Predictable comments here - 'How can the children do this?'; 'Why can't people get along?'; 'but they're you're family'. Sure people, this is just a casual social fashion and estrangement something that people could not possibly do for a valid reason. You know it 'couldn't be right' and so people feel free to judge.

The key issue as you will see from a lot of the Reddit communities mentioned as well as the examples in the article is the narcism of the parents. There is no compromise with such people, it's either their way or the highway and we are reading about the people who took the highway.

Consider another family relationship: Divorce. Apart from a few religious fundamentalists we don't see people queuing up to try and reconcile divorced couples simply because they are divorced. We don't expect such people to be comfortable in their ex's presence, we don't feel the need to apply thought-terminating clichés to shut down the idea that they might be right. For some reason there is a societal inertia that parents have a divine right to just carry on being a*holes to their children if they wish and it is the children's fault if they don't like it.