TL;DR
A September 15 study of five older Finnish parents separates making sense of an estrangement from the broader question of whether life still feels meaningful.
A larger 2025 study found estrangement was associated with lower sense of purpose among older parents, but it didn’t establish that estrangement caused that difference.
I still care why this happened. I’m less certain that an answer to why can carry everything I once expected from it.
I’ve spent years trying to understand what happened.
Not in the abstract. I kept the emails, the court documents, the recordings and the dates. I organized them because I wanted the record to be available when memory got disputed, when stories changed and, eventually, if my sons ever wanted to see my side for themselves.
Last week I wrote that I finally sent both of them the archive. I told them they didn’t have to agree with me. I still wanted them to have it.
So I’m not done caring about why.
A study published September 15 made me notice that I’ve been asking another question as if it were the same one.
It isn’t.
Two different questions
Jonna Ojalammi analyzed interviews with five older adults in Finland who were estranged from adult children. Five people is a very small study. It can’t tell us how most estranged parents experience estrangement. The distinction is what caught me.
One question was how the participants made sense of the estrangement itself. Who did they believe was responsible? What story did they use to explain how the relationship broke?
The other question was larger: did their lives still feel meaningful?
Those questions are related. They still aren’t the same question.
In these interviews, assigning responsibility was the most common way participants tried to make sense of the estrangement. But trying to explain the estrangement wasn’t the same as finding life meaningful.
The paper is careful about the limits of five interviews. I want to be careful too. This isn’t evidence that explanations don’t matter. Ojalammi examined two different problems inside the same loss.
What an answer can do
I know what it feels like when one question becomes more settled.
In The Weight of Being Right, I wrote about what happened when years of documentation stopped feeling like a pile of disputed memory and started feeling like solid ground. The record answered things I had spent years second-guessing.
That mattered.
It didn’t give the years back.
I think I carried a similar expectation around the word why. If I could understand the sequence well enough, if I could identify what happened and when, maybe the explanation itself would loosen something.
Maybe it does. I don’t want to dismiss that. Understanding can change how a person carries the past. But it still has limits. It can organize what happened. It can’t recreate a graduation I missed or give me a conversation that never happened. It can’t introduce me to the years of my sons’ lives I didn’t get to know.
To me, missing those years is a different kind of absence from missing an explanation.
What’s hard to replace
Ojalammi’s study uses the word generativity. In this context, it means the sense that something of your life continues forward through later generations: through what you teach, pass down, build or leave behind.
The five participants found meaning in different places, including community and personal projects as well as other relationships. The study doesn’t say those things replace an estranged child. On one important point, it suggests the opposite: the generativity found in relationships with children and grandchildren may be especially hard to replace elsewhere.
The examples are specific to these participants, including inheritance and religious practices. But parts of parenthood point forward. You imagine what you will teach. What stories will survive you. Whether there will be grandchildren who know where they came from. Whether something ordinary from your life ends up in theirs.
I wrote about that loss in The Men I Don’t Know: the possibility of weddings I may not attend, grandchildren whose faces I may never learn and whole branches of my family growing somewhere beyond my reach.
I don’t think another relationship simply takes that place. That doesn’t mean the rest of life becomes empty.
Purpose is part of the loss too
A larger 2025 study gives the question of purpose after estrangement a little more weight, although it still can’t tell us what causes what.
Andreas Nikolajsen and his colleagues collected survey data from 75 parents aged 75 or older who were estranged from at least one adult child and 196 older parents in a comparison group. Estrangement was associated with lower well-being and sense of purpose, more depressive symptoms and greater loneliness.
That’s an association. The study didn’t show that estrangement caused those differences. People enter estrangement with different relationships, histories and life circumstances. The researchers measured a pattern. They didn’t prove a single cause.
Still, I noticed that sense of purpose was one of the things they measured.
For a parent, estrangement can also remove a future you had quietly assumed would contain certain roles. Father. Grandfather. The person who tells the old story one more time. The person whose box of photographs eventually belongs to someone younger.
Some of those roles may return. Some may not.
In my view, the uncertainty is part of the loss.
I still want to know
I don’t want to turn this research into a lesson about moving on.
I still care what happened. I still care what the record says. I still care whether my sons ever read what I sent them and what they make of it if they do.
Those questions haven’t become smaller because other parts of life matter to me too.
But I’m starting to separate the jobs I was asking those questions to do.
The answer to why might help me understand the past. It might correct something false. It might even change what becomes possible between us someday.
I don’t think it can be responsible for making the rest of my life meaningful.
And I don’t think a meaningful life requires me to pretend the part occupied by my sons is interchangeable with something else.
I still want the answer to why.
I just don’t want to ask it to give back something no explanation can return.
Author’s Note
This article combines personal reflection with published research on estrangement from adult children. The research discussed here is limited by sample size, study design and population. It doesn’t establish what caused any individual estrangement or what any estranged parent or adult child should do. My references to my own family reflect my perspective and previously documented experience. This isn’t legal or clinical advice, and it isn’t a substitute for mental-health care.
Resources
Jonna Ojalammi, “Making meaning of estrangement from adult children and its relationship to sense of meaning in life among Finnish older adults”, Journal of Religion, Spirituality & Aging, published online September 15, 2026. Exploratory qualitative analysis of interviews with five Finnish older adults estranged from adult children.
Andreas Nikolajsen, Lars Larsen, Morten Christoffersen, Bjorn E. Holstein and Christine E. Swane, “Estrangement between older parents and adult children: Associations with mental health”, Journal of Social and Personal Relationships, 2025. Survey responses from 75 estranged parents aged 75+ and 196 older parents in a comparison group; 234 respondents had complete data for the analysis. Open accepted manuscript.
Andreas Nikolajsen, Lars Larsen, Bjorn E. Holstein and Christine E. Swane, “How Older Parents Cope With Estrangement From Adult Children: A Qualitative Study”, first published online November 24, 2025. Interviews with 15 older parents describing reconciliation-oriented, acceptance-oriented and avoidance coping.
Rin Reczek, “Redoing Family After Estrangement”, Journal of Marriage and Family, first published February 13, 2026. Interviews with 68 U.S. adults estranged from family of origin; useful as a contrast because the sample concerns estrangement from parents and other family-of-origin members rather than parents estranged from their own children.