Your Family Needs You (And You Need Them) / Podcast by John Stonestreet and Maria Baer for Break Point
Earlier this month, in a piece for The Atlantic, Joshua Coleman described an epidemic that’s not COVID but that’s also afflicting America: family estrangement. As a psychologist who specializes in family therapy, Coleman reports that his practice is flooded with older parents mourning the loss of contact with their grown children and with grown children angry and hurt by conflict with parents. “The rules of family life have changed,” he said.
The more recent changes in family structures and dynamics he described have only added to the pressure already felt by earlier stressors. For example, the Industrial Revolution, which moved work from inside the home to out, completely upended family life in all kinds of ways. The more recent forces of family estrangement, on the other hand, don’t come so much from the outside as from the inside.
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Coleman quotes Stephanie Coontz, the Director of Research at the Council on Contemporary Families, to clarify this point:
“Never before have family relationships been seen as so interwoven with the search for personal growth, the pursuit of happiness, and the need to confront and overcome psychological obstacles.”
