Family estrangement – cutting ties with a parent, grandparent, or sibling – is often seen as at odds with the meaning of family as we know it. Sociologist and author Rin Reczek says it’s time to rethink what family means and what we expect from it.

Guests

Rin Reczek, professor of sociology at the Ohio State University. Author of “Families We Lose: A New Explanation for Family Estrangement.”

Book Excerpt

From “Families We Lose: A New Explanation for Family Estrangement.” Not to be republished without permission All rights reserved.

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Transcript of Full Broadcast

The version of our broadcast available at the top of this page and via podcast apps is a condensed version of the full show. You can listen to the full, unedited broadcast here:

Part I   

MEGHNA CHAKRABARTI:

Last week, I asked if you’d be willing to share your stories of family estrangement. Maia Goodall is in Boston, Massachusetts. She and her mother haven’t had contact in decades.

MAIA GOODALL [TAPE]: I have not spoken to my mother in about 20 years. She wrote me an email and told me that I was never there for her and that she was no longer going to go out of her way for me, and I said, “This sounds like something we should talk about,” and she told me that that was all she had to say. There were a lot of people in my life telling me that because she’s your mother, you have to give her grace or whatever. I’ve realized that her toxicity and her narcissism was not worth having a relationship with her.

CHAKRABARTI: By the way, as I’ve said before, and I want to say it again, I’m always grateful to you listeners when you share your stories with us, especially when they’re deeply personal like that and sometimes even still very painful.

Well, Maia’s story contains the entire spectrum of how family estrangement is and has been perceived over time. There’s the ancient blood is thicker than water view, where people, as you heard, were advising Maia that she had an obligation, and that’s the key word here, an obligation to give her mother grace.

Then there’s the modern therapy-inflected view about protecting one’s self from toxicity, about estrangement as an act of self-care. In her new book, Families We Lose: A New Explanation for Family Estrangement, sociologist Rin Reczek says both ends of that spectrum are wrong, and to then understand why people cut ties with families, perhaps we need to cast a glance not within specific families, but somewhere else entirely.

And Rin Reczek joins us now from Columbus, Ohio, where she’s a sociology professor and co-director at the Center for Aging Families at The Ohio State University. Professor Reczek, welcome to On Point.

RIN RECZEK: Thank you for having me.

CHAKRABARTI: First of all, I would actually like to ask you what inspired you to write this book now, since family estrangement, I guess, in, in some way, shape, or form is kind of almost as old as families themselves?

RECZEK: That’s right. I’ve been studying families for about 20 years. And I really like to take a demographic approach to families, so that is understanding these big picture trends and family changes, as well as the personal side of family. So I do lots of interviews with people in their family lives.

My first book, “Families We Keep,” was actually about why and how people stay in family relationships, and I interviewed adult children and their parents about the challenges that they face in their family lives and how they navigate those challenges. Even in the face of some of the things that I talk about in this second book, “Families We Lose,” you know, people decided they wanted to stay in these relationships, and they did a lot of effort, work, labor to do so.

But in the course of doing research for that book, I talked to a couple people who had periods of estrangement, and I was so curious about that topic. I went and looked at the research on family estrangement, and I was so surprised to find very little on this topic that was really what I would consider research-based.

And so the, I just felt like it was my responsibility to dive into this topic to better understand what’s going on with family estrangement.

CHAKRBARTI: Hmm. Interesting because a couple things you said there caught my attention. One is that there was very little data. implying that is family estrangement common enough that there’s a critical mass of this happening to people where you can actually somehow form a, a robust data set around it?

RECZEK: It absolutely is common enough but the issue is that it is such a highly stigmatized event that really it has gone undercover. So I think this is one of the issues in the kind of public conversation that we’re having is, wow, we’re hearing so much more about it now. It must be increasing.

But that really, we have no evidence to suggest that that’s the case scientifically. This is something that is amongst the most stigmatized family experiences that we can have, and therefore, people just really don’t share this information. I think it’s really only in the past five years that we see the conversation being brought to the fore.

So we do have some data on this actually, but we had to go digging into existing data sources that didn’t ask, “Are you estranged from a family member?” Instead, what they’ve been doing is asking, “Do you have contact? How often do you have contact? What is your relationship like with this family member?”

And that is how we can start to get a sense of the prevalence of estrangement.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay. So tell me one of the stories of people that you interviewed in order to better understand sort of what the drivers of estrangement are. Pick anyone. I’d love to hear one of those stories.

RECZEK: Sure. Yeah. Well, you know, I start the book with Barbara, and Barbara is an amazing Black woman. I talked to her for hours and I was so grateful for all the people who I talked to, their time and energy and really vulnerability to speak with. Now, Barbara told me a lot about her childhood, and quite harrowing things, to be honest with you, things that I found to be really troublesome.

But, despite all of her childhood experiences with her parents and her sister, who she also ended up being estranged from, it really wasn’t her childhood experiences that mattered. What mattered most for Barbara was what was happening in her adulthood. So after Barbara left her parental home, she had her own child, and she married her husband.

The relationship continued to have some issues, and these issues Barbara likened to a lack of mutual respect, a lack of accountability and growth, a lack of attention and intentional connection, and to some degree, a lack of safety. And these really, for the people that I talked to, were what was driving estrangement.

You kind of heard it in that first story that you, Meghna, aired, that like, what do we want from our relationships in adulthood? And I think this is a misnomer of people who are talking about estrangement because, of course, there can be things that happen in childhood that set the stage for the adult relationship with, between parents and children, between adult siblings. But really, I think the, the story is about what’s happening when people are adults and they get to mutually decide what the nature of their relationship is, and that’s the case for Barbara, who ultimately decided, “This relationship actually is not allowing me to be the kind of mother that I wanna be.

It’s causing me so much stress and strain that I can’t be a good parent, or I can’t be a good spouse or a good friend.” And Barbara actually, I think many of the people’s stories echoed this, she became so invested in the relationship with her husband’s family. She went so far as to, have, you know, she ran a family reunion that brought together, like, 100 people from his family.

And so it’s not that Barbara doesn’t care about the family. She actually cares so much. She really just wanted the kind of family that really worked for her and that is part of her story.

CHAKRABARTI: Can we just stick with Barbara for another few minutes?

RECZEK: Sure.

CHAKRABARTI: Because you’re right her story is profoundly affecting, you said harrowing to say the least, right? I mean, since you wrote about it in the book, I do think we should talk about it a little bit more, because it can mean a lot of different things to a lot of different people. But she grew up in a, an abusive household, right? Yes. I mean, her, her father, she describes her father as, you know, doing things like regularly physically abusing her, throwing lit cigarette butts at her, attacking her when he was violently drunk. And she was just a young girl at this time, sometimes even hiding in the closet with her sister.

RECZEK: Yeah. Yes. And you could imagine hearing this story is devastating to hear that Barbara had to go through this as a young person.

CHAKRABARTI: Yeah and I think the other key part is how did her mother react when either seeing her husband be violent to Barbara and her sister or being confronted by the fact? How did her mother react?

RECZEK: Well, we have to remember that family violence is often a system event, which means that Barbara’s mother also experienced family violence from her husband. And so oftentimes it is incredibly challenging for the parent who’s also the victim of abuse to step in and prevent that abuse.

And, and this is also true, you know, of other family people I talked to who felt that their parent, who wasn’t directly abusive, was an enabler of that abuse. And that can lead to also estrangement later in life when that parent can’t accept that they had a role to play in not protecting their child.

CHAKRABARTI: Explain to me more about when the estrangement or the no contact happened it wasn’t exclusively Barbara saying, “Now I have my own family, and I want to create a sense of nurture, love, and safety with my own family that I didn’t have with my parents.” It wasn’t just exclusively her that cut off contact.

If I remember correctly, her parents also cut off contact. Is that right?

RECZEK: So there, I think one of the, the things that Barbara’s story shows us is that estrangement can be, it can happen multiple times across the course of a relationship. So there may be periods of time where contact just fizzles out, and one person might be initiating that over another, and then they can reenter that relationship.

Some of the survey data, data I have says that about 80% of people actually renegotiate contact later after a period of estrangement. So in Barbara’s story, it’s really complicated. It’s called the cycle of estrangement, in and out of contact can happen very frequently. And to some extent, you know, Barbara actually framed this as, “Well, sure, ultimately I stopped talking to them, but they also kind of stopped talking to me.”

And that’s true of her sister as well. So I think that there is this, like, who is really the initiator of estrangement is a question that isn’t so cut and dry. Often the people I talked to said that they set that boundary and don’t want to talk to their family again.

But of course, it could be the case that their family is feeling the same way, and they also effectively went no contact.

CHAKRABARTI: I think this is a really important point, right? Because one of the conventional pieces of wisdom that we receive about family estrangement is that the responsibility for the estrangement is usually heaped on one party.

Yeah. And in your book, in your research, you found that that isn’t true. And in Barbara’s case, I think one of the first points of disconnect was when she was pregnant with her first child, and her family, her parents refused to even acknowledge the birth of her son.

And then, and you write that her mother gave her the silent treatment every time they saw each other. So that was the beginning of then this, like, much longer period of estrangement. But Professor Reczek, if you can just hang on for a second, there’s a lot more in Barbara’s story particularly that I wanna ask you about in terms of how does it help us understand the broader dynamics of family estrangement, and we’ll do that right when we come back.

PART II

CHAKRABARTI: And Professor Reczek, so in the first part of Barbara’s story, as she related to you, it ultimately ended up in this 15-year-long period of no contact.

What part of that do you think challenges our sort of historical notions of family as the blood is thicker than water belief about family, that family is essential for development, for survival, that it is the fundamental social group that we all have and need permanently in our lives in order to sort of survive as human beings?

RECZEK: Yeah. So one of the things that we wanna think about is the function of families, and it kind of touches on these broader social questions that we have and are having in our society right now, right? Who should do the care for children? Who should be kind of in charge of the moral compass of our society?

And often family becomes a sort of place where a lot of blame gets placed for the society’s ills. When we think about children, of course families are obligated to care for them. Parents are legally bound to them. This is not really a open question here in terms of what is the role of parents in the lives of their children and grandparents and extended kin?

I think where the question kind of comes to play is when everyone in that family unit is an adult, because no longer is a parent charged with caring for a child, and yet we still call somebody their child, right? My mother still calls me her daughter. Still a, a role that is continued into later in the life course, even though the way in which that is enacted is not as legally and socially sort of regulated.

And so one of the things that we kind of have to ask, especially in the modern age where we are sort of asked what kind of lives do we want to have. I know you mentioned sort of the therapeutic component, like self-growth. These kinds of things are really central to our lives today. And so I think what’s happening is that we see what used to be this notion of “we do this no matter what” has become more of an open question.

We do this under what conditions? And this really mirrors what I and many sociologists and, and demographers saw in relationship to marriage, right? It used to be that marriage was really a fundamental thing that we all did. It was very uncommon not to get married and have children. And really, and you know, in the late 20th century we see this transition happening, and now marriage is something that we choose to do.

And of course there’s lot of heterogeneity there in terms of that choice, but the same kind of transition I think is happening, maybe 30 or 40 years later with the family of origin where what is the role of the family of origin in our lives as adulthood is kind of an open question.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay. This is why I find Barbara’s story so compelling, because yes, you’re right. It’s turning into more of an open question about the role of families in adult life. But at the same time, let me just call it, almost evolutionary fundamentals are still strong, right?

Because as you tell her story, she goes through this 15-year period of no contact with her mother, father, and sister. But then out of the blue, her mom calls her with this horrible news that her father’s dead. And Barbara has this choice. She has this, this moment where she’s like, “Okay, you guys were terrible to me, like violently terrible to me as a child. My relationship with you is over, period.” Or she can go back and check, and she chooses the latter. And finds this absolutely stunning scene. Do you wanna recount that for us?

RECZEK: Yes. So Barbara is distraught because she gets this phone call from her mother, who is unable to really explain what’s going on, and she goes to her mother and father’s home and finds her father deceased in really terrible conditions.

The coroner asks her, like, “How long has your father been homeless?” Because of the condition of what he, what she’s found.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay, she says — I’m just gonna say it because the details I think really matter because it helped me try to think through her state of mind, right — because he’s not lying deceased in a bed with his arms neatly crossed over his chest. She says he’s on the floor face down, and the carpet is soaked with blood, and he may have been dead for days, right? Yeah. Her mother and sister were too incapacitated, drunk, to even do anything about the her father’s death for days.

RECZEK: Yeah, that’s right. Imagine walking into that situation when you haven’t spoken to any of these people for years. Barbara feels an intense sense of obligation there, and understandably so. This is a traumatic experience. And in some ways she falls back into the role in which she had previously where she’s trying to care for the people that she does still love.

CHAKRABARTI: That word came up, right? There is that word, obligation. And what I find so…from externally reading this, I was, like, so surprised, but then I put my- tried to put myself even momentarily in her shoes, and I kind of got it because not only does she feel this obligation, irrational though it may be, to try and help her mother and sister, thereafter, as you said, people fall in and out of estrangement.

She actually tries to reconcile her relationship, right?  With her sister and mother. Tell me more about that.

RECZEK: She does. Well, often loss can kind of trigger a renegotiation of ourselves and what our priorities are, and so she says, “I really love these people still. They’re really still important to me, and I want to try to rebuild this relationship.

I want to see if they have grown and if I’ve grown in a way that allows me to renegotiate and reenter this relationship.” And she does try. And she stays in relationship for a while but ultimately ends up failing in part because they have a blowout fight over something so simple. I think she says it’s $5 lunches.

Who’s gonna pay? And she realizes that these relationships haven’t really changed. And in order, again, to protect her own now family of procreation, her child, and her husband, she feels that she needs to kind of set those boundaries again with her family of origin. And this is really painful for her.

I want to say it, for the people that I talked to, making this choice was not something that they felt really great about. They’d wanted something different. They wanted to have relationships with their families of origin. They care deeply about these people, but ultimately did make that decision in order to protect themselves and the people around them.

CHAKRABARTI: So what did Barbara’s attempt to reconcile and reconnect with her family, with her mother and sister, what did that tell you about the sort of lingering unique binds that even in the modern age, and we’ll talk about sort of modern conceptions of family in a second, but even in the modern age, it still seems to me that family has a particular definition and, and hold on people for worse or for better, that’s different than other kinds of relationships, which is one of the things that makes family estrangement so uniquely painful.

RECZEK: I think that’s right. So one of the things that Emma Bosley-Smith and I do in our first book is develop this concept called compulsory kinship, and compulsory kinship is the idea that the family that we’re born into and raised by is inherently always a forever family, and this is a ubiquitous cultural norm.

I think we can see this in, again, that first audio you played with the woman and her mother. The, “But she’s your mother” — this is a very common refrain that we have. And I think that this is something that may be being contested in the modern era, but I definitely think that this is still predominant.

So we see with compulsory kinship the notion that the family is hierarchical, that the elders hold power over those who are younger than them. We see that biology remains central, that is blood. The people that you are genetically related to hold power as family, as part of the definition of family. And we see also this notion of the collective over the individual and none of these are inherently bad or worthy of critique, but how they’re played out sometimes in the family can cause issues for people who, for example, experience abuse and can’t really exit the family in a way that is protective. So compulsory kinship is this guiding force that I think again, is still very dominant in our society.

But I think for the people who estrange, they draw on a different, what we might call a script or a logic to explain how they view the family, and they are kind of rewriting that script of, of what they want their families to look like.

CHAKRABARTI: Professor Reczek, you have to forgive me, okay? Because,  what you just said sort of triggered, a little bit of skepticism.

RECZEK: I love that. Wonderful.

CHAKRABARTI: In my mind. And part of it, again, I try to be as transparent as possible with listeners. I grew up in a family who, my parents immigrated from India, so their cultural background in terms of family, and especially their, you know, they’re Indians of the Boomer generation were quite different than sort of stereotypical modern Western conceptions of family. So when you said, you know, there’s this perception that elders have power over younger members of the family, I was like, “Well, yeah.” Mm-hmm. And, and that is, that just makes sense to me. It makes biological sense.

It is the way it should be, and when children are young it’s physical, mental, spiritual, emotional power. But then also when we become adult children, there’s still that emotional power that parents have, again, for better or for worse, over adult children. But I’m just thinking to myself, in cases where it, we’re not talking about neglect or abuse, like what’s wrong with that?

Why is it that in Western societies somehow that becomes something distasteful that your parents may always have a form of emotional power over you. I’m not necessarily sure I ever wanted to see myself as equal to my parents.

RECZEK:  I think that is such a wonderful counter because I think many people would agree with you. I don’t necessarily think, and I’m certainly not arguing that is wrong in any way. I think what I’m maybe trying to point out in the book and from the stories that I heard is that that isn’t necessarily the only way to do family, and that others might desire and feel empowered to do it a different way.

So I think in an ideal world, right, that family formation works quite well and can be quite effective for taking care of each other and which is what we want families to do. We want families to be healthy, to care for one another, and to be a source of support and love. But when that doesn’t happen, then some of these more insidious aspects of compulsory kinship can really rear their head in quite problematic ways. And so making it be the forced way everyone does family, I think that’s where we see that, that concept kind of come to its edge.

CHAKRABARTI: And I, and I will say, I frequently actually enjoy arguing against myself. But, I will say that in non-Western cultures, this sort of continual emotional hierarchy in families has also been used as a tool to do things like hide abuse, right?

RECZEK: Yes, it can. Yeah. That’s exactly right, and I will say, I mean, just to mention I interviewed, I think maybe, like, a third of the people I interviewed were second generation or third generation immigrant.

CHAKRABARTI: Ah, interesting.

RECZEK: And I will tell you, what you just mentioned is so common, for people to be really actually quite, quite loving towards the way that their parents prioritize the family and, and the family culture. But it was often very challenging for some of the adults that I talked to reconcile that with their own needs.

And so especially for immigrant families, I felt that that was a really strong tension that they were trying to reconcile and didn’t always find a way to do that.

CHAKRABARTI: Or the needs that their second and third generation American children present.

RECZEK: Oh, precisely. Precisely. Yes in some ways you have this culture clash of what is family, what does it look et cetera.

CHAKRABARTI: So let me actually turn back to the people who matter, and that’s our listeners, and, and give them some voice here again, because we did have quite a few people share their thoughts and experiences with family estrangement. So this is Ben Tankus. He’s in Portland, Oregon. He describes his family as being disconnected, but he also thinks there is something about family relationships that makes them distinct from others.

BEN TANKUS [TAPE]: The familial ties, in my perspective, it’s a love that Nobody else can replicate the love of a father, the love of a sibling, but it’s also a hurt that n- nobody else can replicate if things go wrong.

CHAKRABARTI: And here is Ellen Jacobs in Bellingham, Massachusetts. She has a family estrangement. Her brother is the one who has stopped talking to her.

ELLEN JACOBS [TAPE]: My brother told me about 10 years ago that he never wanted to talk to me again for the rest of his life. The reason was my mother’s decline with dementia over about seven, eight years. He was the main care provider being on the East Coast. It was difficult to help, so he was very bitter. Never talked to me about it and just said he was healthier, never talking to me again.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay. So Professor Reczek, the willingness, again, and I just want to reiterate, I’m grateful that people are willing to share these stories, but I’m also always kind of a little bit surprised that folks are willing to talk about something so personal and, and painful. But as you said earlier, like in the past five years, there seems to be a much more public conversation around family estrangement.

And part of that public conversation is people in the media, even experts in your field of sociology saying that we’re going through an epidemic of family estrangement. Are we?

RECZEK: Yeah. First of all, let me just say, like hearing Ellen’s voice and the pain in her voice I really feel so empathetic and sad for people who are especially feeling like they’re on the receiving end of estrangement, and I just really want to say that because I think I’m going to talk about it really sociologically here and take a distant step from it, but I, I do feel the pain of the people experiencing that, and this is a really important topic that I’m so grateful that you’re speaking of, Meghna.

So when we think about estrangement, though, on this demographic level of an epidemic, I find that quite problematic. And there’s a couple of reasons. When we started the show, we talked about the prevalence and, like, how common it is, and it really wasn’t. Karl Pillemer, who has a book that came out in 2020, was one of the first people to try to track as this sort of estrangement, are you estranged or not?

He found that about 10% of people reported estrangement between parents and a child with estrangement. I found with my colleagues that about 6% of mothers and about 26% of fathers report periods of estrangement, that’s ever estranged over a 10-year period. And then YouGov has some stats that show similar statistics, right?

So we see that this is happening. I would say between-

CHAKRABARTI: But we have no baseline, right? I mean, how-

RECZEK: We have no baseline. Yeah. Yes. You got it. So, so that’s part of the issue. We do not have a comparison, this is, like, the current moment, and I’m actually working on some some data with Mieke Beth Thomeer to try to look at past cohorts.

We have data on them about their level of contact with adult children, so these are parents across the greatest generation, the baby boomer cohorts, which there are three of them and moving forward in time to try to see if estrangement has increased.

PART III

CHAKRABARTI: Rin Reczek joins us today. She’s author of “Families We Lose: A New Explanation for Family Estrangement.” And Professor Reczek, before the break, you were talking about the, the loose data that we’ve had historically about how much family estrangement is actually going on, and you had mentioned Karl Pillemer and a survey that he did. I’ve found that page once again in your book, and upon reacquainting myself with this survey, now all of a sudden I have a bunch of questions about it.

RECZEK: Okay. I’ll do my best.

CHAKRABARTI: Because he surveyed, what, 1,300 Americans over the age of 18, and the question that he asked is very interesting to me.

He asks, “Do you have any family members, i.e., parents, grandparents, siblings, children, uncles, aunts, cousins, or other relatives?” So any family members quite a few branches away on the family tree from whom you are currently estranged, meaning you have no contact. And so you, you, you quoted this number earlier that he found from this question that 27% of people surveyed said, yes, they were estranged from a, from a relative, which is actually I think quite a shocking number, right? Because that’s more than one in four. Yeah. But then when you look at, okay, the closer you get in the family tree, only 10% said they were estranged from a parent or a child, 8% from a sibling.

RECZEK: That’s right.

CHAKRABARTI: So what does that tell you?

RECZEK: Yeah. So okay, so there’s a few things. One, his is like an identity, right? “I’m estranged.” And I think that’s a really important distinction between some of my survey work, which is contact, so that’s, that’s a different measure. But his work is actually replicated by a YouGov survey that s- finds something very similar, about 26% of people report estrangement from a family member.

But, in the United States, we tend to

CHAKRABARTI: I’m so sorry. Yeah. YouGov, I just have to ask ’cause I, I really… We quote YouGov quite a bit on this show. Yeah. And every time we do this I’m kinda like, “Ugh, should we?”

RECZEK: I know. Because. Yeah, that’s okay. No, it’s not peer reviewed, so that’s part of the issue that I have. I don’t typically use that data. But they do,  they use ACS, which is a, a, a survey that’s validated by the government. You know, they do statistical techniques that I think are pretty valid, but again, they’re not they’re not going through peer review, so that’s important.

So it’s just one more data point of many that I think we’re kind of building what is the prevalence rate, and how, how often is this happening? Because I think for my data that I use, so this is a data set that’s been long-going. It started in 1979, and it’s followed people across their entire life course.

They’re about, I don’t know, 60 now. And so they, in this data set, they follow these people, and when they have adult children that reach the age of 18, they start asking the children about their relationship with their parent. And so we’re tracking them across a 10-year period from the time the child is about, about 18 until probably about 30, and then we’re able to see who is going no contact, how long is that no contact, and do they go back in contact?

And so I feel really good about that, that data set to, to kind of track estrangement prevalence. But we need more data, so, so we need more people who are looking at estrangement. And again, as we mentioned before the break, we really need historical data. So we need to look at people who, again, are in the greatest generation, look at their relationships with their adult children at the time that they, you know, at the appropriate time that we would look at them, to compare across cohorts, and that’s really what the next stage of research needs to do.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay. So that data set has yet to be gathered. Point taken. But I’m wondering if we have existing means of comparing these American numbers to other countries, whether they be, white Western or,  obviously non-Western from very different cultures and traditions.

And the reason why I ask that is something that you had mentioned earlier, that right now in the public discourse over family estrangement, there are a lot of people who are saying they believe estrangement is increasing in prevalence because of a particular American illness of rampant individualism, right?

Of putting the individua over family. And I’m just wondering how can we come to that conclusion? Do we know if family estrangement is on a similar level in other countries? I mean, I feel like some assertions are being made without context.

RECZEK:  Without doubt. Now, I wanna say two things. First, the only data that I feel strongly is well-replicated is the German data set that finds very similar prevalence rates to what we find in our U.S. study. So about 20% of dads and about 9% of moms experience a period of estrangement. But what I wanna say is that often when we hear the sort of blame game around the individualistic society as it relates to people’s personal decisions in the family realm, I often think that that is a really interesting mirror into what’s happening in society more broadly.

Because we hear this kind of what I might call a family panic over and over again if we look at history. So we look back at the divorce, what we might call the divorce epidemic, right? We look back at the people not having children epidemic. These are things that we see used in our kind of lexicon to kind of bring attention to what is considered a social problem.

And I would say that there really isn’t strong evidence that this is a growing social problem. And let me just say why I think that might not be the case. Now, it could be, and I want to find data that shows it is, but right now we don’t have data that shows it is, and the data that I see being used is therapists saying they’re seeing more estrangement in their practice.

Well, as you know, therapy has increased drastically in the United States over the last 10 years. So that makes sense to me. Like, people are maybe more likely to go to therapy for this issue. The social media landscape, we know, is an echo chamber, so certain people are very visible in social media talking about family estrangement It could also be that family estrangement means something different today than it did even 50 years ago. So I talk about this in the book. People have far fewer children. So let’s say my grandmother had nine siblings. If, you know, if one of them moved away and really didn’t talk to the rest of the family, we might count them as estranged, but the salience of that estrangement might be quite different than if you only have two kids and one of them moves away and doesn’t talk to you any longer. And so I think that when we’re, like, looking at the, the broader view of family estrangement change, we have to really take into account these other factors. For example, Karen Fingerman has a great study that looks at how often young adults talk to their parents.

They talk to them more than they have in any recent history, so today. So that means that there’s an expectation that we’re in constant contact with our family of origin. And so when someone leaves that family of origin or stops contact, it can feel extremely monumental.

CHAKRABARTI: You know, I was thinking, what, do you, so you said your grandmother had nine siblings or nine children?

RECZEK: Yes, nine siblings. Nine siblings.

CHAKRABRTI: Yes. Okay. Yes. Oh, actually, my father was one of nine also. Yeah. And, but I, though I do take a little bit of an issue with you saying that maybe if you have more kids and one of them becomes estranged it’s less salient than if you have two kids. Because, I, I don’t know. Yeah. I think parents, a mother’s love is usually, hopefully, pretty equal across her children.

RECZEK: Oh, that’s interesting. I understand your point. I understand your point. Jill Suitor has some great work that shows actually there is parental favoritism among children, but that’s not really, I think what maybe I can clarify it. Your question offers me a opportunity to clarify that. What I mean is the amount of time that you would spend with each child is diminished the more children you have. And so if you have two children, you would  you would be spending a lot more time with those two children than if you have nine children.

It’s just sort of like a numbers game. It’s not that it wouldn’t matter to you. It maybe wouldn’t have as strong an impact on your daily experience. Maybe I can put it in those terms.

CHAKRABARTI: No, that, that makes perfect sense, right? Like, the, in that, in that sense of salience and the sort of hyper presence of a smaller number of people. No, point well taken. I should never try and get in an argument with a sociologist.

RECZEK: No, I love it, though. It really speaks to the need to clarify something.

CHAKRABARTI: Oh, I wanted to ask you about social media for a second here because I think it’s not only an echo chamber.

It’s a mutating echo chamber. Because the algorithms are designed to put in front of us the things that produce greatest emotional response, greatest, quote-unquote, engagement. So in that in that sense, I think it can actually really warp what we perceive to be as reality, and in turn, something that may be completely unchanged, right, in terms of prevalence of family estrangement.

But since it’s much more in our feeds now we are naturally given to thinking it’s happening a lot more. And not only that, but I feel like on social media, you get the most extreme of stories. And plus there’s all this, there’s also this sort of like health, self-help subgenre of family estrangement, which is kind of strange to me. But your thoughts about that?

RECZEK: Well, I think you nailed it exactly. So I think when we’re asking ourselves about the prevalence, that is the fundamental question. This social media and is not the place that we need to look for increasing prevalence or even, you know, articulating an epidemic.

Now, the question of whether social media matters in the estrangement conversation is a different one, and I think it absolutely does. One of the things it does is give language to things. So I mean, the, again, I keep going back to that first caller that talked about her the sort of narcissism, I think she used that word.

I heard that a lot, and I see that a lot on social media. This is a technical term that’s been kind of co-opted by the public to help explain behavior. Now,  when people use that term, I do not personally think they’re giving a clinical assessment of a narcissist.

But what they’re doing is trying to explain behavior through technical or therapeutic discourses. So I think some of that can get spread through social media, and I do see that happening as a way to kind of start to talk about family estrangement. But I don’t think we can use that as a good indicator of the prevalence.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay. Well, let’s, let’s pursue this a little bit more, because even just in the examples that we have brought to the show today, starting off with Barbara from your boo, only a monster would would see that her reasons for estranging from her family were anything other than utterly justified, right?

In cases of abuse of whatever kind, it makes perfect sense that a person does not want, especially when they have their own agency as an adult, to be part of that. Okay. But then there’s also other examples. I mean, some of the listeners who shared their stories with us, there was Ellen, who said, well, her brother is estranged from her now because she was unable to help in the care of her parents when they were elderly.

You know, I know you know of, there’s many stories out there of people saying, “Well, I didn’t feel supported by a sibling or a parent or whatnot.” Or in the case of our first listener, whose mother felt like the child, the adult child wasn’t there enough for her. To me, this does force the question about what our expectations are of family in terms of support and nurturing for us, and whether or not our expectations have actually become unreal, unrealistically high.

RECZEK: Yeah. You raise a point that I think remains to be discussed in the public conversation, and I don’t have the answer for that. I think what I can point to is the sort of what we might call the democratization of intimate relationships that really, as I mentioned before, began in the 1960s and ’70s.

And some of the things I hear from people who feel blindsided by estrangement are very similar to some of the conversations that people have in the context of divorce or dissolution, where they feel like, “I thought this was going fine, and, and I found out this person was really unhappy with me and wanted a divorce.”

And I think that that shows some kind of disconnect, and I really hope my book is helpful in bridging that disconnect. I don’t want people to be disconnected. Ultimately, there’s something going on in the family that needs help and assistance. There’s something that is not quite working, and we can actually kind of prevent estrangement by taking a deeper look at what is that disconnect, and how can we get on the same page?

CHAKRABARTI: Yeah. Okay, hold that thought, because that’s kind of where I wanna wrap up the show. But, we have two more listeners who’ve been brave enough to share their stories with us. This is Sarah, and here’s what she had to say.

SARAH [TAPE]: I have estrangements that have gone on for years because of the dysfunction in my family, but that said, I feel like I did it as a form of protection so I could create my own healthy, safe life, and which has been a success for me.

And this last one is Mackie Buck, who’s in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and she says her estrangement from her family was a saving grace for her, and it’s something she needs until she won’t need it anymore.

MACKIE BUCK: It was necessary at the beginning. I needed estrangement to fully register how many of my siblings somehow thought I was in the wrong for talking about how my brother molested my son. I needed it to support my son. I needed it to keep from drinking too much. I needed it to quiet the searing pain that lived in my body. I needed it to keep my sanity. And now a decade or so has passed. Bit by bit, I have been able to open the door to some siblings who have come knocking. I will need estrangement for as long as I need it.

CHAKRABARTI: So Professor Reczek, this is where I wanted to end, because I think that one of the big takeaways from your book is that family estrangement isn’t just something that happens out of the blue and is also a permanent state of being, right?

I mean, you talk about it as kind of a last resort when other methods to repair whatever’s broken within the family have failed. And then also going back to Barbara’s example, it’s not always permanent. It’s temporary. So, so in that sense, how is it that you think we should change our understanding of what estrangement actually is?

RECZEK: Yeah, that’s right. So I think about this in terms of, a tree can only be uprooted if its roots are weak, right? And so with the exception of gale force winds, typically we see healthy trees survive, right? And so when I’m thinking about family estrangement, it is the felled tree. But if we can support the roots of the tree to start earlier to kind of support family relationships and build the kind of relationships that people desire in adulthood, then that is the key. So when we’re thinking about family estrangement, I have, again, so much sympathy for people experiencing this, and that is kind of, I think, that we have great work that can be done to help people who are coping with family estrangement, especially if they feel that they are in control of it.

But ultimately, we need to start a lot earlier in family life to diagnose the problems that are causing family estrangement, and we know a lot of what those are. When people become adults, they are feeling agentic to be able to form their own families and create families in the way that they choose, and that was a lot of the stories that I heard.

There was a lot of loss. People missed their parents or their siblings, but that they felt like, like your last caller, Macky, they really needed to protect themselves in order to live the life that they desired.

CHAKRABARTI: We have one minute left, professor, and I’ve heard repeatedly, both in the stories of, from our listeners and in your book, that it’s not that people are giving up on the idea of family at all. Not at all. It’s that the family that they were born into may not have worked for them, but they’re trying to create the family that they’ve always desired in their own new biological family, say, with their own kids. Yeah. But we all make our mistakes, though, don’t we?

RECZEK: We do, and I think that it’s so important. I love Macky’s kind of approach. Like, “I needed this right now. This is what I need in this moment. It might change,” and I think that’s a really gracious way of thinking about this. People grow, people change, and that is, I think, part of the human condition.

We make mistakes, and we can learn from them. And so I think if we can better understand each other, take some of the heat off of this conversation, I think and some of maybe the anger, perhaps justified, we can find a path forward that supports more people forming the families that they deserve.

This article was originally published on WBUR.org.