “What they don’t know is I spent twenty years trying to maintain a relationship that left me depleted, anxious, and doubting my own perceptions.”

Her mother’s patterns were consistent: criticism disguised as concern, questions that were actually accusations, boundary violations followed by claims of innocence. “I didn’t stop talking to my mother,” She told me. “I stopped letting her talk through me.”

The highlight reel versus lived reality. The soft-focus memories parents often share publicly versus the raw footage their children actually experienced.

Most family relationships aren’t highlights. Most pass in the same kind of blur. You won’t last long in this world if you spend all your time examining the microscopic fissures in your foundation.

And then there are the lowlights. The comments that cut to the bone. The conditional love. The expectations that crush rather than challenge.

You need to know that freedom includes the freedom to lose. Without it, including the freedom to separate from those who harm us, none of the rest can exist.

You can’t command someone to love you and expect it to feel genuine. There are forces bigger, better, and more important than conformity to family expectations. Without reciprocal respect, nothing healthy can grow.

Mayank, my sister’s friend- now forty-five, describes the breaking point with his father as “surprisingly mundane.”

“After decades of manipulation and emotional blackmail, it wasn’t some dramatic showdown that ended things. It was just Tuesday. He called to tell me why my recent promotion was actually a failure, how I should have negotiated better, pushed harder. And something in me just… shut off. I realized I’d never be enough in his eyes, and I was tired of trying.”

He didn’t ghost his father. He simply stopped performing in a play where his role was perpetually disappointing son.

“The funny thing is, he tells everyone I abandoned him,” Mayank says. “He genuinely doesn’t understand that relationships require mutual care.”

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My father wants control and never tries to understand how his words affect me and my older sister. Every conversation becomes a lecture, every disagreement evidence of our supposed moral failings. For him, parenting never evolved beyond the dynamics established when we were children — he speaks, we listen.

Late in life, Bertrand Russell wrote:

“This has been my life. I have found it worth living, and would gladly live it again if the chance were offered me.”

How many parents could honestly say their treatment of their adult children is something they would repeat, exactly as it happened, if given the chance?

The only way we could live our relationships over again without going mad from despair at the futility of it all is to not know we were doing it.

So how do we know we’re not?

I’m not selling blame here. Parenting is monumentally difficult work. Most do it without training, inheriting patterns they themselves experienced, operating under pressure and constraints that would break most corporate executives.

“I understand my mother was doing her best,” says Shruti, my best friend’s older sister, thirty-six. “But her best-included rage, inconsistency, and using me as her emotional support animal from the time I was six. Understanding why she is the way she is doesn’t mean I have to keep experiencing it.”

Shruti sends birthday gifts. She answers emergencies. But weekly calls and holiday visits ended after her mother used an Antyesti (family funeral) to corner Shruti’s teenage daughter and criticize her weight.

“That was it,” Shruti says. “I couldn’t protect myself growing up, but I can protect my child now.”

Let’s not lie to ourselves.

Few things are more morally sickening than the parent who simultaneously demands access while refusing accountability. Who knocks on the door of their adult child’s life while pretending the locks weren’t installed because of them in the first place.

It’s always struck me as funny how those who claim abandonment by their children invariably present themselves as blameless vessels of unconditional love. They were never, as almost all parents occasionally are, impatient or cruel or selfish or wrong.

I present this idea, then, as a thought experiment, not an accusation: What if adult children who distance themselves aren’t running from love but from its absence? What if they’re not ghosting but finally listening to the ghost of their younger self who begged for something different?

Of course, there are adult children who separate from genuinely loving, well-meaning parents. Humans are complex, damaged, sometimes irrational creatures. No relationship comes with guarantees.

But when disconnection becomes a pattern, when multiple children make the same painful choice, perhaps we should question the common denominator.

“The moment that changed everything,” says my cousin, now in his forties, “was when my therapist asked me: ‘If your father was just a coworker, would you still choose to have lunch with him?’ The answer was immediate: absolutely not. So why was I spending holidays with someone whose company I couldn’t stand for an hour?”

He hasn’t spoken to his father in seven years. His brother made the same choice three years later.

“My father tells everyone we’ve abandoned him in his old age,” He says. “He never mentions the verbal abuse, the manipulation, the fact that he treated us like extensions of himself rather than individual humans.”

Remember that to be able to love your fate is to know you have lived your life right.

Here are some approaches for those navigating the complex territory of difficult parent relationships:

1. Accept that distance isn’t betrayal

Like I said before, you can’t command someone to love you and expect it to feel genuine. The same applies to family relationships.

Distance (physical, emotional, or both) isn’t a betrayal of family bonds. Sometimes it’s the only way to preserve whatever healthy connection might someday be possible. Sometimes it’s the only way to preserve yourself.

The space between you isn’t a failure. It’s a recognition of reality.

2. Stop expecting them to see what they refuse to see

It’s always struck me as funny how we keep presenting the same evidence to people who have consistently shown they’re unable or unwilling to acknowledge it. We enter the same conversations hoping for different outcomes, as if this time, finally, our parent will say, “You’re right. I understand now.”

Your parent may never validate your experience of them. They may never acknowledge the harm they’ve caused or the boundaries they’ve crossed. Their narrative about who you are and who they are may be fixed beyond hope of revision.

Accepting this isn’t cynicism. It’s the first step toward freedom.

3. Create your own belonging

The most liberating realization is that family is both what you’re given and what you choose. The people who see you clearly, who respect your boundaries, who love you without the need to control or diminish you — these are your people.

Your chosen family doesn’t erase your biological one; it simply provides the belonging and safety you deserve. We make our own meaning like we make our own families.

4. Recognize the difference between explanation and excuse

Understanding why your parent behaves as they do (their own upbringing, trauma, limitations) doesn’t obligate you to endure its continuation. Compassion doesn’t require access.

“I understand why you are this way” and “I accept how you treat me” are sentences that don’t need to appear in the same paragraph of your life.

Who wants to live forever in a state of perpetual understanding without ever receiving understanding in return?

Not me.

5. Remember that both of you are unfinished stories

To be able to love your fate is to know you have lived your life right.

Your parent’s story isn’t over. Neither is yours. The relationship between you remains, even in its absence, a living thing capable of evolution. What seems permanent now may shift with time, reflection, or circumstance.

I need no convincing that there are connections better left dormant. Levels of entanglement that need not be revisited, knowing there’s no prize at the end of it anyway. But if you’re reading this, you’re alive, and that means your story is not over. You’re still an agent, still an active participant in the complicated dance we call family.

If you wouldn’t choose this relationship again in its current form, you’re doing it wrong.

The difference is: now you get to decide what “doing it right” means for you.

(P.S. I have used different names for the people mentioned here to protect their privacy.)

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This post was previously published on medium.com.

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