Will the Modern Family Break, or Bend? – LuElla D’Amico

Thus, earlier this January, when I read 26-year-old Brooklyn Beckham’s account of the resentment he still holds toward his parents—soccer legend David Beckham and former Spice Girl-turned-fashion designer Victoria Beckham—over what happened at his wedding in 2022, I was a little taken aback. 

Here’s a taste of what he told his 16.5 million Instagram followers: “The night before our wedding, members of my family told me [my fiancée] Nicola was ‘not blood’ and ‘not family.’” And, later: “In front of our 500 wedding guests, Marc Anthony called me to the stage. What was scheduled to be the romantic dance with my wife turned into my mom waiting to dance with me instead. She danced very inappropriately on me in front of everyone. I’ve never felt more uncomfortable or humiliated in my entire life.”

While the elder Beckhams have yet to publicly confirm or deny their son’s post, I reacted with an audible, stunned gasp. And it seems, from the viral nature of the post, that all of the rest of the internet did too. Within days, outlets from The Guardian to People and Sky News were covering the rift. And, on January 28—a mere nine days after the Instagram announcement—British broadcaster Channel 4 aired a documentary called Beckham: Family at War: UNTOLD. And, never to be outdone by the Brits, American audiences got their own deep dive the next day, when IMPACT x Nightline: End It Like Beckham premiered.

But Brooklyn did not just accuse his mother of inappropriate behavior. He decided, publicly, to cut off the rest of the Beckhams. “I do not want to reconcile with my family. … I’m not to be controlled,” he wrote on Instagram after relaying his wedding blues. “I’m standing up for myself for the first time in my life.” 

This was a mic-drop moment in the post, and my mom heart dropped reading it. And if you’ve made it this far and are wondering why any of this matters—why a celebrity wedding spat has captured so much worldwide attention—here’s my serious claim: Stories like this are as revealing about the state of our culture as any political headline. In fact, they function as a kind of litmus test for whether the social glue holding families—and, by extension, communities—together is stretching, snapping, or perhaps, I have to say it, simply bending. Pun aside, the question beneath all of this is whether families in the social media age still know how to bend—or whether everything now feels like it must break.

For many of us, awkward family moments mellow with time, which sands down the sharp edges of embarrassment. But for Brooklyn, they seem to have hardened into a searing indictment of his parents. To be fair, Brooklyn’s posts suggest he’s referring to more than a single awkward dance or offhand comment: His language about being “controlled” points to a larger sense of lifelong pressure. Still, it’s striking that wedding-day memories, the kinds of moments many families eventually absorb into their shared story, became, for him, public evidence and symbolic confirmation of longstanding dynamics he now experiences as personally and perhaps irreparably damaging. He no longer wants to be part of the Beckhams, but to define himself outside of it. In some ways, this reflects a familiar developmental milestone of young adulthood: differentiating from one’s family of origin while forming a new primary bond through marriage.

And while struggling to adjust to this latter stage is not new, social media has introduced new complications into the already difficult work of becoming an adult. After all, plenty of us grew up with wedding videos where a relative (or two) gave a tipsy toast or danced a little too enthusiastically. For those of us old enough to remember, those tapes often lived in the back of a closet or the attic, and we had to choose to pull them down—dust and all—and relive them.

But in the modern world, embarrassing moments circulate. In the 1990s and prior, documentation was limited, and the audience was small and shared. Today, recording is ambient, and the audience is potentially millions of strangers. For instance, in light of Brooklyn Beckham’s story, another mother’s exuberant wedding dance went viral to the tune of 25 million views last week, accompanied by the caption, “Let moms live.” And we know nothing about her besides the fact of this dance. Is she a teacher? A veteran? A doctor? Context falls by the wayside when the memory spreads en masse. What were once private family moments become public artifacts, open to consumption and commentary from people who were never in the room. What was once created and enjoyed as part of a family’s private story, and interlaced into its shared history, has now become public entertainment.

Even Brooklyn and his now-wife’s wedding—where guests reportedly had to surrender their phones and use limited-function devices—ironically reflects this private-to-commercial shift. The very anxiety around documentation was part of the event itself: Give up your devices to be part of this elite community in the first place. And despite those efforts to maintain privacy, Brooklyn ultimately breached it, choosing to tell social media about his wedding and carefully framing one of his family’s most personal, emotionally charged moments for a global audience. The difference today isn’t simply that moments can go viral; it’s that family members can turn private hurts into public narratives with the tap of a screen. Therefore, what startled me when reading Brooklyn’s post wasn’t that he had imperfect wedding memories. It was that he seemed to believe those memories were evidence of unforgivable betrayal rather than the basic material of a family life that is imperfect—and that difference, I think, says something important about the moment we’re living in.

Notably, Brooklyn’s decision lands in a cultural moment when estrangement—the decisive act of becoming a stranger to those with whom you were once familiar—is losing its stigma in American life. Some estimates suggest that roughly one in four people report being estranged from at least one relative, and about one in ten say they’ve severed ties with a parent or child. A growing ecosystem of online communities, therapists, and influencers also now supports adult children who choose to go “no contact” with their parents. Platforms like Together Estranged and Calling Home openly discuss the perceived benefits of cutting ties, while figures like Patrick Teahan, a licensed social worker with over 800,000 YouTube subscribers, encourage viewers to consider distance from “toxic” family systems as a path toward healing.

In many cases, these spaces offer relief to people escaping genuinely abusive situations. But they also circulate a powerful new vocabulary, of “toxicity,” “boundaries,” and “self-protection,” that can encourage people to interpret painful but ordinary family friction as grounds for permanent rupture. According to a New York Times interview with psychologist Joshua Coleman, a generational divide seems to be at play: “Younger generations who are in therapy, they are coming to their parents saying they were traumatized, abused, neglected—and the parents are like, ‘What the hell are you talking about?’” Brooklyn’s public reframing of his family story mimics this newer language, a language that could potentially be lifesaving in some situations but also, perhaps, unnecessarily relationship-ending in others. 

But let’s zoom in a little. After Brooklyn’s post went viral, I felt, for the first time in my life, an inexplicable kinship with Victoria Beckham. I—a mother—found myself imagining the mix of emotions she must have felt around her firstborn son getting married: the nerves, the hope that everything would be perfect, the pressure of hosting a wedding attended by people like Eva Longoria and Gordon Ramsay. And then another fear many moms carry arose, too, that one slightly foolish, overly enthusiastic moment might someday be retold not as family lore, but as humiliation. And in a cultural moment increasingly comfortable with estrangement, humiliation can start to feel less like a story a family survives together and more like a grievance that must be carried alone until it is “handled” somehow—perhaps in a public post. 

I admit the fact that I feel any relational pull at all says more about our media environment than it does about the Beckhams’ private lives. As sociologist Sherry Turkle has argued, we are increasingly turning to technology to manage emotions that once required face-to-face conversation. Note that rather than picking up the phone or working through hurt in private, Brooklyn aired his grievances in public, seeking understanding—perhaps even solace—from millions of strangers, myself among them, who feel connected to his family without truly knowing any of them. Turkle warns that “human relationships are rich and they’re messy and they’re demanding. And we clean them up with technology. And when we do, one of the things that can happen is that we sacrifice conversation for mere connection.” In other words, technology gives us the feeling of being heard without the vulnerability of real dialogue. We trade the slow, uncomfortable work of reconciliation for the quicker, shinier comfort of public affirmation. We end up with connection, but not necessarily repair.

This phenomenon is rooted in television; back in the 1950s, researchers noticed that television audiences often felt they “knew” the personalities who appeared in their living rooms each week. In the social media age, those bonds are much easier to form. We watch celebrities raise kids, age, and stumble in public, and our brains file them under “people like us.” We now have constant access to the details of other people’s lives: There’s a little burst of brightness in my day, for example, when Kyra Sedgwick and Kevin Bacon pop up on Instagram, singing Bruno Mars or playing with their goats. They will never know who I am, but I’m brightened by the jokes they tell and the behind-the-scenes glimpses of their lives. I spend time “with them” online. When family conflict erupts on a celebrity’s feed, it’s not quite honest to say fans consume it only as spectacle. We talk about it. We instinctively map their lives onto our own kitchens, our own kids, our own future in-laws.

And here’s another truth: Brooklyn Beckham has been in the public eye since before he could walk. Many of us feel like we’ve grown up alongside him. His parents famously sold exclusive photos of key family milestones, including early baby pictures and images from their own 1999 wedding, when Brooklyn was just months old, to OK! Magazine. Long before Instagram birth announcements and Facebook pregnancy updates, Brooklyn was already part of a new kind of public childhood—a life documented not just for relatives, but for millions of strangers. 

Layered on top of all this is a thoroughly modern anxiety: what it means to raise children in an age of permanent documentation. Parents today post their children’s lives at unprecedented levels; researchers estimate the average parent shares hundreds of photos of their child online each year—sometimes adding up to thousands before that child even starts school. Brooklyn echoes this concern on those headline-making Instagram posts, too, describing growing up amid “performative social media posts” and “inauthentic relationships.” His life, he suggests, was always partly a production. That may be extreme, but it relates to a question many ordinary parents now ask themselves: How much of our children’s lives should live online? Previous generations posed for holiday photos; ours curate highlight reels. The line between memory and performance has blurred. 

And so it’s not surprising that the Beckham drama has gone viral. Celebrity gossip is often dismissed as trivial, but these stories are one way humans work through social norms together. Talking about the Beckhams is safer than talking publicly about your own brother or cousin who stopped speaking to the family. Or maybe it was you who made that decision, and you want to process it. These stories let us explore questions about loyalty, forgiveness, boundaries, and respect without naming names at our great uncle’s 75^th birthday party. Through someone else’s family drama, we test our own moral instincts.

At the end of his post, Brooklyn wrote, “My wife and I do not want a life shaped by image, press, or manipulation. All we want is peace, privacy, and happiness for us and our future family.” The irony wasn’t lost on me that this plea for privacy appeared in a very public Instagram statement that all but guaranteed headlines and commentary like this one. I also noticed that for a young man declaring he was “standing up for” himself for the first time, his chosen path forward still lives squarely in the world of image and performance: modeling, photography, cooking for an online audience. He wants distance from the machinery of his public childhood, and yet he is building a life in front of the camera all the same. 

All of this drama reminded this English professor of Hamlet—a story about a young man trying to define himself in the shadow of powerful parents, in a world where public performance and private truth are constantly at odds. Shakespeare’s tragedies unfold when pride hardens, people stop trying to understand each other, and performance replaces honest connection. Early in the play, Hamlet insists that what he feels inside cannot be reduced to outward appearances: “I have that within which passeth show; / These but the trappings and the suits of woe.” He’s talking about grief, but the line resonates far beyond mourning. There is always a gap between what we actually feel and what can be staged for others—including online. When families forget that, when public gesture stands in for private understanding, misunderstanding deepens and hurt calcifies. And the public watches the Instagram story as a kind of cautionary tale, much as audiences in Shakespeare’s time watched Hamlet play out.

Real families, however, are not bound to tragic scripts, and Brooklyn Beckham is not a character in a Shakespearean tragedy either, whatever he may be feeling about how much of his life has “played out” in public. Real families, celebrities or not, are allowed something the Bard’s characters rarely receive: time. Time to cool off. Time to gain perspective. Time to realize that what felt like betrayal might also have been clumsiness, fear, or generational misunderstanding. Time to admit that love can coexist with embarrassment—and that humiliation, in retrospect, can soften into the story that gets told over Easter dinner.

In the end, despite this Instagram debacle, I find myself hopeful. Most relationships in our lives don’t break under pressure. More often, they bend.