The cultural narrative around estrangement is that it's a problem to be solved. ...And so there are websites and books and articles meant to help families reconcile, with advice on everything from how to phrase an apology to how to take legal action. For some families, that helps. But for the rest of us, that pressure to get back together makes everything worse. For us, estrangement isn’t a problem; it’s a solution to a problem, a response to an otherwise unsolvable dilemma. It’s a last resort when you’ve tried everything else over and over, when you no longer trust the relationship. An article by Harriet Brown in The Washington Post.Referenced in the article, Kristina M. Scharp's collected research on parent-child estrangement , including the full text pdf of "It Was the Straw that Broke the Camel’s Back” : Exploring the Distancing Processes Communicatively Constructed in Parent-Child Estrangement Backstories.