‘90s FAMILY : Fractured Families : A growing number of adult children are turning their backs on their parents. Reasons for the broken bonds aren’t always evident, but the pain they cause is all too apparent.

Diana sometimes gets tears in her eyes when she sees a happy, blond little girl walking down the street.

It’s not that her own child has died. For Diana, who asked that her last name not be used, it’s almost worse: She and her grown daughter have been estranged for almost a decade. “The hurt will be there the rest of my life,” she says. “And I keep wondering: What could I have done differently?”

Experts say the number of adult children and parents who no longer talk to each other is growing. Some think it is partly because of an increased popular interest in dissecting relationships and blaming parents for so-called psychological baggage. Others attribute the estrangements to a delay in the natural separation between some parents and children in late adolescence, causing more painful and intense schisms later on.

Diana says she still doesn’t know what caused her break with her daughter, whom she nursed through years of a serious childhood illness.

She remembers one evening about nine years ago when her daughter and son-in-law seemed very angry about something, but Diana and her husband never learned what the problem was. After that, they started to see each other less and less.

When they later visited their daughter and her husband in Northern California, they met at a restaurant and were not invited back to the house. Gradually, the phone calls stopped coming. Diana sent several carefully composed letters to her daughter, expressing a desire to communicate and apologizing for whatever it was she and her husband might have inadvertently done to contribute to the discord. The letters were answered, each after a long delay, with hostility.

Diana says she went through stages of mourning, grieving over the severed relationship, imagining what her five grandchildren were like and whether they would ever know her. “At the deepest level, I keep wondering what would have happened if only I’d done things differently, but my head tells me it’s irrational. I wasn’t her therapist. I was her mother,” Diana says.

Some breakaway children would benefit from a therapist, says Jill Waterman, a professor of psychology at UCLA. She finds estranged children have typically either suffered some horrendous experience from their parents--such as physical or sexual abuse--or are people who never pulled away or rebelled from their parents in adolescence.

Not going through the common stages of rebellion and disengagement as teen-agers can lead to an exaggerated breakaway later in life.

“It’s more wrenching for the adult parent this way because it’s not happening at the appropriate time, and it’s more wrenching for the adult child because it’s not like all their friends are going through it at the same time,” Waterman says.

Etiennette Lowen, a Sherman Oaks-based therapist, says she has often seen schisms caused by adult children’s struggle to achieve effective psychological separation from their parents. Those who separate too late from their parents have to essentially kill them off psychologically in order to become full-fledged adults in their own minds, she says.

One of Waterman’s clients had lived with his family long into adulthood, to the point that he had never even gone to the grocery store by himself and had to frequently reject overtime assignments at work because his parents expected him to be home for dinner. Eventually, he moved out, but he went through a period of extreme estrangement from his parents--fighting like an oversized adolescent--for years afterward, she said.

Waterman understands the issues of parent-child estrangement firsthand; her brother cut off her parents a few years ago for reasons neither she nor her parents understand. “He won’t talk about it. He was quite close to my mother, lived at home all through college, and then, after his second marriage--to a therapist--became estranged,” Waterman says.

For siblings as well as parents, such separations can be heart-wrenching. “I wrote my brother letters, we had intense phone conversations--but he never followed up. It’s so painful,” she adds. “It will never be the same for my parents. It will never be the same for me.”

What can be especially tough for families is their inability to know what caused the schism. Waterman recalls her brother complaining, as an adult, that their parents had given their dog away when they were young children, without forewarning them. “It wasn’t the right thing for our parents to do, but it doesn’t seem like a relationship-breaker 40 years later,” she says.

Some schisms are well-understood by everyone involved, typically when they were caused by a clear-cut action, like marrying someone outside the family’s religious faith, or taking up an alternative lifestyle, says Susan Ginsberg, New York-based editor and publisher of Work and Family Life Newsletter.

Ginsberg knows one New York woman in her early 40s whose parents were divorced, and her father--with whom she is now estranged--virtually disappeared during her childhood.

But more often, the cause of the separations are more nebulous, she says.

“There’s a certain amount of stuff you forgive and there’s a certain amount of stuff you don’t. But you wonder what could anyone have done that’s so terrible that it could precipitate a complete separation. Yet it’s usually the small stuff that causes the estrangement,” she says.

Ginsberg attributes the increase in parent-child feuds to changing times. “It’s turning out that when people live a long time, and they are doing different things with their lives--balancing work and family life--there are some new scripts being written here,” she says. Geographical distance between family members and the lack of time to talk casually contribute to the problem, she says.

Lowen says sometimes the difficulty in smoothly finding a healthy level of separation from parents is a pattern repeated from generation to generation. Some parents have never seen an effective role model of healthy separation. “Trouble between grandparents and parents can be handed down,” she says.

For some, the separation feels like an unnatural cut in what should be a continuous circle of life. Even for those who have accepted the estrangement with their own child, the inability to get to know the next generation--the grandchildren--can be especially painful and frustrating.

“I have decided that when each of my grandchildren turns 18, I will send them a note telling them we are always here for them and we love them,” Diana says.

But Diana’s grief is still for her daughter. “How sad it is that my daughter has killed off her parents in her mind. I have other kids, but you can’t have other parents. That maybe is the sadness of the whole experience for both sides. Not a right or a wrong,” she says, “just a sadness.”