Going No Contact is the New Black

The Four Stages of The Parenting Blame Game

There’s no way to escape the inevitable, once you choose to have kids. At some point you’re going to get the blame for everything, and the credit for nothing.

If Gandhi, the Dalai Lama, Mother Theresa and all the angels and saints combined their DNA to produce the perfect parent amalgamation ,  somewhere a teenager would still be complaining with zero self awareness or empathy about how their needs weren’t met and mum and dad ruined their life.

To paraphrase George Carlin - perhaps you should lose some of your needs.

It’s pretty normal for children to consider their parents a monolith to be resented, rather than an individual with their own needs and feelings, and to find it difficult to understand that perhaps, sometimes, they really are just annoying little shits at times.

But the current zeitgeist has exacerbated and weaponised the tendency of children to be selfish and self indulgent.

During their teen years, in the midst of a frank exchange of ideas, one of my kids shakily proclaimed “You just don’t understand!”

My response “I understand perfectly, I just don’t agree with you” was met with a howl of indignation, followed by them marching off into the night in high dudgeon. I waited five minutes, drove around and hunted them down, brought them home and made us all some hot chocolate. And then we all went to bed.

Because that’s absolutely normal behaviour in a teenager. Their brains are on fire, neurons have been pruning, neural pathways reshaping and reforming, the rational part of a teen’s brain isn’t fully developed and won’t be until age 25 or so.

Teenagers actually process information with a different part of their brain to adults. Hint — it’s not the logical part.

They are simply physiologically incapable of behaving or thinking like the more rational adults they will hopefully one day become.

And this is why I advocate moving both the voting age and the driving age to 21. But that’s another story.

Going No Contact is the New Black

Until I hit my 40s, I’d only heard of one woman disowned by her adult child - bearing in mind I’ve travelled a bit and known a really rather large selection of people from all different walks of life and cultures - anecdotally at least this was a rare event.

No longer is it rare.

It’s all over the internet, on every social media site, from Scumsnet and Reddit through Quora, Facebook and twitter.

And go no contact has seeped, as the poisonous internet does, into everyday conversations too.

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I recently read an online thread where a bride to be’s mother wanted to give a toast at her engagement party, and overall can be a bit pushy.

On the back of that, the bride to be has uninvited her own mother from her wedding. There are hundreds more of these stories floating around online.

• Your 68 year old mother doesn’t want to babysit your kids free of charge so you can go to work?! The selfish bitch! Go no contact.

• Your parents DO babysit your kids full time free of charge but they have the audacity to want to go on a three week holiday this year without your kids! Miserable, self centred swines, they took on the responsibility, it’s their job now, punish them until they cooperate. Go No Contact.

• Your father asked you when you were getting a job and finally leaving, because you moved back in with him aged 25 and now you’re 30 and showing no signs of beetling off? How cruel! He has all that space, he doesn’t need it, you show him, get a dump of your own and go no contact.

• Your parents vote differently to you and are unrepentant about it?! The monsters - Go No Contact.

I wish this was hyperbole, fearless reader. These are actual scenarios I've read, with thousands of slavering commenters pumping their internet fists in the air and chanting Go No Contact in response to pretty much any disagreement, or dilemma, or any scenario they cannot control.

Of course, there’s push back too, not everyone is batshit bonkers, even online.

But I now personally now know of several women whose kids have gone no contact, including a lady I work with. She’s broken hearted over the complete radio silence from one of her three adult children, and seems genuinely clueless as to why they are doing this.

The zeitgeist now embraces going no contact for what seem to me very small offences, or simply not seeing eye to eye.

And I predict that many of the current crop of GNCs will be desperately sorry they chose this path in a decade or so.

Because, past a certain point, relationships are not fixable.

Memory Games

As with the notion of trigger warnings - which have been proven actually not to work and possibly cause harm - Go No Contact seems to be a fragility response, evolving from what was once a fairly robust and extreme measure to protect you from dangerous people, to an everyday reaction to everyday irritations or disagreements.

I went no contact with my lush of an ex sister in law about 15 years ago. Best thing I ever did.

But it took years of her piss taking, overbearing, bullying, chaotic, selfish behaviour before I’d finally had enough.

Actions have consequences, as the GNCs are fond of saying. And GNC is a pretty extreme one. Use it wisely.

Let me also add, at this juncture, that I have not, ever, been disowned by my young adult children. We have a perfectly happy relationship.

So - as with my piece entitled Don’t Have Children, there are no sour grapes at work, and no personal agenda.

I’ve just been paying attention.

When is a Boundary not a Boundary?

Have you ever seen the animated classic The Selfish Giant (story written by Oscar Wilde)?

Basically, a giant found a bunch of annoying kids annoying, and they were playing in his garden when he arrived home. So rather than maybe trying to talk to the kids or embracing the notion of sharing, he built his own boundary and trapped himself in a loveless, freezing prison.

The Selfish Giant has a happy ending, however.

Many of these Go No Contacts will not.

Mugged on Memory Lane

Kids think their memories are perfect.

Surprise — they’re not.

Rather than turning this into a thesis, I’ll write another article on that later and just say this.

Like all of us, children tend to remember the big events, distort things through the lens of emotion (and their brains run on emotion, remember) and they are absolutely clueless about the enormity of the job of parenting.

Ensuring that another vulnerable, dependent human is protected, safe and cared for day in day out for years, sometimes decades is a task beyond compare.

Butterflies and Tiger’s Tails

Our pattern detecting brains evolved to notice and record that one time we noticed a tiger’s twitching tail, not the 1000 times a butterfly fluttered by.

So for all the hundreds or thousands of times parents go to work, pay the bills, give hugs, make dinners, pack lunches, tuck them in, wash their uniforms, buy them toys, take them to the movies, take them to the doctor, the dentist, drive them around town, help them with their homework — we get no credit.

But any stuff ups are written in permanent ink in the Big Book of Sads.

Adults have already been children, and as such have a basis for comparison — but your kids have only up to that point been kids. They think they know everything. And they’re looking for someone to blame for not having had an enhanced consumer experience 100% of the time.

And for all you perfect parents currently patting yourselves on the back — this is something you will learn as they grow up.

All of which brings us to:

The Blame Game

It’s not that blaming your parents for every time you ever felt anything but peace, harmony and joy is a new phenomenon - it’s just one that has been ferociously exaggerated by online social contagion. And that’s bad news for the parents of today.

A whole lot of you are going to be held culpable for every single thing that ever went wrong in your children’s lives up to and including the five hundred thousand photos you insisted on sharing online — an activity I can smugly assure you I had no involvement in.

Yep. That sanctimonious baby/toddler/young child bubble you’re living in will be popped in about a decade when the natural course of things sees them start to examine you with critical eyes.

Stage One — Blame Our Parents

From puberty till their mid 20s, kids start believing they were hard done to by their parents. Some even were.

The slightly less theatrical will generally admit it wasn’t all that bad, but even in my own cohort in the 1980s there was a certain jostling for position in the My Parents Are Worse Than Your Parents Games.

Generally, once you’ve had a couple of kids yourself and parented them to the teenage years, you start to really understand the sacrifices your parents made by choosing not to simply drop you off in a forest somewhere with a pack of handy wolves.

Stage Two — I’m So Much Better Than My Parents so This Will NEVER Happen to ME

Reader, I was that soldier.

Just as we all blame our parents for things we shouldn’t because our spumescent brains are hurtling us helter-skelter through teenagehood, so we all know in our very core that WE are far better parents than our parents ever were.

I mean, to be fair, many of us ARE better parents than our parents were. At least those of us who lived in violent environments.

But guess what? My parents were indescribably better parents than theirs were. And theirs undoubtedly did the best with the shitty hand they were dealt too.

But never fear — because your children will always adore you every bit as much as they currently do, and treat the pearls of wisdom you dispense with reverence and respect. They’ll remember all the amazing things you did for them and with them — obviously.

Your children will grow up beautifully adjusted and it will all be thanks to your loving, caring, supportive and nurturing ways.

You’re the best parents ever. You know far more than previous generations — those people were idiots.

So you can safely tell everyone how to parent. Because of your expertise your kids will grow up perfectly balanced, the best possible version of themselves, and acknowledge how great their childhoods were.

In fact, when they’re accepting their Nobel Peace Prize, they’ll probably give a speech admitting they owe it all to you.

Buckle up. You’re in for a bumpy ride.

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Stage Three — Reality Bites

One day, sometime after they’ve hit puberty, you look around and realise that not only don’t your kids adore you anymore, and don’t consider you the all knowing all caring voice of The Almighty. The ungrateful reprobates actually think they’ve had it tough.

It takes True Grit to get through a childhood immersed in toys, affection, love, birthday parties, full bellies, warm beds, constant support and reams of attention.

You sometimes made them feel bad, you monster. You didn’t agree with them on everything. They felt invalidated. Sometimes you (gasp) ignored them.

On several occasions you selfishly went out with your friends without taking them. You may have occasionally had a glass of cider, failed to share your chocolate, or not praised their clearly inspired efforts in a suitably enriching, supportive, engaging manner designed to offer viable applicable feedback.

A few times your eyes glazed over when they were reciting the fourteenth speech of the year that you’d helped them prepare for with cue cards. And there was that one time you didn’t turn up to a parent-teacher interview and were late with their dinner.

In between working, cleaning, cooking, parenting and doing every other damn thing — you may even have raised your voice to them at times.

The horror.

It’s hardly any wonder they want you to pay for their expensive psychologists now is it? In fact, it’s only fair!

Stage Four — The Generation Game

I wish my parents had stuck around on this planet long enough for me to acknowledge the creeping unease that was growing in my belly as my kids grew older.

A feeling that maybe I really had just been an annoying little shit at times. That if they occasionally looked bored or angry, I may have deserved it. That not every sharp word needs to be the subject of a video entitled Poor Me, Poor Me, Poor Poor Me.

That, in fact, there were times when they reacted as normal humans and it’s not that they didn’t understand me - actually they did.

Kids are incredibly hard work. Parenting is day in day out with no time off for good behaviour, and it’s only love that keeps you upright and sniffing the air.

If you’re doing all the basics and showing up every day — well done. It was my deep and abiding love for my children that made the times of slog bearable.

Reasons to be fearful

Coupled with their own mental health issues, many young people have been encouraged by social media, self diagnoses and a disturbing. slow but notable change within the industry of mental health, to ruminate and fixate on perceived harms done.

And when we combine the natural tendency for children to try to lay blame on their parents with an unstable society hell bent on labelling, treating, medicating and therapising pretty much every quirk of human nature, and then add the internet - you’ve got the perfect breeding ground for performative, attention seeking over reactions, which seems to be manifesting more and more often as Go No Contact.

Swings and Roundabouts

There are, indubitably, some parents who are genuinely abusive. I had a childhood friend whose mother once whacked him over the head with a beer bottle - and she was the better of the two parents.

Time was, I did tend to believe that if a person went no contact with their mum and dad there must be a damn good reason. And, before the perilously poisonous internet and the slow crumbling of societal stability, this was probably true.

And certainly, nobody is owed anything by way of being related to someone, even if you produced them from your own womb, forever altering your body and endangering your life in the process.

Obviously, if your parents are torturers, rapists, or used to beat you on the daily and so on, you’re well within your rights to delete them from your life.

And, obviously, you can choose to go no contact from your parents for any reason - or none.

And yet.

As a current fashion, Going No Contact seems to be the new black.

Redefining Abuse

Therapy for anxious, struggling people used to encourage one to build up a toolbox to foster resilience along with an understanding that you cannot control the actions of others, but rather can build skills to help navigate the often difficult world.

But therapy is only as good as the therapist themselves and the ethics and beliefs underpinning the industry.

Additionally, there seems to be an encouragement to ruminate on past events. Instead of lancing the boil and moving forward, there’s an endless picking over the bones.

And, memory being what it is, constantly remembering and rehashing old hurts means that not only are you viewing the memory event through the lens of your own emotions, you’re remembering a copy of a copy of a copy, distorted by too much scrutiny.

It’s no coincidence that, just as young people have become less stoic, resilient and inclined to self awareness, so the goalposts for abuse have also been pushed further and further back so as to include any perceived offence, whatever the intention or circumstances.

So that time I yelled at my teenage kid (from my bed through two closed doors) to shut up and go to sleep - because it was midnight and I was getting up at 6am to go to work - was not, as she claimed at the time, abuse.

And if you dissolve into tears every time someone raises their voice to you or is impatient, good luck out there in the big, scary world.

From the National Domestic Family and Violence bench book - Abuse is defined as “verbal, non-verbal or physical acts by the perpetrator that are intended to exercise dominance, control or coercion over the victim; degrade the victim's emotional or cognitive abilities or sense of self-worth; or induce feelings of fear and intimidation in the victim.”

Except, no, hang on, that doesn’t work.

Anyone can lose their temper. In fact, all of you, every last one of you, has done so. I sure have. And every single human alive has lost their temper when they shouldn’t have, and regretted the way they made someone feel.

Anyone who claims they are exempt from this is what I like to refer to as “A Liar”.

So every single human on the earth is an abuser then?

Does yelling at your kid “For God’s sake, I’ve asked you four times, just make your bloody bed!” count as abuse?

What if a man shoves another man while getting off a train and the shovee turns and says emphatically “Look where you’re fucking going mate!” and the shover finds that response a bit much?

Because by the definition given above, the yeller and the shovee are abusers.

So to the definition of abusive above I would add the caveat repeated.

If a mother screams “Make your bloody bed!” in her child’s face every day - that’s probably abusive.

And if the man who shouted when he was pushed then turned around and screamed at the other man again just for the joy of feeling like an alpha - yep that’s now in the realms of abusive.

Abuse, like bullying, involves a pattern of behaviour and misuse of power.

But that’s not the definition many will claim.

And I am weary of natural, standard human actions, interactions and reactions being classed as abusive, or bullying.

In my opinion this has lowered the bar of what constitutes abuse to a frightening and worrying extent and certainly has made me more wary of believing anyone who states they have suffered abuse.

Family Ties

Some families really are abusive and harmful.

And people can choose to go No Contact or make a big public scene about how dreadful their families are.

Of course they can. We all have a right to our own boundaries.

But do it at your peril.

Look at poor old Hasbeen Hazza. He dumped his loving family at the urging of a wife who was playing into his fragile and yet massive ego, told the world “That’s it then, I’m off” to much hilarity, and now his marriage is on the rocks, and what does he have to go back to?

(At this point, I want to take a moment to remind you all that I predicted the failure of Ginge and Whinge’s marriage shortly after his 40th birthday. I’ll dig that article out too and subject you to it later. I am not crowing at their downfall because they have children involved in this mess, but I could see it coming from the other side of the world, and I do like being proven right.)

Family are the ones who must open the door to you when you have no choice but to knock.

I dare say they’d find Harry a cottage somewhere in Europe and visit him from time to time, like they did poor old Edward and Wallace, but he certainly cannot be trusted within the family ranks properly, ever again.

Once you’ve publicly disowned and degraded your family - that relationship is altered. Irrevocably.

And so when I see Go No Contact bandied about so casually - mainly by the young - I wonder how these fragile souls will be travelling in ten years time when that internet “family” and all those “Friends are the family you choose” memes have fallen into dust and silence.

When they’ve been reviling and avoiding their true, actual families for so long they no longer feel they can simply knock on the door. When they have tainted everything with their tantrums.

Even if your mum welcomes back the prodigal - and let’s face it, most mums would - hateful conduct towards your nearest and dearest is never forgotten. And the familial, irreplaceable bonds and closeness you once enjoyed will feel bogus and flimsy.

Saints and Sinners

There was a period of time when I received my allotment of blame for things that my kids didn’t understand, or make allowances for - blame for carrying several humans up a great big hill with very little help, imperfectly.

Long ago, I apologised for any shitty behaviours an avoidable mistakes, with honesty and sincerity. And then I was done with self-flagellation.

Fortunately, they’re good-hearted humans. They knew they were loved, and they grew up and - for the most part - got it.

But the reality is, they’ll never appreciate parenting, unless they have kids themselves.

Until you are a parent yourself you cannot fully grasp that children are not their parent’s peers, should not be their judge and jury and that a child’s perspective is not the equivalent of an adult one.

And it’s cruel to tell an unformed, youthful brain that they are right to destroy the most relevant, meaningful relationship of their life for the thrill of telling their friends that’s it - I’m Going No Contact.

Not You, Obviously

But if you’re a parent of younger children, shaking your head at the fact that I’m just a clueless older Karen who doesn’t get it - never mind me.

Ignore everything I’ve said.

Because YOU don’t have to worry about Go No Contact - do you, perfect parent of today?

It’s not emotional fragility and a brain warped by strange online notions causing kids to reject and over react to anyone who disagrees with them.

It’s obviously always the parents’ fault.

You’re so wise. You know so much more than the generations of uninformed parents of yesteryear.

You’ve read the books. You’ve attended the workshops. You’re a forward thinker and you’ve got Trixie and Jasper in enrolled in all the right classes.

Your responses are fair and relevant. You’ve cracked this whole parenting malarkey.

YOUR children will never bludgeon you with Go No Contact to punish you for indefinable offences.

You’ll never have to face the bewilderment, shame and sorrow of your children turning on you for reasons you simply don’t understand, and carry that burden to the grave.

Because that only happens to bad parents. Right, friends and neighbours?

Right?

For all the parents who turned up every day and tried their level best.

These are my opinions. Where possible, when writing, I like to add links and citations. But I don’t have a year to study the various threads and hammer down citations, and I’m keen to publish something rather than nothing - so yes it may be anecdotal and imprecise in places.

Updated and heavily amended, some of this material was originally published May 2022