In my case, it was because:
1. Dad didn’t care except where my behavior made him look bad or otherwise reflected on him.
2. I’d long lost any respect or awe for him, because he was and is emphatically a do-what-I-say-not-what-I-do type.
Between those two, plus a literally psychotic mother and other family problems, I ended up having to function as an adult before I hit my teens. I was basically marking time until I graduated and got the hell outta there. The only thing to do was to endure.
My father was born in Holland, and came here in 1912 with his parents and two brothers. They became citizens when their father was naturalized. I never knew any of my grandparents. My Dad worked on the NY Central Railroad his whole life, and my mother was a housewife who from time-to-time cleaned house for a neighbor. My parents weren't strict disciplinarians, but we all knew that the one thing you didn't do in front of my father, was talk back to my mother. My mother quit school when she was 16 to marry my father. My Dad had only gone to the 4th grade, so neither parent impressed education on us, although I did later get my B.A. and M.A., but after my parents were gone.
My father wasn't the type of Dad who played games with you, or played catch with my brother, and he wasn't much of a fix-it man at home. The railroad was his life. He got up and went to work at 5 a.m. every day, came home, ate supper, did his work reports every night, then went to bed. Every Saturday he made sauce, and every Sunday, and holiday he cooked a big meal. He was a better cook than my mother. He had the same schedule every day through his whole life.
I raised my two sons by myself. I divorced my only husband in 1979 when my youngest was 8 years old, and he's never kept in touch. He remarried, became a Jehovah Witness, moved out of state, and that was that. If he's still alive, he has no idea that his son had cancer. My youngest son decided he didn't want to contact him about it.