Harry* couldn’t bring himself to speak to his dad for a year and a half after he had walked out of their family home to live with his mistress, all when his son was just 14. He was too angry to talk, too protective of his mother. “I thought about him a lot during that time, as you might expect,” Harry reflects. “I often had feelings of doubt as to whether I should be so hard in my stance. Particularly, because I had a lot of voices in my ear telling me not to – friends and family. So, a lot of feelings of doubt crept in, but I tried to keep myself really distracted.”
Periods of estrangement like Harry’s are markedly common. While only 6 per cent of adults report spells of separation from their mothers, more than one in four say they’ve been estranged from their fathers at some point in time, according to a long-term study into family relationships by Ohio State University. Other studies indicate that this is due to fathers being less likely to co-habit or foster emotional connection with their children after marriage break-ups, less likely to initiate contact with their children in adulthood, and more likely to be perpetrators of physical and sexual violence, as well as substance use and abuse.
