Hey {{ first_name | Reader }},
The best estrangement-prevention advice I've heard this year came from an unexpected source: a headmistress from Wembley.
Katharine Birbalsingh runs Michaela Community School. The papers call her Britain's strictest headmistress.
Her school has posted England's highest Progress 8 score, the government's measure of academic improvement between ages 11 and 16 (Family Education Trust, 2025). Last year, she gave a speech at the Family Education Trust's annual conference, titled:
"You Shouldn't Be Friends With Your Kids" (Birbalsingh, 2025).
You can watch that talk here
Earlier that year, she had told The Times that modern parenting books teach "being friends with your children, not holding them to account" and leave parents feeling they have no authority over their own child (Woolcock and Davies, 2025).
Can you sense where this is headed?
She was talking about classrooms. I'm talking about cutoffs.
The way I've come to think about Birbalsingh’s argument is this: you get to be friends with your children once. You can have it when they're small or when they're grown. I don't think you get both opportunities.
Spend the early years as their mate, and you spend the later years listening to a speech about boundaries.
Spend the early years as their parent, and the friendship may arrive on its own sometime in their twenties.
I'm choosing the second one. And the research says most parents already want the version I'm choosing, too.
In 2012, the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture at the University of Virginia surveyed 3,000 American parents of school-age children. Seventy-two per cent agreed with the statement "I hope to be best friends with my children when they are grown" (Bowman et al., 2012).
The trouble lies in what the same parents said about the present. Fifty-two percent said their children see them as friends now, and another 28 percent said their children see them as a blend of friend and authority figure. That's 80 percent of parents who had friends somewhere in the job description while the children were still in school.
I get a version of this in my inbox most weeks.
“We were best friends. We did everything together. How did I end up getting cut off by my adult child?”
One parent in the survey, Peter Anderson, and I ran through the ESMH Coalition wrote: "We were close, always being told that we were the best parents and grandparents, but now we haven't seen our grandkids in over 6 years" (Anderson and Blake, 2026).
In June, a Canadian team surveyed 520 people from an online estrangement support community. 368 of them were parents in a strained relationship. Among the parents, a single personality trait predicted who had been cut off: extraversion, with 79 percent higher odds. Split the trait in two and the effect sat entirely in enthusiasm, the warm, sociable, connection-seeking half. Assertiveness made no difference (Gill, Barker and Nienhuis, 2026).
The authors of this study read this as an adult child who wants space experiences frequent, emotionally expressive bids for connection as pressure. It never measured closeness, so it says nothing about whether those parents were too close. It does say the parents wired to seek connection were the ones who lost it.
Closeness on its own protects nobody. The friendship you want when they're 30 gets built when they're 6, by being something other than a friend.
This topic can’t be opened and closed in one email. So over the next two emails, I'll show you the evidence on both ways of losing the hierarchy: the gentle-parenting way and the way therapy culture is currently calling emotional incest, where the parent hands the child their feelings.
My upcoming book is where I lay all of this out properly, including what to do if the cutoff has already happened to you. It's called Cut Off and the waitlist is open for first access.
Talk soon,
Richard
Join the waitlist → https://cutoffbook.com
References
Anderson, P. and Blake, R. (2026) Parental Perspectives on Family Estrangement: Two Large-Scale Surveys. Ethical Standards for Mental Health Coalition. OSF. https://doi.org/10.17605/OSF.IO/6XT53
Birbalsingh, K. (2025) You Shouldn't Be Friends With Your Kids. Speech to the Family Education Trust Annual Conference. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hFZqYegwfYU
Bowman, C.D., Hunter, J.D., Dill, J.S. and Juelfs-Swanson, M. (2012) Culture of American Families: Executive Report. Charlottesville, VA: Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture, University of Virginia. https://sociology.as.virginia.edu/sites/sociology.as.virginia.edu/files/2023-05/IASC_CAF_ExecReport.pdf
Family Education Trust (2025) FET Annual Conference 2025. https://www.familyeducationtrust.org.uk/events/fet-annual-conference-2025/
Gill, J.S., Barker, M.J. and Nienhuis, C.P. (2026) 'From strain to estrangement: the role of personality in predicting parent-child relational outcomes', Frontiers in Psychology, 17, 1859494. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2026.1859494
Woolcock, N. and Davies, H. (2025) 'Katharine Birbalsingh interview', The Times, 25 February. https://www.thetimes.com/life-style/parenting/article/katharine-birbalsingh-interview-children-school-books-8qs5n2ldr