Sharon Wildey spends holidays, especially this one, calling mothers whose phones won’t ring otherwise.

She knows how painful that can be. Personal experience has led Wildey to self-publish two books about parental abandonment, which is when an adult child cuts off ties from a parent for seemingly inexplicable reasons.

In the first book, “Abandoned Parents: The Devil’s Dilemma -- The Causes and Consequences of Adult Children Abandoning Their Parents,” she sought to validate the trauma felt by parents who experience this. There’s no data on how widespread an issue it is, but there’s an increasing number of support groups online devoted to the problem. Wildey’s Facebook page for abandoned parents has 5,000 followers, and she also moderates a Yahoo group with over 300 members who share their heartache with one another.

“This is a global problem of adult children simply walking away,” she said.

Outsiders who have never experienced such a situation have a hard time believing grown children can simply walk away without legitimate reasons, such as abuse.

“They are just so sure that it is something you have done,” said Cathy Brandt, 69, who lives in Huntington, Virginia, and helps run another Facebook support group for estranged parents.

But Wildey says that 95 percent of the parents who turn to her for advice say that they tried their best as parents, provided a loving and good upbringing for their child, and cannot understand why they have been cut off. Her second book offers a path toward healing from the overwhelming grief she has experienced firsthand.

Wildey had a child die of cystic fibrosis, which was devastating, but she says the pain of losing her other adult children to estrangement has been even worse.

“We are talking about horrendous grief,” she said, which most parents are too ashamed or embarrassed to discuss with their friends. There are abandoned parents who still drive by their children’s houses or search for ways to contact them once they’ve been cut off.

Brandt says her daughter has blocked her on Facebook and ceased contact with her more than four years ago. They share a mutual friend on Facebook, who tries to sneak Brandt pictures of her daughter and keep her updated on her whereabouts.

For years, Brandt beat herself up about the lost relationship. She talked to several therapists and read dozens of books on the topic, hoping for a reconciliation.

“Now, I am trying to reconcile myself that I will probably die with this unresolved,” she said. “I will probably die without my child being there. I have to prepare myself for that.”

That can be too bleak an outcome for others in her situation to accept. And some psychologists recommend that estranged parents continue to try to find ways to reach out to a child, even if they have been blocked from phones and social media accounts. Sometimes, there are grievances from childhood that need to be acknowledged in order to repair the broken bond, even if the reaction seems out of proportion to the perceived parental failings.

Wildey takes exception to this advice. She talks about the injury that comes from this type of repeated rejection from one’s own child: It takes a serious toll on physical and emotional health. And she believes that a parent’s persistent, unwanted outreach can also hurt an adult child who has decided to cut off ties. She advises parents to try to heal their own wounds first, so they can be healthy if their child decides to reconcile.

While she offers strategies to cope with this kind of grief, she says, “There are no magic answers. What I’m talking about is lessening the pain. It’s not ever going to go away.”

So, she makes a point to spend special days that will trigger that pain with others who need her comfort.

She picks up the phone and calls.

A white woman checked my privilege recently, and I’m glad she did.

She was presenting at an education writers conference at Stanford, where top experts discussed research on the academic achievement gaps between various groups of students. I asked her if there were aspects of the second-generation immigrant experience that could be valuable to helping lower-income students improve their academic outcomes.

I asked this as a child of working-class immigrants who came to America with very little, and who worked hard to raise six high-achieving children. We grew up on the outskirts of an upper-middle-class, mostly white suburb, where I frequently felt like an outsider.

The presenter asked me a few pointed questions:

-- Even though my mother didn’t speak English, had she been educated in her native country? Yes.

-- Even though we qualified for reduced-price lunches growing up, did we ever worry about our next meal? No.

-- Did my parents model the behaviors one needs to succeed in middle-class society? Yes.

-- Did we attend high-quality public schools? Yes.

In fact, our house was filled with books and high expectations, even though we were a working-class minority by race, ethnicity and religion. I certainly didn’t feel “privileged” in comparison to the wealthy white Christian families I grew up around, but looking back, I see that I was far more privileged than poor children in failing schools.

She helped me clarify my own assumptions: that it was primarily our hard work and learned values that got my siblings and me where we are. Those played an important role, of course, but there were unearned advantages that we benefited from, and it was naive for me to suggest that our experience could be compared to that of far more disadvantaged students.

It was after this conversation that I decided to approach the topic with my own middle-schoolers. We’ve always talked to them about the responsibilities that come with blessings and the importance of gratitude, but this was a different conversation. I wanted to help them see the difference between societal privilege, enjoyed by certain groups, and a blessing, a spiritual favor that can be bestowed upon anyone.

I also didn’t want my children to buy into the false narrative about their identity as American Muslims -- that they were either villains or victims, as so often portrayed in the media.

We talked about how power works in society. They are already aware that certain people are treated differently based on factors outside their control. So, there may be situations when they’ll be singled out while traveling based on their names or religious background. But there will also be times when they will benefit from certain characteristics -- whether it’s their gender, their socio-economic background, their skin color, their lack of disabilities or their sexual orientation.

We talked about what it means to use that privilege to work toward a more just society.

Nicole Hudson, the director of racial equity and priority initiatives for St. Louis Mayor Lyda Krewson, has taken a different approach with her own children, who are several years younger than mine. She will point out scenarios in which people in the same situation are treated differently -- by the police or the courts, for example -- and let them form their own conclusions.

Privilege is often about who gets the benefit of the doubt and who gets second chances, she said. Parents can explain to minority children that their white friends may not get in trouble (or to the same degree) for the same mistakes as them -- a reality borne out by history and years of data.

“Some people get a larger margin of error,” she said.

But she tries to avoid using the word “privilege” at all when talking about issues related to race or inequality.

“It’s a trigger word,” she said. “It so quickly shuts down the conversation” with some people, who see it as an attack. They assume they are being told they don’t deserve something or that their work didn’t matter. Or that they should feel guilty for something they couldn’t control.

“It becomes a debate about what they did or didn’t do, instead of helping them see a recurring systemic issue,” she said.

That defensiveness is learned, which is why I want my own children to recognize the ways in which they benefit from society’s power structures and the ways they don’t. More importantly, I want them to think about what they can do to listen to and lift up the voices of people who deal with challenges they won’t experience.

It was embarrassing to me that, as an adult, I failed to take into account the advantages in my upbringing before implying there were lessons in it for those less fortunate.

“You don’t see it because it was there for you,” Hudson said.

I had failed to separate the privilege from the blessings.

When parents start chatting about their tween or teenage children at a party, the conversation invariably turns to their anxiety about their child’s devices. So, it was a mother I met at a baby shower who told me about a fairly new app she was planning to use to keep on top of her teen’s digital life.

There are divergent schools of thought on monitoring apps: One group believes that keeping close tabs on their children’s every online move is a creepy invasion of privacy, and prefers to teach their children to independently make good choices. On the other end, there are parents who believe that children lack the emotional maturity and self-regulation to make good decisions all the time with technology, and require supervision until they are older and better equipped to control their impulses.

But keeping track of a child’s (or children’s) entire daily digital communication can seem like an overwhelming full-time job. Not to mention, there are secret codes and hidden apps that can be used to hide or disguise inappropriate content on a child’s phone.

In between these groups are parents who try to keep open lines of dialogue, keep a list of their child’s passwords and do random spot-checks on their devices.

There isn’t much good data on how many parents fall into each of these categories, although anecdotally, it seems to be about half who try to keep some kind of monitoring, even if just spot-checks, and half who are pretty hands-off.

This is where an app called Bark offers a different type of solution. It’s a subscription-based app ($9 a month for a family) that uses algorithms to scan a child’s phone for potentially harmful activity from bullying to sexting to mental health crises. When something is spotted through these filters, the parent gets an alert with the flagged content and advice on how to handle it with their child.

On one hand, it affords a child far more privacy, since all of their communication is not being watched or reported to a parent. Yet, it allows some measure of a safety net for parents.

Brian Bason, CEO of Bark, launched the company in February of 2016.

“Teens don’t understand the permanency of their online activities and the downstream effects they can have,” he said. Among their subscribers, 54 percent of kids have at least one issue per month that generates an alert for a parent to review. The vast majority of those parents, 80 percent, were completely unaware of the issue until they received an alert.

In some cases, they have been alerted about 10-year-old boys trying to download the dating app Tinder. But others have been more serious. There have been about two dozen situations in which a parent was alerted about a potentially suicidal child, Bason said. He said they see a large amount of cyberbullying, violence, threats and drug use, along with mental health concerns.

While the app can scan content over 20 different platforms on a child’s phone, there are things that can slip through the cracks. For example, not all “snaps” sent via Snapchat can be filtered. On Android phones, messages sent using WhatsApp cannot be filtered. On an iOS device, the content is captured when the device is connected and backed up to iCloud. On Android, the app is installed on both the parent’s and child’s phones.

While there are still some loopholes and the technology is evolving, this will help those parents who believe something is better than nothing. Ideally, this sort of careful monitoring service should be provided as an option to all cellphone subscribers through the monthly charges and fees that cellphone providers already charge.

For many parents, a child’s constant connectivity provokes a fear similar to when an adolescent starts driving, but unlike that rite of passage, there is no formal “digital citizenship exam” or learner’s permit that comes with the technology that connects them to the world and their friends. And yet, just like the potential risks that come with driving, there’s a legitimate worry that a foolish mistake could derail a child’s life.

Regardless of whether a parent is pro-monitoring, anti- or somewhere in between, it’s a relief that tech companies are continuing to find ways to help parents keep kids safer online.