Why more Asian adults are cutting ties with their parents

Sunita, a Hong Kong woman, found herself on the other side of that divide when her 25-year-old daughter stopped answering her messages and calls and blocked her after calling her a "toxic mother."

Sunita could not sleep or keep up with housework. "What did I do wrong?" she kept asking herself. Her attempts to reconcile failed. "How am I supposed to carry on living when the child I cared for 25 years decided to cut me off with no explanation?"

Deliberately ending communication with a family member is often called going "no contact."

In a survey of more than 1,300 U.S. adults, 27% said they were estranged from a relative, including 10% who were estranged from a parent or child, according to Cornell University.

In Asia, such a break can clash with expectations of filial piety.

Among Chinese respondents in a 2016–18 survey, 84% said a father’s authority should be respected under any circumstances, while 88% said children should strive to bring honor to their parents, according to Pew Research Center.

Illustration courtesy of CM Media

But such sentiments have not prevented estrangement in Asian families, especially in Hong Kong and Singapore, according to the South China Morning Post.

A study of 28,038 parent-child observations across eight survey rounds in South Korea found estrangement, although at understandably lower rates than in Western studies. The findings, based on older parents’ reports, were published in scientific journal Ageing & Society in May.

For some adult children, cutting contact is tied to grievances over how they were treated by their parents and a belief that filial obligations should not be unconditional. Some young adults in Singapore say they had cut ties with their parents over physical abuse, emotional distance or overbearing control.

In Singapore, that tension over what children owe their parents has even entered the law.

A 2023 amendment requires parents who abandoned, abused or neglected a child to seek a tribunal’s permission before claiming financial support from that child.

A third of cases before the Tribunal for the Maintenance of Parents involved adult children alleging such treatment.

Experts say young people are placing greater importance on matters like boundaries, childhood trauma and emotional well-being

For them, parental control over schooling, careers, or relationships feels less like care and more like interference. People interviewed by CNA described years of conflict and the difficulty of balancing their well-being against pressure to honor their parents. Micromanaging your child’s studies, career or romantic life can be seen by some parents as well-meaning acts of care, but by some youths as hurtful boundary violations.

Estrangement can grow from harsh parenting, favoritism, disputes over money or partners, and differences in values, Cornell sociologist Karl Pillemer’s research found. Even when parents and children describe the same rift, they may see its cause differently.

Parents most often pointed to their children’s relationships or sense of entitlement. Adult children more often cited hurtful parental behavior or feeling unsupported and unaccepted, shown by a study of almost 900 estranged parents and adult children surveyed separately.

The divide can reflect competing ideas of family: one emphasizes duty and forgiveness, while the other expects mutual respect and emotional safety, Ohio State University sociologist Rin Reczek wrote in an article.

A break in contact is not always permanent. Among people who reconnected with estranged relatives in Cornell’s Family Reconciliation Project, many stopped seeking agreement about the past and focused instead on what kind of relationship they could build now.