Psychologist Carl Pickhardt has written extensively about adolescence for Psychology Today. In one of his articles, he described a father frustrated that his teenage daughter argued with what he asked before eventually complying. The father saw that as disrespect. Pickhardt disagreed: the fact that she engaged with the request and ultimately acted on it meant his authority still mattered to her, even if she liked it less.
That distinction sits at the center of how respect forms between a parent and a child who is growing up. It is not the same thing as unquestioning obedience, and it does not survive on volume. It is built, quietly, through the accumulated behaviors a parent does or does not model across a child’s development.
The behaviors that erode it tend to look small in the moment.
Consider the parent who cannot understand why their adult child answers calls in monosyllables. Or the one who noticed their daughter had stopped sharing anything important around the age of twelve. Or the parent whose adult children are polite at holidays and unreachable the rest of the year. None of these situations necessarily began with one dramatic rupture. Often, distance accumulates through smaller moments that teach a child what is and is not safe or worthwhile to bring to a parent.
The first behavior follows directly from the problem Pickhardt describes: treating any pushback as an attack on authority. When a parent’s sense of self becomes bound up in being right, unquestioned, and in charge, ordinary adolescent resistance can become a power struggle. Winning at all costs may secure compliance in the moment while doing damage to the relationship underneath it. Children remember which disagreements were allowed to remain disagreements and which ones had to become contests.
The second is contempt for the other authority figures in a child’s life. A parent who spends dinner mocking a teacher’s competence, a coach’s decisions, or a manager’s intelligence may think they are simply venting. But children also learn from the way adults talk about people they dislike or disagree with. A YourTango piece examining this pattern describes low social trust, frequent interruption, defensiveness, and passive-aggressive habits among adults who grew up around persistent contempt for authority. A child who repeatedly hears that every frustrating adult is incompetent or undeserving of respect may eventually apply the same logic at home.
The third is inconsistency dressed as flexibility. A rule that applies on Monday and dissolves on Friday can make the rule feel less like a principle and more like a reflection of the parent’s mood. Flexibility itself is not the problem. A 2026 article by biological anthropologist Libby Ware, describes research in which caregivers adjusted their behavior according to offspring age and environmental risk. The broader lesson is that useful flexibility responds to context rather than convenience.
The fourth is the refusal to apologize. A parent who cannot say I was wrong about that teaches a child that adulthood means never having to be accountable. It can also create a household in which the parent’s version of events is always the final version, so the child eventually stops offering their own.
The reverse extreme can distort accountability too. Parents who apologize automatically even when they have done nothing wrong model a different kind of imbalance. A Times of India psychology explainer describes habitual unnecessary apologizing as a pattern that can develop in early environments where saying sorry became a reliable way to de-escalate tension. Neither extreme models straightforward accountability: one refuses fault, while the other assumes it too quickly.
The fifth is talking about the child rather than to them. Many parents recognize the moment a child overhears them recounting a private argument to a friend on the phone, perhaps with laughter, as though the disagreement were harmless material. The child may not confront them. They may simply begin editing what they share. Children who feel like material eventually have reasons to stop supplying it.
The sixth is the habit of interrupting. In small doses it seems harmless. Cumulatively, it can communicate something specific: my thoughts are more important than yours, and this conversation is happening on my terms. Children absorb repeated interruption both as a message about whether their contribution matters and as a template for how conversation works. A parent who rarely lets a fourteen-year-old finish a sentence should not be surprised if, years later, that adult child becomes less eager to start conversations at all.
The seventh is using shame as a management tool. Shame can shut an argument down quickly, but repeated shaming can also make a parent’s presence feel associated with being judged, corrected, or found wanting. Some parents rarely raise their voices yet still have a comment for every choice their children make, until the choices themselves stop being shared.
The withdrawal is not always dramatic. Sometimes it arrives through fewer calls, shorter visits, and less personal information. A Psychology Today essay on family estrangement describes estrangement as rarely being a first resort, and more often the end of a much longer period of unsuccessful attempts at repair. By the time distance becomes obvious, smaller withdrawals may have been happening for years.
The eighth is treating a child’s independence as a personal betrayal. This can become especially damaging during late adolescence and young adulthood, when a child is building a life the parent did not design. One of the central developmental shifts of adolescence is toward greater self-direction. Parents who treat that shift as rejection can turn ordinary separation into a struggle over loyalty.
Independence does not have to mean disconnection. But when every independent decision is received as ingratitude, defiance, or abandonment, a young adult can begin to feel that creating a life of their own requires creating distance from the parent as well.
Underneath the list, the pattern is uncomfortably simple. Respect between a parent and an adult child is not a debt the child owes for having been raised. It is shaped by how the parent behaved during the raising, and by how the relationship adjusted when the child stopped being small.
The parents whose adult children still call them are rarely the parents who demanded to be called. They are the ones who, somewhere along the way, treated the child as a person whose inner life was real. They apologized when they were wrong. They listened without immediately correcting. They allowed the child to hold different opinions without treating those opinions as a threat. They did not use the family dinner table to litigate every grievance with the wider world.
None of this requires being permissive. Adolescents still need structure, expectations, boundaries, and the friction of being told no. What they do not need is a parent who confuses authority with dominance, or who treats growing autonomy as a referendum on the parent’s worth. The work is to hold the line on what matters and let go of what does not, without turning every disagreement into a test of loyalty.
There is a version of parenting culture, especially online, that treats every mistake as catastrophic and every technique as decisive. Parenting is not a style you choose once. It is a series of adjustments across a child’s development, and one of the most important adjustments in adolescence is the movement from simple command toward increasing consent and self-direction.
The parents who miss that turn can find themselves trying to manage a seventeen-year-old as though they were still seven, then struggling to understand why the relationship feels different a decade later. The parents who make the adjustment give the relationship room to become something else: one in which the child, now an adult, chooses closeness rather than being required to perform it.
That is worth sitting with, because most parents will one day be described by their children to their grandchildren in only a few sentences, and those sentences are unlikely to center on which household rules were enforced most efficiently. They will be about how it felt to be in the room.
The behaviors to say goodbye to are the ones that make that room hard to be in. Everything else is negotiable.