Quick answer
Telemachus is usually treated as a coming-of-age subplot in The Odyssey. Clinically, he’s something more specific: a child raised in the presence of an absence, shaped by a father’s reputation without ever having the actual relationship. That’s a distinct kind of grief — one common to kids of deployed, incarcerated, overseas, or estranged parents, and it doesn’t expire once someone turns eighteen. The keys to helping a child through it: keep the absent parent human instead of mythologized, name what the child is actually grieving, and treat reunion — at seventeen or at fifty-one — as an adjustment period rather than a resolution.
I saw The Odyssey in IMAX, and while most of the conversation afterward was about Penelope, I kept coming back to Telemachus. Twenty-five years of working with families has taught me that the kid in these stories usually gets the least airtime and does the most invisible work. He’s not a coming-of-age subplot. He’s a case study in what it costs a child to grow up around an absence instead of a person. I have some personal familiarity with that particular cost — my own father died when I was ten, and I’ve spent a career since then watching for the same patterns in other people’s lives that I first noticed in my own.
What does it do to a child to grow up without an absent parent physically present?
Telemachus was raised on his father’s reputation without ever getting the actual relationship. He knows Odysseus as a legend — clever, brave, larger than life — because that’s all anyone could offer him. That’s its own specific grief, and I see it constantly with kids whose parent is deployed, incarcerated, working overseas, or simply estranged. The loss isn’t abstract to them, even if it’s hard for them to name. It shows up as idealizing the missing parent, friction with authority, or a kind of restlessness that doesn’t map cleanly onto anything else going on in their life.
How do I talk to my kids about a parent who’s been absent for a long time?
Don’t let the missing parent turn into a myth. It’s tempting to build them up into something heroic to soften the loss for a child. But the kid eventually has to reconcile the myth with the real, flawed, specific person — and that’s a harder landing than if you’d kept them human from the start. Small, honest contact beats an idealized story every time: a recorded bedtime message, an actual conversation about an actual day, rather than a legend passed down secondhand.
Name what the kid is really grieving. It’s rarely just “Dad” or “Mom.” It’s the modeling — how to handle conflict, how to run a household, how to be an adult under pressure. Kids often can’t name that loss because it doesn’t have an obvious shape; it’s not a person missing from a chair at dinner so much as a whole way of learning to be a person that isn’t happening. Naming it for them, or working through it with a therapist, does more than reassurance ever will.
Watch for the quiet signs, not just the loud ones. A child struggling with a parent’s absence doesn’t always act out. Sometimes it looks like idealizing the absent parent to an unrealistic degree, difficulty with authority figures who aren’t that parent, or a noticeable shift in behavior whenever contact or reunion comes up.
Does it get easier once the family is reunited?
Not automatically, no — and this is the part families are least prepared for. Telemachus doesn’t just get his father back; he has to figure out who he is now that the person he became without his father meets the actual man standing in front of him. That’s a real developmental event, not a footnote to the reunion.
Families reuniting after deployment, incarceration, or long separation should plan for an adjustment period, not a movie ending. The kid who grew up in the meantime is not the kid who got left. They’ve built routines, identities, and coping strategies around the absence — and reintegrating a present parent into that structure takes real, deliberate work, usually more from the parent than the child expects.
What can parents do to make the reunion adjustment smoother?
Go in expecting to meet the child where they are now, not where they were when the separation started. Rebuilding trust and closeness takes time and consistency, not a single homecoming moment. It also helps enormously to involve the child in setting the pace — asking what they need, rather than assuming the relationship should simply resume where it left off.
What about adult children reconnecting with a parent after decades of absence?
Telemachus is a teenager, which makes his story easy to file under “kids and divorce.” A meaningful share of the work we actually do at the practice is with people well past that — adults in their thirties, forties, and beyond, reconnecting with a parent after ten, twenty, thirty years of absence. The myth doesn’t cover this part, but it’s some of the most delicate work I do, and it deserves its own attention rather than a footnote.
I’ll say plainly that I recognize a lot of this from the inside, not just from the therapy room. My father died when I was ten, which isn’t the same story as estrangement or alienation — there was no reconciliation to work toward, no version of him to reconcile with — but the underlying architecture is familiar. Growing up without a parent leaves a specific kind of gap regardless of why the parent is gone, and I’ve spent decades since then able to spot that gap in adult clients well before they can name it themselves. It’s part of why I don’t buy the idea that this work belongs only to childhood. The absence doesn’t clock out at eighteen. Neither does the loss.
A lot of these cases trace back to high-conflict divorce and what’s clinically referred to as parental alienation — a pattern in which a child’s relationship with one parent is damaged, sometimes deliberately, sometimes as fallout from a custody conflict neither adult fully controlled. I want to be careful here, because “parental alienation” gets used loosely and sometimes weaponized in custody disputes themselves. Clinically, what I’m describing isn’t a diagnosis to hand out from the outside — it’s a pattern I see borne out in adult clients who grew up absorbing one parent’s narrative about the other, often without the context, nuance, or ability to question it that comes with age. By the time they’re adults, that narrative has calcified into identity: this is who my father is, this is who my mother is, built entirely secondhand.
What makes this different from Telemachus’s situation is that the child is no longer a child. They’ve had decades to build a life, a version of events, and often real grief or real anger that isn’t going to soften just because the absent parent shows back up wanting a relationship. Some things I’d want anyone in this position — on either side of it — to know:
The adult child’s version of events is real to them, even if it’s incomplete. If you’re the parent trying to reconnect after a long absence, the instinct to correct the record or explain “what really happened” tends to backfire early on. Rebuilding trust starts with hearing their experience as valid before it starts with being understood yourself.
Decades of absence don’t erase the developmental cost — they just change its shape. An adult who grew up without a parent still carries the same core loss Telemachus does: no modeling, no template, no lived relationship to draw on. It shows up differently in adulthood — in how they handle their own relationships, their own parenting, their own conflict — but the underlying wound is the same one, just aged.
Reconciliation is not owed, and it’s not always the healthiest outcome. Part of this work is helping adult children figure out what they actually want, separate from what they feel obligated to want. Some reconnect fully. Some choose a limited, boundaried relationship. Some choose not to reconnect at all, and that can be the healthiest resolution available, even though it’s the one nobody in the myth gets to choose.
Both generations usually need their own support, not just joint sessions. Families coming back together after decades apart tend to do better when each person has done some individual work on what the absence meant to them before trying to rebuild the relationship together. Jumping straight to reunification conversations without that groundwork tends to reopen wounds faster than it heals them.
Frequently asked questions
Is it normal for a child to idealize an absent parent? Yes, and it’s actually one of the more common patterns therapists see. In the absence of real information, children often fill the gap with an idealized version of the missing parent. It’s not a sign anything is wrong with the child — but it does mean the eventual reunion, or the eventual full picture of who that parent actually is, requires careful handling.
Should I tell my child everything about why a parent is absent? Age-appropriate honesty tends to serve children better long-term than a curated or heroic narrative, even when the truth is complicated. The goal isn’t full disclosure of adult details — it’s keeping the absent parent recognizably human rather than mythologized.
Why is reunion sometimes harder on a family than the separation itself? Because both the child and the returning parent have changed, and reunion requires renegotiating a relationship as it actually is now, not resuming it as it was. Families often expect relief and instead encounter friction, which can feel discouraging if they don’t know to expect an adjustment period.
Can an adult child and an estranged parent rebuild a relationship after decades apart? Sometimes, yes — but it typically requires each person doing individual work first, and the adult child’s version of events being heard as valid before it’s revisited or explained. Reconciliation isn’t guaranteed, and in some cases a limited or boundaried relationship, or no reconnection at all, is the healthier outcome.
Is parental alienation a real clinical pattern? It’s a recognized pattern in family therapy, though the term is often used loosely or contested in custody disputes. Clinically, it describes a child’s relationship with one parent being damaged — sometimes deliberately, sometimes as fallout from high conflict — in ways that can carry into adulthood as a fixed, one-sided narrative about the absent parent.
Does the author have personal experience with this topic? Yes. Dr. Holroyd’s father died when she was ten, and she grew up without a parent as a result. While her personal experience is grief-based rather than divorce- or estrangement-based, she draws on it directly in her clinical work with adults who experienced early parental loss or absence of any kind.
If you’re navigating how a parent’s absence — whether it’s a current separation affecting a child, or decades of distance you or an adult family member are trying to make sense of — that’s a lot of what we work through at The Relationship Center.
This article reflects the clinical perspective of Dr. Victoria Holroyd, PhD, LPC, LMHC, NCC, ACS, CCMHC, based on over 25 years of clinical practice with couples and families, as well as her own lived experience of losing a parent in childhood. Dr. Holroyd is licensed in Virginia, New York, and DC, and trained in EFT, Gottman Method, Imago, PACT, RLT, IFS, EMDR, and Brainspotting.