More Americans are talking about going “no contact” with parents and relatives. But behind family estrangement may be something deeper: changing ideas about what we owe our families — and what they owe us.

There are few relationships we expect to last forever.

Friendships fade. Romantic relationships end. Colleagues disappear from our lives.

Family is supposed to be different.

A mother remains your mother. A sister remains your sister. A child remains your child.

Or at least that has traditionally been the assumption.

Yet increasing attention is being paid to something that challenges that assumption: family estrangement.

Adult children stop speaking to parents. Siblings who once shared bedrooms go years without seeing each other. Grandparents lose contact with grandchildren. Sometimes an entire extended family quietly divides into opposing camps.

From the outside, the explanation can sound surprisingly simple.

“They had an argument.”

“She didn't approve of his wife.”

“They fell out over the inheritance.”

“They have different politics.”

But research into estranged families suggests that the final argument may only be the visible crack in a relationship whose foundations have been shifting for years.

And beneath some of those conflicts may lie an even bigger change.

We may be changing what we believe a family relationship is supposed to be.

Two very different ideas of family

Sociologist Rin Reczek of The Ohio State University has proposed an intriguing way of understanding modern family estrangement.

In her recent book Families We Lose, Reczek describes what she calls a “kinship culture clash.”

On one side is a traditional idea of family.

Family membership is largely unconditional.

You may argue with your mother, disapprove of your brother or be disappointed by your daughter — but the relationship itself remains.

Family is family.

On the other side is a more contemporary idea.

Family relationships, like other close relationships, are expected to contain mutual respect, accountability, reciprocity and room for personal growth.

Under this model, biology alone does not necessarily guarantee lifelong access to another person's life.

Reczek describes these competing ideas as “compulsory kinship” and “democratized kinship.” Her argument is based on qualitative interviews with adults who had gone no-contact with members of their families of origin. Her interpretation is therefore best understood as a sociological explanation of how some estranged adults understand family, rather than proof of a single cause of estrangement.

And that distinction matters.

Because families rarely break apart for only one reason.

The argument may not really be about the argument

Family estrangement researcher Karl Pillemer, a sociologist at Cornell University, spent years interviewing people affected by family rifts.

His research identified six recurring pathways toward estrangement.

They included difficult experiences earlier in life, the long-term effects of divorce, conflict involving spouses or in-laws, disputes about money and inheritance, unmet expectations, and differences in values or lifestyles.

Look closely at that list and something becomes apparent.

The event that finally breaks a relationship may not be the real source of the rupture.

An argument about inheritance may contain decades of resentment about which sibling was favored.

A disastrous Christmas dinner may represent years of feeling criticized or ignored.

Conflict about a son's wife may actually concern whether his parents accept that they no longer have authority over his adult choices.

A disagreement over politics or religion may expose a much deeper divide over identity and values.

Families accumulate history.

And unlike most relationships, we don't choose the people with whom that history begins.

Estrangement is more common than many of us realize

One difficulty in studying estrangement is defining it.

Does speaking twice a year count as estranged?

What about regular contact between two people who feel almost no emotional connection?

Researchers therefore produce different estimates depending upon how estrangement is defined.

One of the stronger American studies followed thousands of parent-adult child relationships using data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth.

Researchers Rin Reczek, Lawrence Stacey and Mieke Beth Thomeer examined both contact and emotional closeness rather than simply asking people whether they considered themselves “estranged.”

Their results were striking.

About 6% experienced a period of estrangement from their mothers, while approximately 26% experienced estrangement from their fathers.

The average age of first estrangement was around 26 for mothers and 23 for fathers.

Those numbers shouldn't be interpreted as meaning that one-quarter of Americans are permanently estranged from their fathers.

Quite the opposite.

Because another finding changes the picture considerably.

Estrangement doesn't always mean forever

We tend to imagine estrangement as an endpoint.

Someone announces that she has gone “no contact,” and the relationship appears finished.

But families are not necessarily that static.

Among people in the longitudinal study who experienced estrangement and were observed again later, approximately 81% of those estranged from mothers and 69% of those estranged from fathers subsequently became “unestranged.”

That does not necessarily mean that every relationship became warm or healthy.

Nor does it mean reconciliation should always be attempted.

It means something subtler.

Estrangement can be a period in a relationship rather than its final chapter.

People change.

Parents age.

Adult children become parents themselves.

Marriages begin and end.

Illness occurs.

Grandchildren arrive.

Sometimes anger softens. Sometimes expectations change. Sometimes one person finally apologizes.

And sometimes two people simply become willing to build a different relationship from the one they had before.

Why fathers appear particularly vulnerable

The enormous difference between maternal and paternal estrangement deserves attention.

Researchers caution against reducing it to a simple explanation.

But family structure appears relevant.

Mothers have historically been more likely to perform intensive caregiving and maintain family relationships. Fathers have been more likely to live apart from children following parental separation, and divorce has been associated with less frequent father-adult child contact and greater conflict.

The longitudinal study also found that fathers who were still living with the respondent's mother had a substantially lower risk of estrangement.

This doesn't mean divorce inevitably damages father-child relationships.

It certainly doesn't mean mothers are responsible for maintaining them.

But it does remind us that family relationships exist within structures.

A relationship that receives little attention for years may eventually become surprisingly fragile.

The cost of silence

There is another side of estrangement that receives less attention.

The person initiating separation may experience relief.

The person receiving it may experience something entirely different.

Pillemer's interviews revealed profound feelings of rejection, uncertainty, loneliness and shame among some people living through family rifts. Estrangement can behave like a form of chronic stress rather than a single painful event.

There is often no funeral.

No socially recognized period of mourning.

Sometimes there isn't even a clear explanation.

A person is simply absent.

And the ambiguity can be extraordinarily difficult.

The daughter still exists.

The mother still exists.

The brother still exists.

But the relationship doesn't.

But reconciliation is not always the answer

This is where conversations about estrangement require particular care.

Reconciliation sounds inherently virtuous.

Sometimes it is.

Sometimes it isn't.

Families can contain abuse, violence, coercive control, addiction, exploitation and other circumstances in which distance may be necessary.

No research finding can determine whether a particular person should resume contact with a relative.

And nobody reading an article on the internet should feel pressured into returning to a relationship that she believes places her physical or psychological wellbeing at serious risk.

But there is an equally important principle.

Not every deeply imperfect relationship is necessarily irreparable.

Pillemer deliberately sought out people who had experienced serious family estrangements and later reconciled. His research eventually included 100 in-depth interviews with such “reconcilers,” some of whom had been separated from relatives for a decade or more.

Their experiences suggest that reconciliation does not necessarily require pretending the past never happened.

Sometimes it involves something considerably more modest.

Changing expectations.

Setting clearer boundaries.

Accepting that two people's memories of the past may never completely agree.

Or creating a smaller relationship that both people can actually manage.

The question before “no contact”

Perhaps one of the most useful lessons from this research is that there may be space between accepting everything and ending everything.

For someone considering estrangement, several questions may be worth thinking about:

  • Am I responding primarily to one event, or to a longstanding pattern?
  • Have I clearly explained what is hurting me and what would need to change?
  • Is the other person unwilling to change — or simply unaware of what I need?
  • Would stronger boundaries or less frequent contact make the relationship manageable?
  • Am I hoping for a relationship this person may never be capable of providing?
  • If nothing changed, how might I feel about this decision five or ten years from now?

These aren't tests with correct answers.

And in relationships involving abuse or credible threats to safety, the questions may be very different.

But in less dangerous situations, they can create a little space between hurt and permanence.

Families change because people change

Perhaps Reczek's larger argument is ultimately about something beyond estrangement.

Our understanding of family itself is evolving.

Earlier generations were often expected to tolerate enormous differences because kinship carried obligations that transcended personal satisfaction.

Modern relationships place considerably greater emphasis on autonomy, mutual respect and emotional wellbeing.

There are advantages to that change.

People may be less willing to tolerate cruelty simply because it comes from someone who shares their DNA.

But there may also be something worth preserving from the older idea.

Human beings are imperfect.

Parents make mistakes.

Adult children make mistakes.

Siblings remember the same childhood differently.

People say things they later regret.

And relationships lasting 30, 40 or 60 years will inevitably contain disappointment.

The challenge may therefore be distinguishing between a relationship that is harmful and a relationship that is simply difficult.

From inside the relationship, that distinction is not always obvious.

Sometimes the relationship that returns is a different one

Reconciliation does not have to mean returning to the family relationship that existed before the rupture.

Perhaps that relationship no longer works.

A mother and adult daughter may never again speak every day.

Two siblings may decide that occasional lunches work better than family vacations.

An adult child may love a parent while refusing to discuss certain subjects.

Forgiveness, contact, trust and closeness are not necessarily the same thing.

A relationship can return in a different form.

And perhaps that is one reason the longitudinal research on “unestrangement” is so interesting.

It reminds us that families are not frozen in the moment when they fracture.

The people on either side of the fault line continue living.

Sometimes they move farther apart.

Sometimes they find another way across.

Lydia's™ Take

There is an appealing simplicity to the phrase “family is family.”

There is also an appealing simplicity to “protect your peace.”

Real families tend to be more complicated than either slogan.

There are circumstances in which leaving a family relationship may be necessary.

There are others in which distance may provide time for something to change.

And there are relationships where reconciliation becomes possible only after both people stop trying to recreate what existed before.

Perhaps the most important thing research on estrangement teaches us is not whether we should stay or leave.

It is that family relationships have histories — and futures.

Sometimes a family relationship ends.

Sometimes what ends is only one version of the relationship.

Research & Trusted Sources

Reczek, Rin (2026). Families We Lose: A New Explanation for Family Estrangement. NYU Press. Reczek develops the concept of a “kinship culture clash” between compulsory and democratized understandings of family.

Reczek, Rin; Stacey, Lawrence; Thomeer, Mieke Beth (2023). “Parent–adult child estrangement in the United States by gender, race/ethnicity, and sexuality.” Journal of Marriage and Family, 85(2), 494–517. The nationally oriented longitudinal analysis examined thousands of mother-child and father-child relationships.

Pillemer, Karl (2020). Fault Lines: Fractured Families and How to Mend Them. Avery/Penguin Random House. Based on the Cornell Family Reconciliation Project, including a national survey of 1,340 people and extensive interviews concerning estrangement and reconciliation.

Further reading: The Conversation — “The real reason many Americans are cutting ties with their parents and siblings.”