Speaking through silence: relational communication among only daughters in post-divorce Indonesian families

Research on family communication has largely been shaped by Western cultural paradigms that emphasize open dialogue as a central indicator of family well-being. These assumptions may not fully capture communication practices in collectivist cultural contexts such as Indonesia, where maintaining relational harmony often takes precedence over direct expression. This study explores how only daughters in urban Indonesia interpret and navigate family communication following parental divorce. Using interpretative phenomenological analysis (IPA), the research draws on in-depth interviews with five only daughters to examine their lived experiences and meaning-making processes. This analysis advances a core theoretical concept: protective relational silence, a deliberate communicative strategy used by daughters to manage emotional tension, prevent conflict escalation, and preserve personal and familial stability. This concept is situated within two other emergent themes: negotiating relational boundaries, which captures how daughters reinterpret parental roles through negotiations of responsibility, and daughter-mediated relational maintenance, which reveals how they assume intermediary roles to sustain family cohesion. The findings demonstrate that only daughters are not passive recipients of family conflict but active agents who strategically reshape family relationships. This study extends symbolic interactionism by conceptualizing silence not as communicative failure but as a culturally embedded, agentic, and symbolic act of relational care. It also proposes a process model illustrating how post-divorce conflict precipitates the use of these adaptive strategies. These findings challenge deficit-oriented perspectives and urge clinicians to develop mechanism-driven interventions that recognize and support the complex communicative labor performed by daughters in post-divorce families.