Matt asked me something the other day that I haven’t been able to shake. We were doing our nightly check-in—the one we do after the kids are in bed, devices down, just the two of us on the couch—and I’d been telling him about a phone call with my mom. How it was fine. How it’s always fine. How “fine” is the only temperature our conversations ever reach.
He looked at me and said, “Do you think you’re actually yourself when you talk to her?”
I didn’t answer right away. Not because I didn’t know the answer, but because the answer made my chest tight.
No. I’m not. I haven’t been in a long time. And the strange part is, I don’t think I ever made a conscious decision to stop. It just happened in increments—years of small recalibrations where I learned, without anyone saying it out loud, which parts of me were welcome in that house and which parts needed to be tucked away.
I know I’m not alone in this. And I know the distance so many adult children feel from their parents isn’t usually about one catastrophic event. It’s about something quieter and harder to name: a thousand small moments where being real felt riskier than being pleasant.
What nobody remembers but the body keeps
Clinical psychologist Dr. Jonice Webb has spent over two decades studying what she calls Childhood Emotional Neglect—and her framing of it changed the way I understand my own family. As she explains in her book Running on Empty, emotional neglect isn’t something a parent does to a child. It’s something a parent fails to do. It’s not an act. It’s a non-event. And because our brains don’t record things that didn’t happen, it’s almost impossible to see—both for the parent and for the child.
Webb describes how it typically unfolds in a thousand small moments across a childhood. A child is upset and the parent changes the subject. A teenager shares something vulnerable and is met with practical advice instead of emotional acknowledgment. A kid cries and hears, “You’re fine.” Over and over, the message lands—not through cruelty, but through absence: Your feelings are not important here. Your inner world is not something we attend to in this family.
The child doesn’t rebel against this. They adapt. They wall off their emotional life because that’s what the environment requires. They become easy, agreeable, self-sufficient. Adults call them mature. Teachers call them a pleasure to have in class. And underneath all that composure, a quiet conclusion takes root: Being fully myself is not safe in this relationship.
That conclusion doesn’t expire when you turn eighteen. It follows you into adulthood, and it shapes every interaction you have with the parent who—without ever intending to—taught you that authenticity was a liability.
The accumulation no one can point to
This is the part that makes it so hard to talk about, and so easy to dismiss.
When adult children pull away from their parents, the cultural script expects a reason. An affair. An addiction. A screaming match at Thanksgiving. Something visible, something dramatic, something that justifies the distance. And when there’s nothing like that—when the parents were stable and providing and technically present—the default explanation becomes: the child is ungrateful. Selfish. Too sensitive.
But the research tells a different story. A study of 14,000 U.S. children published by the Sutton Trust found that roughly 40 percent of children do not form strong emotional bonds with their parents—not because of abuse or poverty, but because of a lack of emotional attunement. The parents in these families weren’t absent. They were picking up their kids from school and sitting at the dinner table and signing permission slips. They just weren’t tuning in to the emotional current underneath. And that gap—between physical presence and emotional presence—is the gap that adult children spend decades trying to either bridge or walk away from.
I grew up in that gap. My parents are good people. My dad worked hard, came home, provided. My mom kept the house running with a level of competence I still marvel at. Dinner every night. Homemade everything. A garden, a routine, a structure that held. But feelings? Feelings were not the language spoken in our house. When something was wrong, you powered through it. When someone was upset, the solution was a task, not a conversation. And over time I learned—without anyone teaching me directly—that the safest version of me in that house was the cheerful, helpful, uncomplicated one. The one who didn’t need too much. The one who read the room and adjusted accordingly.
That’s not trauma with a capital T. But it’s something. And it’s the something that makes the hour-long drive to my parents’ house feel like preparing for a performance rather than going home.
Why the body says no before the mind says why
Here’s what I wish more people understood about the adult child who loves their parents but avoids visiting: it is rarely a thought-out decision. It’s a body response.
You don’t sit down and rationally conclude, “I will not visit my parents this weekend because our emotional dynamic is insufficiently attuned.” What happens is simpler and more primal than that. You think about going and your stomach tightens. You imagine the conversation and feel tired before it starts. You sit in the car in the driveway and take a breath that’s deeper than it should need to be for a Sunday afternoon. Your nervous system is doing the math your conscious mind won’t do—adding up all those small moments of emotional mismatch and producing a single output: this environment requires you to shrink.
As Dr. Webb has noted in interviews about her work, children who grow up with their emotions unacknowledged learn to push those emotions down and away. It becomes automatic. And in adulthood, the body remembers what the mind has rationalized. You can tell yourself your parents meant well—and they did. You can remind yourself they gave you a stable life—and they did. But your body remembers the version of you that had to exist in that house, and it doesn’t want to go back there. Not because of danger. Because of the exhaustion of being half a person.
The parents who did everything right on paper
I want to pause here, because this is the part that could land wrong if I’m not careful—and getting it right matters to me, both as someone still working through her own family patterns and as a mother trying not to replicate them.
The parents I’m describing are not villains. Webb herself emphasizes this again and again: the vast majority of emotionally neglectful parents were emotionally neglected themselves as children. They literally cannot give what they never received. If no one ever modeled emotional attunement for you, you don’t just fail to provide it—you don’t even see the absence. You genuinely believe you did everything right, because by every visible metric, you did.
My mom didn’t ignore my feelings to be cruel. She ignored them because feelings were ignored in her house too. She was raised by a hardworking, emotionally distant father and an anxious mother who expressed love through labor, not language. She inherited a template—love means doing, not feeling—and she passed it on to me with the same quiet efficiency she passed on her recipe for Sunday pot roast. No malice. No awareness. Just the silent transfer of what was never examined.
Understanding this doesn’t erase the impact. But it does change the story from one of blame to one of inheritance. And that shift—from “my parents failed me” to “my parents gave me what they had, and what they had was incomplete”—is the shift that makes space for both compassion and change.
What I’m trying to do differently
This is where everything I’ve learned about my own family meets everything I’m building with mine. And honestly, it’s where I feel the most pressure to get things right—and the most certain that “right” isn’t the point.
Ellie is five. She is tender-hearted and chatty and pays closer attention to the emotional weather of our house than I’d sometimes like. When I’m quiet, she notices. When Matt and I have a tense exchange, she notices. She is, in many ways, the child I was—attuned, adaptive, quietly scanning for how to keep things smooth.
The difference I’m trying to create is in what she does with that information. In my house growing up, noticing the emotional climate meant adjusting yourself to maintain it. In our house, I want it to mean something different. I want her to notice and then speak. To say, “You seem upset,” and hear me say, “I am a little. Thank you for noticing. But it’s not your job to fix.” I want her to bring me a feeling—any feeling, the ugly ones too—and have the experience of being met with curiosity instead of correction.
My go-to phrase with both kids is “tell me more.” Not “you’re fine.” Not “let’s move on.” Tell me more. It’s small. But it’s the opposite of what I grew up with. And every time I say it, I feel myself building a bridge between the house I was raised in and the house I want to raise them in.
Milo, at two, doesn’t have the words yet. But he has the body language. When he’s upset, he climbs into my lap and buries his face in my neck, and I just hold him. I don’t rush him through it. I don’t say, “You’re okay.” I let him not be okay for a minute. Because that’s what I needed, and it’s what I never got—the permission to feel something fully without it being treated as a problem to solve.
The distance is not cruelty
If you’re an adult who loves your parents but finds it exhausting to be around them—who drives home from visits feeling drained in a way you can’t quite explain—I want you to know that you’re not broken and you’re not ungrateful.
You’re responding to something real. Something that may not have a name in your family, because your family never had the language for it. Something that accumulated silently over years of being subtly asked to be less of yourself so the family system could stay comfortable.
And the distance you’ve created? It’s not a punishment. It’s the space your nervous system needs to be a full person again. To stop performing and start breathing. To remember what it feels like to exist without editing yourself in real time.
That doesn’t mean the relationship is beyond repair. It doesn’t mean you owe your parents a reckoning or a diagnosis. Sometimes it just means giving yourself permission to love them from a distance that allows you to stay whole. And sometimes—when you’re ready, when the timing is right—it means trying, gently, to bring a little more of your real self into the room and seeing what happens.
What I keep practicing
I called my mom this morning. It was a short call. She told me about her garden. I told her about Ellie’s latest art project. We stayed on the surface, as we do. But at the end, I said something I don’t usually say. I said, “I love you, Mom. And I’m working on some stuff from when I was a kid. Not because you did anything wrong. Just because I want to understand myself better.”
There was a pause. Then she said, “Well, that sounds like a good thing to do.”
It wasn’t a breakthrough. It wasn’t a scene from a movie. But it was honest. And for a family that built an entire culture around staying pleasant, honest felt like a very small act of courage.
Progress, not perfection. That’s what I keep whispering to myself. And I mean it more every time I say it.
