How Gender Shapes Pathways to Parent-Child Estrangement

• In Event: 40466 - Child Gender, Parenting, and Intergenerational Relationships Across the Life Course

Abstract

Parent-child estrangement conflicts with the widespread assumption that the parent-child bond endures unconditionally throughout the life course. This paper draws on 30 in-depth interviews with adult children in Canada, the United States, and the United Kingdom to better understand their experiences of estrangement from their parent(s). Here, we account for gendered themes in their experiences of estrangement and what they reveal about the tensions and alignments that exist between situations of parent-child estrangement and conventional ideas about families. Further, it invites a consideration of how gendered familial labor and gendered expectations of children can be conceptually expanded to include cases of parent-child estrangement. In doing so, this paper contributes an understanding of gender’s impacts on how estranged adult children navigate familial labor, child expectations, and the process of parent-child estrangement more broadly.

Authors

• Michelle Nadon Bélanger, University of Toronto

• Taylor Domingos, Northwestern University

• Aryssa Hasham, University of Toronto