What if your estranged adult child is expressing ideas that seem delusional?
Should you play into those delusions? Or try to talk her out of them?
You might worry that while going along with your child’s distorted thinking may soothe her somewhat, it isn’t good for her psychological health.
You’re torn between preserving the relationship at any cost, and doing the right thing for your child.
Fortunately, this isn’t a choice parents have to make.
Through a story about a delusional patient in a psychiatric ward, Tina shows why parents should focus on the child and the relationship, not the delusion, for best results.

You’d be surprised how many estranged adult children come from close families. It’s a myth that parents must have been toxic and abusive for adult children to seek estrangement. Sometimes the very closeness that characterizes a family is what underlies the adult child’s need for distance. But how can that be? Aren’t close families good for children? Yes, close families are wonderful environments for children to grow up in. But not every family is close in the right way for children to thrive. In this episode, Tina distinguishes between closeness and enmeshment. While closeness is healthy and feels good for everyone involved, enmeshment pumps the brakes on individuality and autonomy, especially in children. The closeness that parents enjoy in enmeshed families may be experienced by children as control or benign oppression. As always, Tina offers hope for parents to turn things around.

Understanding your adult child’s reasons for estrangement can be hard, especially when there’s no communication.
But it can seem downright mystifying when you look back at your child’s youth. “He had so many great experiences!” you may exclaim, “We made sure he had good times and lots of opportunities.” You wonder how someone who was given so much could ever turn on his parents.
It’s wonderful to have the satisfaction that you gave your child(ren) as much as you could. But parents do this naturally, not as a quid pro quo, and not purely out of generosity. Surely it helped you sleep at night if you knew your child was warm and safe and fed.
It’s a sad awakening to realize that the childhood you were able to give her, didn’t guarantee your child’s happiness. 
But there may still be much you can joyfully give that can have a positive impact on both of you.
In this episode, Tina outlines three assumptions parents make about good childhoods, and explains why the privileges and opportunities your child received are less relevant to the relationship than one might hope.
The investments you made in your child(ren) were never guaranteed. But they were also less conscious than the ones you can make in that relationship today. Trade assumptions for good information, and anticipate better results.
If you enjoy this podcast you'll also like Tina's book, Reconnecting With Your Estranged Adult Child.

How can they do this? Is it really okay with them? Are they happy? Research suggests answers to these questions, and Tina shares the information in this informative episode.

It's easy to resent feeling required to indulge the poor behavior of your estranged adult child. You feel like you're being mistreated, and yet you're supposed to jump through hoops for them?

If you've ever felt this way when listening to this podcast or reading Tina's book (Reconnecting With Your Estranged Adult Child), this episode is for you.

Estrangement from your adult child may or may not include verbal assaults from him or her, featuring foul language. If you’re faced with this kind of behavior, given the current estrangement, what’s the best way to respond? You don’t want to push your child further away. But does that mean you have to tolerate whatever language they may fling at you in a text? In this episode, Tina offers a 2-part response for parents. Her approach takes into account both your family’s communication history and the importance of healthy boundaries, even during estrangement. Don’t continue to put up with rude behavior. Know where your limits are, and calmly assert them. Do this with your child, your spouse or partner, other family members and friends. Setting boundaries, if you do it in the spirit of building better relationships, will not damage your bond with your adult children. Use the examples given in this episode to set your own boundaries around the disrespectful use of foul language. In the spirit of picking your battles, Tina also offers an opinion regarding your adult child’s use of “snarky tones” with you.

Do you let them know how their behavior is making you feel? Or not?
Tell them just what it’s like not to get a reply, time after time? Or pretend you’re fine with it?
When all you get from them on your birthday is a 2-word text at 11pm, should you say something?
Knowing how and when to express your feelings about the estrangement to your adult child is not easy. What if expressing negative emotions just pushes him further away?
There’s a clue in a simple rule of thumb for rejected parents. Before you do anything, ask yourself, “Will this serve my child?”
You’re human. You deserve for someone to care when your feelings are hurt, and when you’re having a hard time. But it’s not clear that your adult child is the right person to fill that role, especially when she’s estranged.
Tina offers some food for thought in this episode (use the player below to listen now) if you’re thinking of giving your estranged adult child a piece of your mind.

Estrangement doesn’t happen on a whim. If your adult child has cut ties with you at the moment, he has reasons that make sense to him, and that are probably long-standing. In order for the estrangement to end, those reasons usually need to be addressed and neutralized. Many parents rejected by their adult children are in such a hurry to end the estrangement that they don’t take sufficient time to investigate the “why” of what happened. They miss opportunities to understand and correct missteps that led to problems in the first place. Even if they search high and low for the cause of their children’s behavior, parents as a group tend to look in the wrong places for the causes of estrangement. In this informative episode, Tina helps parents slow down and focus their efforts where they’ll be most fruitful. If you can pinpoint the real cause(s) of your adult child’s desire for distance, you can start building a better experience for both of you in the future.

Your child has cut you off, but still speaks to your spouse. Or vice versa.
Maybe your child is estranged from both of you, but both parents are not on the same page about how to respond.
Should the two of you act as a team, taking a single stance together vis-à-vis your child?
Usually the parent who wants a united front is the one who favors withholding attention, contact, or something else from the estranged adult child.
The idea is, if your child won’t speak to your spouse, or to both of you, then the two of you won’t condone this behavior with contact or favors. There should be consequences, the thinking goes.
But is that a good idea? It depends on whether the outcome you seek is to hold on to your principles, or to facilitate reconciliation. Your strategy may not be able to do both.
In this helpful episode, Tina offers her thoughts on parents presenting a united front. She considers both partial estrangement (i.e., estrangement from one parent but not the other) and estrangement from both parents.

Mothers and daughters have the potential for a very close, lifelong relationship. But not every mother-daughter pair enjoys a harmonious, supportive bond. You may have seen your friends get together with their grown daughters, and watched them with envy. Your daughter, in contrast, has become estranged. How did this happen, and why? If the mother-daughter bond is supposed to be so close, why do so many mothers and daughters become estranged? Mother-daughter relationship coach Rosjke Hasseldine has some important thoughts on that question, and she shares them in this episode. Listen to an excerpt from Tina’s interview with Rosjke, who is also the author of The Mother-Daughter Puzzle and The Silent Female Scream. In this excerpt you’ll hear Rosjke discussing the roots of conflict between mothers and daughters – what often goes wrong in this very special relationship, and why the problem extends beyond just you and your daughter.