Opinion: When 'Setting Boundaries' Means Never Calling Mom Again

Opinion.

Family estrangement isn't a fringe phenomenon anymore — it's a trend line, and according to a Wall Street Journal story that made the rounds this week, a growing number of American adults are cutting off their own parents for good.

Joe Getty brought the piece up on his radio program, calling the numbers troubling. The Journal's reporting, as Getty summarized it, points to a shift in how young adults define harmful parenting. What used to count as ordinary family friction — a disagreement, a bad holiday, a parent who said the wrong thing twenty years ago — now gets filed under psychological harm. Getty's read: the diagnosis has gotten broader, and the remedy has gotten more permanent.

His theory for why centers on the therapy office. Getty argued that a lot of therapists have landed on the same playbook: boundary-setting as the default prescription, full stop. "No is a complete sentence," he said, describing the mantra he believes gets handed to clients instead of a plan for working through conflict. In that framework, the parent or sibling causing distress doesn't get a hard conversation. They get cut off.

Getty also pointed to the vocabulary doing a lot of the lifting. Narcissist, he said, has become the all-purpose label — slap it on a parent who was overbearing, or just inconsistent, or simply disappointing in some ordinary human way, and the estrangement writes itself. He didn't dispute that real narcissistic abuse exists. His complaint was about overuse — that a clinical term has become a conversational trump card, deployed to end discussion rather than start one.

Jack Armstrong, Getty's co-host, extended the point into politics. Armstrong said some family members now treat a relative's political views not as a disagreement but as a moral failing serious enough to justify walking away entirely. If an uncle votes the wrong way or holds the wrong opinion on a hot-button issue, in Armstrong's telling, that's increasingly framed as toxicity — something you don't argue with, you just exit.

Neither host pretended every estrangement is manufactured. Getty put a number on his skepticism — he figures something like ninety percent of the trend is overblown, which still leaves room for the genuinely abusive situations where cutting ties is the right call. Armstrong was blunter, dismissing the broader cultural push as, in his word, crap.

Here's where I'll add my own two cents, having watched three decades of therapeutic fashion come and go. Boundaries are a real concept and sometimes a necessary one. Nobody owes an abusive parent unlimited access. But there's a difference between a boundary and a door slammed shut forever, and the culture seems to have stopped distinguishing between the two. A profession that used to specialize in helping people stay in hard relationships and work through them has, in a lot of corners, started specializing in helping people leave them instead. That's not obviously progress. It might just be easier — for the therapist billing by the hour and the client who doesn't want to do the uncomfortable work of a phone call.

Families have always had friction. What's different now, if Getty and Armstrong are right, is that friction gets a diagnosis and a permanent exit ramp instead of a Thanksgiving argument followed by reconciliation. A political opinion becomes a moral failing. A flawed parent becomes a narcissist. And a relationship that might have survived a hard conversation doesn't get the chance.

None of this requires a law or a federal task force — it's not Washington's business, and nobody's proposing it should be. It's a cultural question, best argued out at kitchen tables and in therapists' offices, not in Congress. But it's worth asking, the next time "boundaries" gets invoked as the final word: is this protecting someone, or just making an exit easier than an argument ever was?