+
upworthy
popular

Woman says adult children should never be judged for cutting ties with their parents

Boundaries are boundaries regardless of who you set them with.

estranged parents, estranged children, chatswithchass tiktok

Chatswithchass explains why its okay for adult children to cut off their parents.

A “silent” epidemic is happening in American families that is seldom discussed, the sudden rise in estrangement between adult children and their parents. In 1997, research on family dynamics found that 7% of adult children had severed connections with their mothers, and 27% had done so with their fathers.

Fast forward to 2020, and Karl Pillemar, a sociologist, found that a quarter of Americans are estranged from at least one of their parents or child.

Steven Mintz, the author of “Huck’s Raft: A History of American Childhood,” told The Atlantic that it’s all part of the change in family dynamics that’s happened over the past 50 years.

“Families in the past fought over tangible resources—land, inheritances, family property. They still do, but all this is aggravated and intensified by a mindset that does seem to be distinctive to our time. Our conflicts are often psychological rather than material—and therefore even harder to resolve,” Mintz says.


It’s also part of a greater trend for people to eliminate or censure those they deem oppressive or toxic.

TikTokker Chassity Marchal (@Chatswithchass) recently went viral on TikTok for a video explaining why it’s not okay to judge adult children who have cut ties with their parents. She makes the vital point that people who have no problem supporting those who leave an abusive spouse will still judge those who do the same to toxic parents.

@chatswithchass

Just because someone is “family” doesnt mean they can treat someone anyways they want. #chatswithchass

“Stop telling people who have no contact with their parents that they need to either make things right, they need to talk to their parents,” Marchal says, citing a recent online interaction where she was chastised for not talking to her mom. The critic noted that cutting her off is wrong because she’s “not guaranteed tomorrow.”

“I just know that if it was my husband that was saying or doing the things that my mom has done, that y’all would not be telling me that I need to stay with him and talk to him and make it work,” Marchal continued. “So why is it different when it comes to parents?”

She added that it wasn’t an “easy decision” to cut off her mom and that she’s still not “happy” about it. “I don’t want to be doing this, but I’m also putting myself first and doing what I feel is best.”

Response to her post was overwhelmingly positive. A commenter named Cat summed up the reactions perfectly: “I’m so sick of hearing this! Just bc someone gave birth to you—doesn’t mean they need to talk to them!”

@chatswithchass

Replying to @Ken Lambert892 #chatswithchass

In a follow-up video, Marchal addressed a commenter who said, “You can never replace a mom or dad.” To which she responded, “When someone hurts you over and over and does not care that they’re doing those things to you, you have to walk away.”

It’s a sad fact of life that more adult children and their parents are becoming estranged. But it appears to be a symptom of a culture where people care more about creating healthy boundaries than spending emotional energy on those they deem toxic.





Community

How to end hunger, according to the people who face it daily

Here’s what people facing food insecurity want you to know about solving the hunger problem in America

True

Even though America is the world’s wealthiest nation, about 1 in 6 of our neighbors turned to food banks and community programs in order to feed themselves and their families last year. Think about it: More than 9 million children faced hunger in 2021 (1 in 8 children).

In order to solve a problem, we must first understand it. Feeding America, the nation’s largest domestic hunger-relief organization, released its second annual Elevating Voices: Insights Report and turned to the experts—people experiencing hunger—to find out how this issue can be solved once and for all.

Here are the four most important things people facing hunger want you to know.

Keep ReadingShow less

A guy passes out on his bed eating pizza.

A 29-year-old woman had a baby girl, and after a brief maternity leave, she had to return to work. She couldn't afford childcare, so her husband, 35, reluctantly agreed to watch the baby while she was at work.

“It’s important to know that he’s been unemployed since 2021,” the woman wrote on Reddit’s AITA subforum. “He receives benefits. It’s also important to know that he’s extremely lazy. He doesn’t cook, clean, or help out in any way. I was nervous about leaving her home with her father, but I had no choice.”

The mother had reason to be worried about leaving her baby home alone with her husband, but in the beginning, things seemed fine. “When I came back from work, she was clean and sleeping. The next few times I came home, he was either playing with her, feeding her, or out for a walk with her. I was happy,” she wrote.

Keep ReadingShow less
Photo via Canva, @WhattheADHD/Twitter

The 'bionic reading' font is designed to help keep you focused and read faster.

Reading is a fundamental tool of learning for most people, which is why it's one of the first things kids learn in school and why nations set literacy goals.

But even those of us who are able to read fluently might sometimes struggle with the act of reading itself. Perhaps we don't read as quickly as we wish we could or maybe our minds wander as our eyes move across the words. Sometimes we get to the end of a paragraph and realize we didn't retain anything we just read.

People with focus or attention issues can struggle with reading, despite having no actual reading disabilities. It can be extremely frustrating to want to read something and have no issues with understanding the material, yet be unable to keep your mind engaged with the text long enough to get "into" what you're reading.

Keep ReadingShow less
Pets

Family brings home the wrong dog from daycare until their cats saved the day

A quick trip to the vet confirmed the cats' and family's suspicions.

Family accidentally brings wrong dog home but their cats knew

It's not a secret that nearly all golden retrievers are identical. Honestly, magic has to be involved for owners to know which one belongs to them when more than one golden retriever is around. Seriously, how do they all seem have the same face? It's like someone fell asleep on the copy machine when they were being created.

Outside of collars, harnesses and bandanas, immediately identifying the dog that belongs to you has to be a secret skill because at first glance, their personalities are also super similar. That's why it's not surprising when one family dropped off their sweet golden pooch at daycare and to be groomed, they didn't notice the daycare sent out the wrong dog.

See, not even their human parents can tell them apart because when the swapped dog got home, nothing seemed odd to the owners at first. She was freshly groomed so any small differences were quickly brushed off. But this accidental doppelgänger wasn't fooling her feline siblings.

Keep ReadingShow less

Only child asks her friends what it's like to grow up with siblings.

Ahhh, siblings. Sometimes they're your best friends and other times your living room turns into an MMA octagon over the remote control. If you grew up with brothers and sisters, it's hard to imagine what it would be like to be an only child. (That's not to say you didn't dream about it when your sister stole your favorite shirt for the 30th time.)

But not everyone has siblings, so it can be equally as hard for someone who grew up as an only child to picture what it would be like to have them. Only children also likely had moments where they dreamt of having a little brother or sister, not realizing the literal torment siblings can inflict on each other.

TikTok creator Lonnie IIV recently posted a video of himself with two other friends seemingly out to lunch, when the girl in the group asked what it was like to grow up with siblings. In less than a minute she realized she lucked out being an only child because her two guy friends gave her a crash course in sibling behavior.

Keep ReadingShow less
Photo: courtesy BioCarbon Engineering/WikiCommons

Technology is the single greatest contributor to climate change but it may also soon be used to offset the damage we've done to our planet since the Industrial Age began.

In September 2018, a project in Myanmar used drones to fire "seed missiles" into remote areas of the country where trees were not growing. Less than a year later, thousands of those seed missiles have sprouted into 20-inch mangrove saplings that could literally be a case study in how technology can be used to innovate our way out of the climate change crisis.

Keep ReadingShow less
Health

Artists got fed up with these 'anti-homeless spikes.' So they made them a bit more ... comfy.

"Our moral compass is skewed if we think things like this are acceptable."

Photo courtesy of CC BY-ND, Immo Klink and Marco Godoy

Spikes line the concrete to prevent sleeping.


These are called "anti-homeless spikes." They're about as friendly as they sound.

As you may have guessed, they're intended to deter people who are homeless from sitting or sleeping on that concrete step. And yeah, they're pretty awful.

The spikes are a prime example of how cities design spaces to keep homeless people away.

Keep ReadingShow less