It's weird. Thinking about "kids these days", the main difference between these letters and my terrible great-aunt's family in the '80s is that when any of my aunt's kids announced they were cutting her off, the socially acceptable response, in which she was egged on by her terrible friends, was to say "well, if that ungrateful child is going to be rude and disrespectful, I'm not talking to them anymore, see how they like it!"

This made everybody happy and worked very well.

I suspect the difference is partly the internet - which makes it so much harder to cut people off, and so much more expectation of being constantly in touch. Partly I suspect it's smaller families - if you have six kids, you can drop four of them and still get plenty of narcissistic supply from the others (and the kids themselves can trade off who is not speaking to you this year, so none of them has to be around you more than one year in five) - but if you only have one or two you can't afford to drop any. And partly it's that abusive parents these days are such fragile special snowflakes compared to what they were back when I was growing up, and they have no self-respect...