Luna, 26, no longer speaks to her father. There was no single betrayal, no dramatic rupture. What ended the relationship was his insistence on obedience and dominance.

“In his head it’s like, ‘I’m the father, you’re the daughters, we do things my way,’” she told me. Luna explained to him that she was “not willing to have a relationship like that,” and her terms for contact were simple: “We could only have a relationship where you understand that I’m a person, and I’m not just gonna do whatever you want me to do whenever you want me to.”

He refused to accept those terms. So after numerous attempts to make it work, she walked away.

Family estrangement has become a fixture of talk shows, advice columns and social media. It’s also the subject of my new book, “Families We Lose.”

Much of the current media coverage on estrangement tends to frame it as an epidemic that is the product of therapy culture.

My research suggests that this framing misses what is actually happening. I conducted 68 in-depth interviews with adults who went no-contact with a parent, sibling, grandparent or other relative. (All participant names, including Luna’s, are pseudonyms used to protect their privacy.)

I found that estrangement is less a story of trauma or selfishness, and more a clash between competing expectations: an insistence on loyalty, duty and forgiveness on one hand, and the longing for respect, emotional safety and personal growth on the other.

Falling birth rates raise the stakes

Estrangement is fairly common.

In a 2022 study, my colleagues and I used national survey data that followed parent-child relationships over several decades. In that period, 26% of adult children in the U.S. experienced a period of estrangement from their fathers, and 6% reported a period of estrangement with their mothers. Our findings were consistent with what sociologist Karl Pillemer found in his 2020 national survey, which showed that 27% of Americans were estranged from a relative, or........

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