âI donât like my motherâ: Why do children decide to distance themselves from their parents?
The Beckham familyâs situation highlights a reality that is becoming increasingly common on social media and in surveys: people who decide they would be better off stepping away from their families
Brooklyn Beckham and David Beckham in London in 2018.Samir Hussein (WireImage/Getty)
Parent-child relationships have always been somewhat of a minefield. Parents hold a key that grants access to areas of their childâs life that no one else can enter â a foundational intimacy. However, more and more people are choosing to sever that bond and throw the key away. Itâs difficult to quantify how many children have decided to stop speaking to their parents, although some studies point to a steady increase in recent years. In 2020, 27% of Americans over the age of 18 were estranged from a family member, according to data collected by Karl Pillemer, a professor at Cornell University. In August of last year, a YouGov poll indicated that 38% of U.S. adults were estranged from a family member: 24% from a sibling, 16% from a parent, 10% from a child, 9% from a grandparent, and 6% from a grandchild.
Itâs a trend that has also made its mark on social media. On TikTok, the hashtag #ToxicFamily has generated hundreds of videos and millions of views, offering advice on how to deal with toxic family members. The latest case to come to light is that of Brooklyn Beckham, who announced on social media that he is cutting ties with his parents, David and Victoria Beckham, after months of rumors pointing to a deep family rift.
Brooklyn directly blames his parents for the problems that, he says, affect both him and his wife, Nicola Peltz. He did so in a blistering statement that includes lines such as âI do not want to reconcile with my family,â âI have been controlled by my parents for most of my life,â and âmy brothers were sent to attack me on social media.â
Prince William and Henry, together but not quite at Queen Elizabeth II’s funeral in September 2022.Justin Setterfield (Getty Images)
This is yet another example of how the social taboo surrounding cutting ties with oneâs parents is slowly beginning to crack. Brooklynâs case recalls that of Prince Harry, who also made his family conflicts public after beginning his relationship and distancing himself from the British royal family.
This phenomenon even has a specific term:Â estrangement. And it stems from a wide variety of causes. Sometimes itâs related to physical or psychological violence, abuse, mistreatment within the family, gender-based violence, or the rejection by some family members of their childrenâs sexual or gender identity. According to the YouGov study, gay men and lesbian or bisexual women are more likely to become estranged from their families than heterosexual people.
Other times, the causes have less to do with a specific incident and more with a longâstanding, strained relationship: ongoing conflict, gradual distancing, and, above all, the inability to meet certain emotional needs that go far beyond financial support or basic care.
âEmotional neglect goes beyond minimal care,â Hernand explained on the podcast Que si quiero o que si tengo. She also pointed to a widely held misconception: âIt seems that cutting off a family relationship is only justified when there is physical or sexual aggression.â However, she notes, there are other forms of neglect, mistreatment, or violence â less visible but equally harmful â whose emotional weight can be decisive when it comes to breaking the bond.
Psychologist David GĂłmez, author of Un viaje hacia el amor (propio) (or, A Journey Towards [Self] Love), says that family issues are among the most common problems brought to therapy. âFamily can be a fundamental source of well-being, but also a constant source of conflict.â This tension, he notes, becomes especially visible at Christmas â gatherings where roles are firmly assigned, where there are implicit rules about how things should be, and where any deviation is perceived as a threat. âTo the point that you see articles and advice like: How not to argue with your family at Christmas? And you think: wow, families really are in rough shape.â
Millennials were the first generation to prioritize emotional well-being and mental health over the perceived obligation to remain close to their parents. Beatriz Molina, a psychologist, says she sees many people between the ages of 20 and 35 in her practice who struggle with these kinds of family conflicts. âItâs not exclusive to that age group, but it is especially common,â she says. In her opinion, itâs related to a clear generational shift. âThese are generations with a greater awareness of emotional well-being and a much more normalized approach to therapy.In the past, parents were expected to provide little more than basic survival. Today, people expect emotional attention, presence, connection. And that creates clashes between generations.â
In many cases, parents arenât even able to fully understand what their children are asking of them. Marta ĂĂąigo, 31, has spent years barely speaking to her mother, aside from the occasional encounter at Christmas or at her nephewâs birthday. She explains that, for her, cutting off the relationship had to do with having expected something from her mother that never came. âIâm grateful for the material things: feeding me, caring for me like you would an animal or a pet. But I needed a maternal figure with an emotional availability that simply wasnât there.â Thatâs why she now sees her mother now in a different light. âSheâs not a mother. Sheâs an older person, almost decorative, someone I donât want to argue with. I donât want to experience the constant shock of realizing sheâs not the mother I would have wanted, but I also donât want to turn her into an enemy.â
According to ĂĂąigo, one has to accept that family often works like a lottery. Sometimes you fit, and sometimes you donât. âIf I liked my mother, if I didnât see her as a badâtempered, cowardly, depressed person; if her life didnât seem like hell to me, maybe it would work. But I donât like her as a person. Itâs brutal to say, but itâs true.â She adds: âIâm fairly certain that itâs not that my mother doesnât love me, but I am sure Iâm not someone sheâs particularly fond of. Although, of course, she would never admit it.â
In recent years, family has lost weight as a structuring force in society, giving way to friendships. Books like Elogio de la amistad (In Praise of Friendship), by philosopher Geoffroy de Lagasnerie, explore this shift. GĂłmez believes family relationships havenât necessarily worsened; rather, people now have the option of distancing themselves when a relationship doesnât work. âWeâre realizing that certain imposed roles donât have to last forever. And that doesnât have to be negative. From there, a broader idea of family emerges: not just blood or what appears in the family registry, but also what is built â the bonds we nurture and, above all, the people we choose to have in our lives or not.â
This shift has reduced the sense of obligation to support parents and grandparents. âI donât identify with the image of the self-sacrificing son who visits his grandfather on Sundays, even if he finds him unbearable,â says HĂŠctor Salgado, 28, who has reduced his contact with his family to almost nothing. He is grateful to belong to one of the first generations that will âtrulyâ consider whether they want and are ready to have children. âItâs hard to say, but many of our parents had children out of inertia.â Salgado believes his generation has the opportunity to avoid repeating the mistakes their parents made with them. âIâve spent my whole life watching my mother trapped in her relationship with my grandmother. Sheâs still nervous for fear of her disapproval, and yet she still visits her every Monday.â
Few grief experiences compare to the grief of breaking with oneâs parents. Molina explains that, emotionally, what usually emerges is a particularly intense mix of anger and guilt. âAnger at not having felt heard, respected, acknowledged, or validated. And guilt because, ultimately, itâs about the parents. In many cases, there isnât an explicitly harmful intention behind it, but rather problematic relational patterns that are perceived as well-intentioned.â She gives the example of very intrusive parents who offer their opinions on everything under the guise of helping. âItâs a form of covert control. And because itâs framed as âIâm doing it for your own good,â it creates a guilt thatâs difficult to dismantle, even when the harm is evident.â
But is it really possible to cut ties with oneâs parents? Does it ever stop hurting? âIt depends,â GĂłmez replies. âSome people are in such a bad place that they feel relief. Others distance themselves for less clear reasons, and then guilt or discomfort can linger for a long time, or even forever.â He concludes: âThereâs no correct way to feel. It depends on the story and on the person.â
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The US runs a $300B+ SERVICES trade surplus. Its biggest foreign market is Europe. The EU relies heavily on US cloud, software, and tech platforms. But Europe is becoming so FED UP with Trump’s tariff threats that it’s becoming ready to hit the KILL SWITCH on US services.
Image caption:Kanzi, a bonobo, was part of the study
Credit:Ape Initiative
Animal cognition
Apes share human ability to imagine
A Johns Hopkins study is the first to show that the capacity to pretend is not uniquely human
By Jill Rosen / Published 2 days ago Media Inquiries
In a series of tea party-like experiments, Johns Hopkins University researchers demonstrated for the first time that apes can use their imagination and play pretend, an ability thought to be uniquely human.
Consistently and robustly across three experiments, one bonobo engaged with cups of imaginary juice and bowls of pretend grapes, challenging long-held assumptions about the abilities of animals.
The findings suggest that the capacity to understand pretend objects is within the cognitive potential of, at least, an enculturated ape, and likely dates back 6 to 9 million years, to our common evolutionary ancestors.
Video credit: Johns Hopkins University see above
“It really is game-changing that their mental lives go beyond the here and now,” said co-author Christopher Krupenye, a Johns Hopkins assistant professor in the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences who studies how animals think. “Imagination has long been seen as a critical element of what it is to be human, but the idea that it may not be exclusive to our species is really transformative.
“Jane Goodall discovered that chimps make tools, and that led to a change in the definition of what it means to be human. And this, too, really invites us to reconsider what makes us special and what mental life is out there among other creatures.”
By age 2, human children can engage in pretend scenarios, like tea parties. Even at 15-months-old, infants show measures of surprise when they see a person “drinking” from a cup after pretending to empty it.
“It really is game-changing that their mental lives go beyond the here and now.”
Christopher Krupenye
Assistant professor, Psychological and Brain Sciences
There had been no controlled studies of pretense in nonhuman animals, despite several anecdotal reports of animals seemingly engaging in pretending behavior from both the wild and captivity.
For example, in the wild, young female chimpanzees have been observed carrying and playing with sticks, holding them like mothers would hold their infants. And a chimpanzee in captivity seemed to drag imaginary blocks along the floor after playing with real wooden blocks.
Krupenye and co-author Amalia Bastos, a former Johns Hopkins postdoctoral fellow who is now a lecturer at Scotland’s University of St. Andrews, wondered if they could test this capacity to pretend in a controlled environment.
They created experiments very similar to a child’s tea party to test Kanzi, a 43-year-old bonobo living at Ape Initiative, who had been anecdotally reported to engage in pretense and could respond to verbal prompts by pointing.
In each test, an experimenter and Kanzi faced one another, tea party-style, across a table set with either empty pitchers and cups or bowls and jars.
In the first task there were two transparent cups on the table, both empty, alongside an empty transparent pitcher. The experimenter tipped the pitcher to “pour” a little pretend juice into each cup, then pretended to dump the juice out of one cup, shaking it a bit to really get it out. They then asked Kanzi, “Where’s the juice?”
Kanzi pointed to the correct cup that still contained pretend juice most of the time, even when the experimenter changed the location of the cup filled with pretend juice.
In case Kanzi thought there was real juice in the cup, even if he couldn’t see it, the team ran a second experiment. This time there was a cup of real juice alongside the cup of pretend juice. When Kanzi was asked what he wanted, he pointed toward the real juice almost every time.
A third experiment repeated the same concept, except with grapes. An experimenter pretended to sample a grape from an empty container, then placed it inside one of the two jars. They pretended to empty one of the containers and asked Kanzi, “Where’s the grape?” Kanzi again indicated the location of the pretend object.
Kanzi was never perfect, but he was consistently correct.
“It’s extremely striking and very exciting that the data seem to suggest that apes, in their minds, can conceive of things that are not there,” Bastos said. “Kanzi is able to generate an idea of this pretend object and at the same time know it’s not real.”
The findings inspire continued study, especially trying to test whether other apes and other animals can engage in pretend play or track pretend objects. The team also hopes to explore other facets of imagination in apes, perhaps their ability to think about the future or to think about what’s going on in the minds of others.
“Imagination is one of those things that in humans gives us a rich mental life. And if some roots of imagination are shared with apes, that should make people question their assumption that other animals are just living robotic lifestyles constrained to the present,” Krupenye said. “We should be compelled by these findings to care for these creatures with rich and beautiful minds and ensure they continue to exist.”
The work was supported by the Johns Hopkins Provost’s Postdoctoral Fellowship Program; Templeton World Charity Foundation (TWCF-2021-20647); CIFAR Azrieli Global Scholars; and an Early Career Collaboration Enhancement Award from the Diverse Intelligences Summer Institute.
The price of misjudging the switch to electric vehicles swelled again yesterday, as Jeep maker Stellantis announced $26.2 billion in charges â the largest yet by any automaker, Axios’ Joann Muller reports.
That amount reflects the cost of canceling EVs and compensating suppliers â plus what CEO Antonio Filosa called “poor operational execution” by predecessor Carlos Tavares.Â
The automaker’s shares fell nearly 25% yesterday on the news. Stellantis’ move is the latest in a series of write-offs amid slower-than-expected EV demand:
GM took $7.6 billion in charges for 2025, with more likely in 2026.
Ford announced $19.5 billion in EV write-downs
VWÂ took a $6 billion hit, mostly from scaling back its EV plans for Porsche.Go deeper.
Mainstream cryptocurrency Bitcoin is being eviscerated this week. The token tanked to a historic low, coming eerily close to as little as $60,000 on Thursday evening. Thatâs well under 50 percent down from its all-time high a mere four months ago.
While the crypto has since bounced back to around the $68,000 mark, it comes at a grim cost: itâs now wiped out all of its gains since president Donald Trump won the presidential election in late 2025.
Analysts arenât presumably hopeful about an imminent recovery, with some expecting the absolute worst.
âOur BTC price target is 0.0,â Pivotus Partners chief market strategist and partner Richard Farr tweeted. âThatâs not just for shock factor. Itâs where the math takes us.â
Farr said he concurred with Michael Burry, who famously shorted the US housing market before its collapse in 2008, and recently warned in a Substack post that further losses for Bitcoin could result in a âdeath spiral.â
Farr pointed to Bitcoin following similar trends to a larger US stock downturn, suggesting itâs no longer the safe haven it was once claimed to be, arguing that it operates as a âspeculative instrument correlated to the Nasdaqâ instead.
The crypto bear argued that âno serious central bank will ever own something where Michael Saylor controls the float,â referring to the CEO of Strategy, the largest corporate Bitcoin treasury.
Farr also criticized the token for being damaging to the environment, as mining it requires copious amounts of energy and water.
âNothing âgreenâ about this âcoin,’â Farr wrote mockingly. âWe think itâs a zero.â
In a follow-up post on LinkedIn, Farr argued that worsening US jobs numbers could cause even more money to âcome out of speculative assets, than in,â which led him to feel âincreasingly emboldenedâ about his zero-dollar call.
He also pointed to crypto miners, who were already squeezed by winter storms driving up electricity prices, being forced to close up shop amid the crash.
âWe think we are only in the early innings of the crypto correction,â Farr wrote.
In his Substack post, Burry noted that a recent crash in gold prices â following a historic surge â appeared to be linked to Bitcoinâs ongoing demise.
As people continue to gamble on gold futures, Burry argued that âphysical metals may break from the trend on safe haven demand,â triggering a âdeath spiralâ-like collapse.
Considering Bitcoinâs enormous swings over the last couple of months, itâs likely not the end of the ride for the infamously volatile digital token.
Farr clearly isnât alone in predicting further losses.
âThis steady selling in our view signals that traditional investors are losing interest, and overall pessimism about crypto is growing,â Deutsche Bank analyst Marion Laboure wrote in a note to clients, as quoted by CNBC.
âBitcoin isnât trading on hype anymore, the story has lost a bit of that plot, it is trading on pure liquidity and capital flows,â FG Nexus CEO of digital assets Maja Vujinovic added.
The United Kingdom is currently overseeing the testing and gradual deployment of a suite of technologies designed to monitor, analyse, and predict the behaviour of its citizens in ways that were previously confined to dystopian fiction. The scale of these systems, and more importantly the philosophy underpinning their use, should concern anyone regardless of political persuasion or criminal intent.
These technologies will not remain confined to the UK. There is a long and well-established precedent of individual states operating as de facto pilot studies, trialling new forms of surveillance and control before they are adopted elsewhere. Controversial technologies trialled in one country today often become conventional practice globally tomorrow.
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The UK itself provides clear historical examples. In the 1990s, Britain became the most surveilled democracy on earth, with the highest density of CCTV cameras anywhere in the world. This set a template that other Western nations soon followed. Britain remains one of the most surveilled nations on earth, but has since been surpassed by both China and the United States. The same pattern can be seen with Automatic Number Plate Recognition technology, which uses optical character recognition to read vehicle registration plates. It was first extensively deployed in the UK and is now embedded across policing, border control, and private security throughout the Western world. This suggests that technological innovations deemed successful are likely to expand far beyond the borders of their country of origin.
The most concerning recent development in UK surveillance is the use of AI to predict crime before it happens. According to reporting in The Telegraph, police chiefs in the UK are currently evaluating around 100 separate AI projects, with the Government investing ÂŁ4 million in the creation of an interactive, AI-powered map of England and Wales intended to be fully operational by 2030. Its stated purpose is to identify areas likely to experience criminal activity and to recommend police intervention before any criminal activity actually takes place. Sir Andy Marsh, head of the College of Policing, has described plans to identify the 1,000 most âdangerous predatory menâ believed to pose the highest risk to women and girls.These individuals would be flagged for crimes they are statistically likely to commit based on data and case histories. Marsh has stated openly that the aim is to make such men âfrightened because the police are coming after themâ.
There are several problems with this approach. The first is epistemic. Men willing to engage in highly taboo, predatory behaviour are already demonstrating a willingness to defy social norms and legal constraints. They are, by definition, less predictable than average citizens. Treating them as stable data points risks giving police a false sense of control over individuals who do not conform to statistical regularities to the same degree as the average citizen. Equally, if they are aware they are being observed it would make sense for them to alter their behavioural patterns to render the AIâs predictive abilities far less effective. This could lead to a situation in which, because they are being monitored by artificial intelligence rather than human police officers, they are able to commit crimes so long as they do not adhere to the prior patterns of criminality used by the AI to predict their behaviour in the first place.
The second problem is that monitoring these 1,000 predatory men is not as effective as other interventions. Predictive systems may create an illusion of containment while diverting attention from the reality that the most reliable way to prevent certain crimes is the physical removal of genuinely dangerous individuals from society. This could be either through imprisonment or, in more serious cases, capital punishment. The return of the latter is still supported by a majority of Britons. In the context of the current shortage of prison space in Britain, this will incentivise subsequent governments to release dangerous criminals into society, free to commit further crimes, but with the illusion of preventative measures in place.
This approach also further erodes the boundary between what is a crime and what is not. How do you deal with someone who is predicted to commit a crime but has yet to do so? Do you still treat them as a criminal? Until very recently, the police recorded ânon-crime hate incidentsâ, which resulted in police intervention despite, by definition, no crime being committed. Being âguiltyâ of such an incident could result in police visiting oneâs home or even a trip to the police station. These incidents also appeared on enhanced background checks despite no criminal conviction taking place. Non-crime hate incidents were only scrapped following a considerable campaign against them. Nevertheless, they support the view that individuals can be effectively criminalised for behaviour deemed problematic by the state despite no actual crime having occurred.
While efforts to protect women and girls are undeniably admirable, it would be naĂŻve to assume these tools will remain narrowly confined to this domain if they are deemed successful. There are powerful institutional incentives to expand their application. Once a system exists to identify high-risk individuals, the definition of risk inevitably broadens. Political dissidents, protest movements, journalists, and activists all generate behavioural patterns that can be framed as disruptive. Within the increasingly dominant technocratic, data-driven governance model, it seems inevitable that such technology would eventually be employed in this manner.
If this were not concerning enough, it comes alongside plans to implement live facial recognition technology in every town centre across the country. Such systems allow police to identify individuals in real time, track their movements, and retrospectively reconstruct their behaviour. When combined with predictive analytics, this creates the technical foundations for continuous population monitoring regardless of criminality.
The political architect of much of this vision is the Home Secretary, Shabana Mahmood, who has described her ideal system as a âpanopticonâ in which âthe eyes of the state can be on you at all timesâ. She recently articulated this vision to Tony Blair, a figure synonymous with the expansion of technocratic governance and surveillance powers, and received his stamp of approval.
The panopticon is a prison design that originated with the 18th-century philosopher Jeremy Bentham. It consists of a rotunda with cells arranged along the outer circumference across multiple levels. The side of each cell facing the centre of the circle has iron bars, while the outer side has a window, allowing light to pass through the cell and silhouette the prisoner, making them easily visible. At the centre is a watchtower from which a single guard can observe all prisoners without being seen himself. Although one guard cannot physically monitor every prisoner at once, prisoners can never know when they are being watched and are therefore compelled to behave as though they always are. It is effectively a prison designed to induce self-regulation through uncertainty.
Applied at the level of an entire population, the implications are deeply sinister. A panoptic surveillance state goes far beyond punishing dissent. It prevents it from forming in the first place. People moderate their behaviour, speech, and associations long before the state needs to intervene. From the perspective of a potentially tyrannical government, this is the most effective technique for maximising obedience among its subjects.
Functionally, a future surveillance dystopia emerges incrementally through pilot projects such as these, using the framing that they are well-intentioned attempts to target criminals. Much like a parasite, by the time it is recognised as a problem in the body politic, it is already deeply embedded and difficult to remove. Unless current trends are disrupted we may well find ourselves living inside our very own panopticon, forever watched by unseen authorities, despite doing nothing wrong.
BREAKING: President Trump just PUMMELED the âexpertsâ âThe âExpertsâ said that if I hit 50,000 on the Dow by the end of my Term, I would have done a great job, but I hit 50,000 today, three years ahead of schedule â Remember that for the Midterms, because the Democrats will CRASH the Economy!â Heâs right!
Ronald Reagan was the first U.S. president who had been divorced. His first marriage, to actress Jane Wyman, ended because she chose to walk away. By all accounts, she wasnât the easiest person to be married to â she filed for divorce from her second husband just a month after marrying him, and her third marriage didnât last long either.
But Reaganâs second marriage, to Nancy, was a different story. They were together for 52 years, and their relationship was widely seen as a model of love and partnership. In 1971, when Reagan was Governor of California, his eldest son Michael was getting married. Reagan couldnât be there in person, so he sent him a letter. What he wrote wasnât just a note of congratulations â it was honest advice from a father who had lived, learned, and deeply valued his own marriage:
Dear Mike, Youâve probably heard all the jokes from people who are bitter or cynical about marriage. But hereâs the truth: youâre about to start the most important relationship in your life. And it will become whatever you choose to make it. Some men try to act tough by living like the guys in locker room stories â thinking that what their wife doesnât know wonât hurt her. But believe me, even without lipstick on your collar or shady excuses about where you were at 3 a.m., a wife always knows. And when that trust starts to break, the magic in the relationship starts to fade. More often than people realize, the ones who say marriage doesnât work are the same ones who put the least into it. Itâs like physics â you get out exactly what you put in. If you only give half, youâll only get half back. Sure, thereâll be moments when youâre tempted â when you notice another woman or miss your old single life. But Iâll tell you something: real strength, real masculinity, is sticking with one woman your whole life. Anyone can cheat â thatâs easy. But to stay interesting and loving to the same woman, through all the normal, messy, everyday stuff â that takes real character. If you love her, really love her, youâll never embarrass her by flirting with others or making her question where youâve been. And youâll never put her in a position where another woman could give her a knowing smile â like she knows a secret your wife doesnât. Even for one second. You, more than most, understand what itâs like to grow up in an unhappy home. Now, you have the chance to build something better.
Thereâs no greater feeling than coming home after a long day and knowing someoneâs waiting just to hear the sound of your footsteps. With love, Dad P.S. Say âI love youâ at least once a day. It really does help.
Those words came from more than just a father â they came from someone who knew what marriage meant and how important it is to nurture love and loyalty every day.
Reagan made sure Nancy never had to doubt she mattered. He made sure she always waited for him with love. As people say, you reap what you sow. And Nancy â graceful, strong, and loyal â chose him just as much as he chose her. She wasnât just the First Lady of the United States. She was, first and always, the First Lady of his heart. And Ronald Reagan â the strong, determined leader known to the world â never forgot who he was at home: a husband, a father, and a man who truly loved his family. Like many good men in this world.
Illustration: Sarah Grillo/Axios
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