After years of speculation that there was a feud in the Beckham family — along with various levels of confirmation during that time — Brooklyn Beckham has finally spoken out about his ongoing fallout with his parents.
Across six Instagram Stories yesterday (January 19), Brooklyn appeared to confirm that he is indeed estranged from his family and that he has no intention of reconciling with them. He claims that his parents have been “trying endlessly to ruin” his relationship with his wife Nicola Peltz-Beckham, including by allegedly “hijacking” the couple’s first dance at their wedding, attempting to “bribe” Brooklyn into “signing away the rights to [his] name”, and declaring that Nicola is “not blood and not family”.
Brooklyn also rebuffed media accusations that he’s being controlled by his wife, writing instead that he’s “been controlled by [his] parents for most of [his] life”, accusing them of putting “Brand Beckham first” and valuing “public promotion and endorsements above all else”. David and Victoria Beckham have never publicly addressed the feud and did not reply to Cosmopolitan UK’s request for comment.
While the Beckhams’ fallout is unique in this way — few family feuds play out with such a huge, and invested, audience watching — those who are also estranged from their parents will likely feel a twang of familiarity in Brooklyn’s words. And, as family estrangement remains hugely stigmatised, his statement may even serve as a comfort for others who’ve taken the difficult decision to cut off their parents — which appears to be something more and more young people are having to do these days.
But what’s it really like to be estranged from your parents? We speak to millennials and Gen Zers who’ve reached breaking point to find out why — and how they’re dealing with it all.
Jordan was raised in a Southern Baptist household in America’s North Carolina, where she was expected to attend church multiple times a week, accept Jesus Christ as the way to salvation, and honour her father and mother. That last point was right there in the Ten Commandments. So when she made the decision to stop talking to her dad, the choice stood in defiance of the lessons of her upbringing — but that was kind of the point. Jordan was tired of being told that women should submit to men, a belief ordained by her community. She was done obeying.
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At first, despite the fights they’d have about religion and politics, Jordan held back from completely severing ties with her dad. But after one last explosive phone call, Jordan, now 33, had a “moment of clarity”, she says: “It’s an extreme privilege to have a great relationship with your adult children.” Her father continued to call and text her, but without receiving a sincere apology from him, Jordan didn’t budge.
This kind of estrangement flies in the face of what most of us are taught as children — that family is forever and the bonds of blood cannot be replicated. Especially in cultures that value the cohesiveness of the group over more individualistic wants and needs, family is not considered a choice as much as it is a fact. But for families like Jordan’s, that fact is fraying.
According to Stand Alone, a charity that supports people who are estranged, 19% of the UK population have been impacted by estrangement. Karl Pillemer, a professor of human development at Cornell University in New York, explored the topic in his 2020 book Fault Lines: Fractured Families And How To Mend Them. There isn’t yet hard longitudinal data, he says, but lots of young people are coming forward to discuss their discontent. See: the term #ToxicFamily, which, at the time of writing, has 2.3bn views on TikTok.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, attitudes tend to fall along generational lines. Boomers accuse millennials and Gen Zers of being too quick to sever ties, while the younger generations push back, saying they don’t have to tolerate shitty behaviour just because someone is related to them.
“Norms that forced families to stick together no matter what have weakened,” says Pillemer. Difficult childhood experiences, competing values, lifestyle differences, and unmet expectations may all be at play. “If the relationship is aversive over a long period of time, some young people feel they have the ability to get out of it,” he explains, noting this seems to be especially true in white families. Estrangement rates tend to be lower among immigrant groups, Latino families, and Black families, he adds, where cultural nuances can make some people generally “less likely to say, ‘I never want to speak to you again’”.
The year after Jordan fell out with her dad, he was hospitalised. She took an overnight flight to be by her mother’s side and say goodbye to her father, who died after she got there. Now, she finds herself grieving a complicated relationship. She thinks she did the right thing, but part of her grief is accepting that she’ll never know, given more time, if he would ever have changed.
Threaded into so many stories like Jordan’s is a similar hope — that maybe the nuclear act of permanent disconnection could eventually bring these families closer, like cutting hair to try to make it grow longer.
Rose, 22, still has that hope. She used to be “daddy’s princess”, she says, before her father’s heroin addiction escalated to the point that she felt forced to cut ties with him. “I hoped that he would say, ‘Oh, my daughter isn’t talking to me — I should try to fix this’. Sadly, he hasn’t.” There are so many things she wishes she could tell him: that she passed her exams and dyed her hair, that she got a job working with disabled children and brought a boyfriend home to meet the rest of her family. Yet it all happens without him.
Others, though, may not wish for any sort of reconciliation, says psychologist Quincee Gideon, who specialises in trauma therapy. “By the time some folks go no-contact, they’ve spent years trying to set appropriate boundaries, live with disappointment, accept their family’s flaws and negotiate in so many different ways that estrangement is a relief.”
That’s how it was for 25-year-old Holly, who ended her relationship with her mother after enduring years of hostile and controlling behaviour. In an email, Holly wrote: ‘I hope you choose a different path in this next part of life… I won’t be there to see it.’ Her mother responded with a handwritten letter, but Holly hasn’t contacted her since receiving it. She feels at peace, despite the judgement of others. ‘She’s your mother — you should love her,’ a close family member told Holly, who says: “We would never tell a woman who’s been abused by a partner, ‘You should go back to the person who hurt you’. But we do for people with abusive parents and it makes me very mad.”
Having to continually justify the painstaking decision to cut off a member of your family is a daunting task. As is ending a relationship with a relative in the first place, because how a family comes together or apart is never completely rational or easily explained. It is impossibly tangled.
Every person’s case is different. Some may have regrets, some may feel better off, and some, like Ant, who is in their 20s, find freedom. After a tumultuous childhood, Ant’s estrangement from their ultra-conservative parents made space for them to fully and freely live as queer and non-binary. Sometimes, their mother still calls. “She thinks that she has authority simply because she’s the mother and I’m the child,” says Ant. “Meanwhile, I can just hang up at any point. I’ve found a chosen family that has allowed me to actually be myself.”
Fortesa Latifi is a journalist with bylines in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Teen Vogue, and more. She is working on a book about the experiences of child influencers. You can find her online anywhere @hifortesa.
