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‘That anxiety has disappeared’: why more adult children are choosing estrangement

‘That anxiety has disappeared’: why more adult children are choosing estrangement

The estrangement wave is coming, and the new generation is redefining family boundaries, privacy and what it means to have a healthy relationship with parents.

Photo by Karwai Tang/WireImage

Ruairidh Pritchard

Published: October 5, 2026 at 2:20 PM

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This feature was first published on our Apple News channel. Follow us on Apple News to see content like this first.

It is easy to treat family estrangement as an aberration. Something that happens only after catastrophic harm, or because someone, usually the child, has failed a moral test of gratitude. For decades, the assumption was simple: families fracture because someone is difficult.

That assumption no longer holds.

What we are watching now, through the increasingly public unravelling of families like the Beckhams, is not a series of isolated dramas but the early swell of a generational shift. One driven by technology, visibility and a quiet but radical redefinition of what privacy, autonomy and love are supposed to look like.

Brooklyn Beckham did not invent estrangement. But he may be one of the first high-profile adult children to articulate it using the emotional grammar of the social media generation. His framing is not about rebellion or punishment. It is about anxiety, control, image, privacy and relief.

“For the first time in my life, since stepping away from my family, that anxiety has disappeared,” he wrote.

That sentence matters more than any allegation, timeline or rebuttal. It explains why this story refuses to stay contained within celebrity gossip. It speaks to something far wider, and far closer to home.

Privacy is not secrecy. It is control.

Research into Gen Z and younger millennials shows a fundamental shift in how privacy is understood. For those who grew up online, privacy is not about hiding or withdrawal. It is about agency. About having the right to decide what parts of your life are shared, and what stays yours.

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This generation grew up watching social media amplify everything. Childhood embarrassment. Mental health struggles. Awkward phases. Family dynamics. They saw how posts made casually could linger forever, detached from context and consent. Unsurprisingly, they became guarded.

According to a Malwarebytes survey, around 62% of Gen Z report anxiety about sensitive personal content being exposed too widely, and they are significantly more likely than older generations to seek permission before posting content about others. That detail matters. It signals a moral shift. One generation’s proud sharing is another’s boundary violation.

For many adult children now stepping back from family, estrangement is not about rejection. It is about reclaiming authorship.

This is why Brooklyn Beckham’s repeated use of words like “performative” landed so hard. He is not simply accusing his parents of control. He is rejecting a family structure in which visibility equals love, compliance equals closeness, and emotional reality must be smoothed over to preserve the image.

Growing up as content changes you

This generational clash becomes sharper when you look at what researchers call “sharenting”, the widespread habit of parents documenting their children’s lives online long before those children can consent.

Studies suggest the average parent posts around 1,500 images of their child online by the age of five, with nearly a third never considering permission at all. For Gen Z, privacy was not eroded slowly. It was never there to begin with.

Psychologists warn of resentment and emotional fallout when children feel their dignity or agency was sacrificed for likes, laughs or family branding. One expert summarised the unspoken accusation many adult children carry: you were meant to protect me. Instead, you exposed me.

Strip away the fame, and this is the emotional backdrop to many estrangements. A sense that childhood was lived on display, and adulthood is the first chance to shut the door.

Why the mood around Brooklyn has shifted

What is striking in this latest turn of the Beckham story is not just what Brooklyn said, but how it was received.

Earlier coverage of his life leaned heavily on mockery. The nepo baby jokes. The eye-rolling at his ventures. The collective amusement at his much-ridiculed photography book, including the line that became shorthand for his supposed emptiness: elephants are “so hard to photograph but incredible to see”.

For years, that line was used as evidence that he was dim, indulged or unserious.

Read differently now, it could be seen as something else entirely. A young man straining, awkwardly, to articulate wonder without irony. Someone unused to being taken at face value. Someone whose attempts at sincerity were flattened into punchlines.

The ridicule is softening. In its place is something closer to pity, and perhaps understanding. A recognition that being born into a life where everything is visible, managed and commented on might not produce confidence or depth, but caution, anxiety and a desperate craving for something unobserved.

From nepo rage to nepo reckoning?

The backlash against “nepo babies” has begun to evolve. What started as justified anger at structural advantage is becoming more complicated. Less Eat the Rich, more What did this do to you?

Prince Harry’s break from the Royal Family seems to be following a similar emotional arc. A childhood lived without privacy. Emotional needs subordinated to institutional image. A wife framed as disruptive for wanting boundaries. His language, like Brooklyn’s, centred on mental health, protection and escape.

At the far end of the spectrum sits Ruby Franke. Her case is more extreme, more disturbing and criminal in outcome. But the underlying assumption was the same: that children’s inner lives, images and pain were hers to broadcast.

These stories differ wildly in scale and severity. What links them is not fame, but a generational refusal to accept that being someone’s child means forfeiting ownership of your story.

Is privacy the new luxury?

For Gen Z and younger millennials, privacy has stopped being a background condition and started to function like a resource. Something to be actively claimed, defended and rationed in a culture that assumes constant availability. Control over narrative is no longer a preference, it is protection.

These are not young people rejecting visibility out of fear. They are rejecting exposure without consent. Having grown up watching social media amplify every detail of life, they have learned early that once something is public, it is no longer yours.

Privacy has quietly become aspirational. Locked Instagram accounts, empty grids, private group chats and disappearing stories are no longer signs of disengagement. They are signals of discernment. The social capital now lies not in how much of your life you share, but in how little you give away.

Researchers increasingly describe privacy as a luxury good, a scarce resource in a culture that assumes constant availability. Where previous generations displayed success through visibility and reach, this one increasingly displays it through restraint.

There is an irony here. The wealthiest families, particularly those at the heart of media and tech empires, have long protected their children from the very exposure that built their fortunes. Now, a generation raised without that protection is trying to claw it back for themselves.

Seen through this lens, estrangement stops looking like an overreaction and starts to look like a boundary drawn in the only language left. Blocking. Silence. Absence. These are not punishments. They are attempts to regain something that was never freely given.

What comes next

This is why the estrangement wave is unlikely to recede. As the first generation raised on social media reaches full adulthood, more families will fracture quietly. Through unanswered messages. Through missed invitations. Through boundaries that feel abrupt only to those who never saw them forming.

This does not mean parents are villains. Many are devastated, confused and genuinely blindsided. Their grief is real, and often minimised.

But obligation alone is no longer enough to sustain relationships. Love now has to coexist with autonomy. And autonomy, for this generation, often begins with privacy.

Brooklyn Beckham is not the cause of this shift. He is its early signal.

A young man born into total visibility, mocked for his sincerity, ridiculed for his privilege, now slowly being understood.

Just as elephants are hard to photograph but incredible to see, perhaps some things, it turns out, were never meant to be captured at all.

Authors

Ruairidh PritchardDigital Growth Lead

Ruairidh is the Digital Lead on MadeForMums. He works with a team of fantastically talented content creators and subject-matter experts on MadeForMums.