As we continue to unpack the meaning of the Beckham family feud, I don’t think enough attention has been paid to the roast chicken. Perhaps you were busy having a life in December and missed it. But this week’s explosion by Brooklyn Beckham was the culmination of a chain of events triggered last month when Victoria Beckham, advisedly or otherwise, chucked a like at her son’s video of a roast chicken on Instagram.
For some, the takeaway was that Brooklyn’s chicken looked undercooked. For others, it was a reminder that you could draw a face on a balloon and achieve roughly the same level of sentience as Brooklyn in his cooking videos. All of which was to miss the point: that according to the new semiotics of family alienation, Brooklyn’s mother, by liking his post, had crossed a fraught boundary between “NC” (no contact) with her son to “VLC” (very low contact). Had Brooklyn not blocked her and the rest of the family immediately, she may have gone the whole hog and escalated to LC – “low contact” – at which point all bets would’ve been off.
These terms derive from burgeoning online communities in which adult children estranged from their parents gather in groups for mutual support. This kind of alienation isn’t new; it probably goes back as far as the family unit itself. What’s unique to the era of gen Z and millennial kids cutting their gen X and boomer parents out of their lives is codification, an attempt to legitimise and name a traumatic experience in an effort to remove stigma and guilt from painful decisions.
It is the weight of these decisions – the question of whether they are being increasingly flippantly, if not petulantly, made – that critics of the “no contact” movement call out. As you would expect in an era in which terms formerly used by psychiatrists are bandied about by all of us, parents in these groups stand accused by their estranged offspring of an entire medical textbook of damaging behaviours including narcissism, borderline personality disorder, controlling and “high-conflict” behaviours, and gaslighting. And while there aren’t many examples of families driven apart by a business model premised on parental oversharing – to take Brooklyn’s rationale at face value – the Beckhams are, in other ways, typical: the damage inflicted by attention-addicted control freaks is a very common theme.
On the other side of the dispute are various shades of the culture-war position: suck it up, snowflakes, we all make mistakes. (David Beckham put it slightly more gracefully this week when he said, cryptically, that “children are allowed to make mistakes”.) Personally, I don’t know anyone who has taken the decision to walk away from their family lightly. I’m also aware of people whose parents are life-wreckingly damaging but can’t bring themselves to walk away. In data cited in Anna Russell’s excellent deep dive on this subject in the New Yorker in 2024, 27% of Americans are said to be estranged from a relative, while in Britain, charities estimate that 20% of families are affected by estrangement. These numbers don’t seem to me either excessive or surprising.
And there are half measures. These, too, have helpful handles with followings on TikTok. One is called “grey rocking”, the practice of staying in contact with toxic family members while not being drawn in by their provocations, instead simply nodding, smiling and going along with what is being said, while taking none of it in and remaining entirely emotionally uninvolved. (It strikes me that large numbers of men nail grey rocking without even realising it.)
But back to the Beckhams. It is a measure of Brooklyn’s limitations that the method via which he chose to attack his parents for living on Instagram was a series of Instagram stories. Anyone seeking further insight into the Peltzes, meanwhile, might enjoy spending half an hour browsing the counter lawsuit filed by Brooklyn and Nicola’s wedding planners in response to the suit Nelson Peltz, Nicola’s father, brought against them. Put it this way: as personality types go, the Peltzes seem every bit as lovely – even more lovely, perhaps – as the Beckhams.
Elsewhere, there are early indications that accused parents are fighting back. Doormat Mom is a social media account set up by 59-year-old Laura Wellington after her daughter failed to invite her to her wedding and which now has 140,000 followers across various platforms. “Were you a really good parent who did the best they could and yet your child has decided to be an ungrateful little bastard as an adult?” says Wellington in the opening video. “We need to connect here. We need to support each other, and we need to talk about it.” Victoria and David: your support group awaits.
Emma Brockes is a Guardian columnist
