The correct answer generally is to maintain "the right level of contact", not too little, and not too much. This is not meant to be a selfish answer either. Also, there is no "fixed rate of contact" to be maintained; sometimes it's meant to be lower, and at other times higher.
What compromise is to be found with the parents in the first example? If you don't completely agree with them, then you're a sinner. I don't think the daughter can find a compromise.
How we treat family members is the most accurate indication of our decency. We chose our friends, so their company is easy. It's when we're forced to reckon with people we don't choose. That is the actual test of our grace.
The parent wasn't talking about strangers, they were talking about people you have to have a measure of intimacy with. Friends in this comparison are relatively easy because whatever happens later at the start you at least get to pick them.
No one gives you a choice about your parents or siblings. That's the great thing about them in some ways. Except by chance of birth I would never have been friends with my parents and probably not my siblings.
That said these are all people I love who I would never be friends with so they can't be treated like friends. Family has to be treated like family.
Yes, my family is Bangladeshi and my parents live ten minutes away. We are over there multiple times a week with our kids and usually sleep over on Fridays. Similar story with my Bangladeshi relatives in Australia and Canada. We have a critical mass in Toronto and Sydney and everyone lives nearby (several families in the same apartment complex or the same subdivision) and are constantly visiting each other. We moved to America when I was six, and I grew up without family nearby, and I still mourn the loss of that connection.
I think elsewhere it’s better for the average person, but worse for a substantial minority of people. There’s probably a relatively small number of people in abusive situations that should cut contact with their families. And in a more traditional society they would be stuck in dangerous situations. But there’s probably a much larger number of people who cut-off contact over bridgeable differences, who would make a healthier choice in a society where they faced social pressure to do so.
Parents held sway over their children because so much of life was dependent upon the family. Domestic help, help during food scarcity, help during a housing crisis, etc.
Today the government provides much of these services, but usually to a lesser extent. The result is the destruction of the power of the m/patriarchs, the replacement of the family by government, etc.
On the bright side, you can now walk away from abusive families. The more families are exposed, the more we see how many are messed up.
But on the downside, your average matriarch or patriarch was probably a better parent than the government, and better positioned to exert social pressure needed by often wayward children.
and then when they search in Linkedin or Facebook and your name pops up?
Thats my point. You have to actively block or hide from them and/or explicitly tell them no contact.
In the past you didn't have to actively hide because even if they knew where you lived and your phone number it was too expensive to do anything other than send the odd letter.
Yes in the past their would be less avenues for them to get back in contact if you went away, but that going away would be much more expensive for you too. E.g. in the past, people frequently died during such journeys. So costs were high for both parties.
So given that the costs of breaching the boundaries is lower, but so is the cost of making them, the solution is still just building them higher until it's infeasible to breach them.
I'm not talking about the 1800s. I'm talking about the 1920s-1970s
A three-day bus journey for a gay man moving to San Francisco or New York is not a big ask. But his parents aren't going to come visit or expect him to go back for Thanksgiving each year.
Quite a tear-jerking story, but in reality children don't want to call because they don't want to deal with aging parents, that are boring, keen on offering unsolicited "life advice" and at one point might become sick and ask for help.
The false confusion is what gets me when it comes to this topic.
If your position towards another person is "I expect the following of you", that person doesn't agree with those expectations and in fact finds them intolerable, and then in response to this disagreement you just double down every time and state your expectations more forcefully, what do you think is going to happen? You leave them only one choice to remove this ongoing source of pain from their lives - to remove you from it.
As is alluded to in this article, the central theme here is narcissism. Narcissists can't legitimise the concept of compromise in their heads, because compromising would involve an acceptance that they were wrong. A narcissist will literally die before they will do such a thing.
The vast majority of energy spent on this topic is completely wasted. When there is a psychological impossibility of one or more parties to the conflict from compromising and changing their minds and attitudes, all this stuff is just pointless bickering and reopening old wounds, that helps no one.
The central problem is that narcissism is effectively incurable. Changing this is where efforts should be focused, just like we focus efforts on curing other currently incurable ailments.
Predictable comments here - 'How can the children do this?'; 'Why can't people get along?'; 'but they're you're family'. Sure people, this is just a casual social fashion and estrangement something that people could not possibly do for a valid reason. You know it 'couldn't be right' and so people feel free to judge.
The key issue as you will see from a lot of the Reddit communities mentioned as well as the examples in the article is the narcism of the parents. There is no compromise with such people, it's either their way or the highway and we are reading about the people who took the highway.
Consider another family relationship: Divorce. Apart from a few religious fundamentalists we don't see people queuing up to try and reconcile divorced couples simply because they are divorced. We don't expect such people to be comfortable in their ex's presence, we don't feel the need to apply thought-terminating clichés to shut down the idea that they might be right. For some reason there is a societal inertia that parents have a divine right to just carry on being a*holes to their children if they wish and it is the children's fault if they don't like it.
I think more common is narcissism of the children--who often reject socially reasonable expectations imposed on them by parents.
American divorce culture is also deeply dysfunctional. It's not just "religious fundamentalists" who think that. Many of us asian americans look at it and silently judge you.
