“Blood is thicker than water” may be one of the most powerful—and damaging—ideas governing family life. New research on adult family estrangement suggests that people who cut contact with parents or other relatives are rarely rejecting family itself. Instead, many are making a difficult transition from relationships defined by biological obligation to relationships organized around safety, accountability, equality and mutual care. The findings challenge the increasingly common public narrative that “no contact” is a symptom of selfishness, social-media influence or a breakdown of traditional values.
The research comes from Rin Reczek, a professor of sociology at The Ohio State University, whose new book, Families We Lose: A New Explanation for Family Estrangement, examines why adult children sometimes decide that maintaining a biological or legal relationship is no longer worth the psychological cost. Reczek’s work follows her earlier book, Families We Keep: LGBTQ People and Their Enduring Bonds with Parents, co-authored with Emma Bosley-Smith. Together, the projects investigate how people preserve, reshape or abandon family relationships when conventional expectations collide with lived experience.
Reczek describes the pressure to preserve biological and legal family ties as “compulsory kinship.” The concept refers to a widely held social expectation that parents and children owe one another enduring loyalty simply because they are related. Under this model, family connection is treated as a permanent obligation, even when interactions involve hostility, manipulation, discrimination, neglect or repeated violations of personal boundaries. The expectation can be especially intense when adult children are told that they must forgive harmful behavior, provide care for aging parents or remain available regardless of how the relationship affects their mental health.
The new study is based on in-depth interviews with 68 estranged adults across the United States conducted in 2023. Every participant was actively “no contact” with at least one family member, although the length of estrangement ranged from a few months to several decades. Some participants described repeated cycles of separation and reconciliation, while others viewed the break as permanent. By tracing each person’s family history from childhood to adulthood, Reczek examined estrangement as a long-term social process rather than a sudden decision triggered by one argument, one therapy session or a single viral trend.
The interviews indicate that estrangement is usually a last resort. Participants commonly described years of mistreatment, unresolved conflict, emotional volatility, miscommunication or boundary violations before contact ended. The final break could be triggered by a specific incident, but that incident generally represented the accumulation of earlier experiences. Reczek found no evidence supporting claims that mental-health professionals are driving a widespread estrangement epidemic. Instead, many participants said therapy helped them identify patterns in their relationships and understand what respectful, reciprocal family life might look like. In this sense, therapy functioned less as an instruction to sever ties than as a setting where people evaluated whether existing relationships met their own standards for safety and care.
A central explanation in Reczek’s analysis is the conflict between compulsory kinship and what she calls “democratized kinship.” In democratized kinship, family relationships are not automatically granted unlimited authority because of age, parenthood or genetics. They are maintained through qualities such as mutual respect, accountability, emotional safety, growth and meaningful connection. These relationships may include friends, neighbors, colleagues, partners or other supportive people who are not connected by blood or law. The model does not necessarily reject biological families; rather, it treats family as an ongoing social relationship that must be sustained through reciprocal behavior.
Estrangement can therefore occur when one family member begins evaluating relationships according to democratized-kinship principles while other relatives continue to rely on compulsory-kinship rules. An adult child may ask for an apology, establish limits around harassment, refuse to expose their own children to abuse or expect parents to acknowledge past harm. A parent who believes biological ties guarantee permanent access may interpret those boundaries as disrespect or abandonment. The child, however, may view the same actions as necessary protections. The disagreement is not merely over a single event but over the basic rules that should govern family life.
The research also challenges the idea that estranged adult children do not care about their families. Reczek’s participants often expressed intense grief, longing and disappointment. Many had spent years attempting to repair their relationships, explaining their needs and hoping that parents or relatives would change. Their decision to stop communicating frequently reflected high expectations for family rather than indifference toward it. They wanted relationships marked by trust and genuine concern, and they experienced continued contact as incompatible with those goals when relatives repeatedly rejected accountability or refused to respect boundaries.
Becoming a parent was another important turning point in the interviews. Raising children often caused participants to reconsider their own childhood experiences and recognize forms of behavior they had previously normalized. Some concluded that contact with a parent could expose their children to the same harm, instability or prejudice they had experienced. Others discovered that protecting the next generation required enforcing limits that had never been respected in their family of origin. Parenthood thus created a comparison between the environment participants had endured and the environment they wanted to build, sometimes making estrangement appear less like a personal rejection and more like an intergenerational safety decision.
The findings arrive amid intense public anxiety about family change. Estrangement has joined divorce, declining marriage rates and changing household structures as the subject of recurring “family panics”—periods when private decisions are presented as evidence that society is abandoning family altogether. Yet prior research cited by Reczek estimates that approximately 6% of U.S. adults experience estrangement from a mother and about 23% experience estrangement from a father at some point in adulthood. There is no empirical evidence showing that estrangement rates are currently surging. Reczek argues that the growing visibility of “no contact” discussions on podcasts, social media and news programs may make an old phenomenon appear new or more widespread than it is.
Estrangement nevertheless has significant emotional and practical consequences for everyone involved. Parents may grieve the future they expected, including the possibility of regular contact with adult children or grandchildren. Adult children may experience guilt, loneliness and uncertainty even when separation improves their well-being. The decision can also expose disagreements about caregiving, inheritance, holidays and social identity. Reczek’s work does not portray estrangement as universally beneficial or painless; instead, it explains why some people conclude that continued biological connection carries greater harm than distance. The broader implication is that family should be understood not as an unchangeable institution but as a set of relationships continually shaped by power, expectations and personal agency.
Reczek hopes the research will move public discussions away from panic and toward a more realistic understanding of modern kinship. Family relationships rarely follow a single model, and biological connection alone cannot guarantee trust, safety or affection. For many estranged adults, ending contact is not the end of their desire for family but an attempt to create relationships that better reflect their values. As families become more diverse and personal boundaries become more openly discussed, the study suggests that accepting estrangement may be part of accepting family itself: complicated, evolving and defined not only by who people are related to, but by how they treat one another.
Subject of Research: Adult family estrangement, no-contact relationships, compulsory kinship and democratized kinship.
Article Title: Families We Lose: A New Explanation for Family Estrangement
Web References: https://news.osu.edu/why-lgbtq-adults-keep-ties-with-parents-who-reject-them/; https://news.osu.edu/adult-children-more-likely-to-be-estranged-from-dad-than-mom/; https://nyupress.org/9781479838790/families-we-lose/; https://doi.org/10.1111/jomf.70065
References: Rin Reczek, Families We Lose: A New Explanation for Family Estrangement; Rin Reczek and Emma Bosley-Smith, Families We Keep: LGBTQ People and Their Enduring Bonds with Parents; Journal of Marriage and Family article on family estrangement.
Keywords: Family estrangement, sociology, social psychology, human social behavior, social networks, social relationships, human relations, social values, family, parenting, social conflict, mothers, fathers, daughters, sons
