This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies. Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility: "She's your mom." "They're your family." "Blood is thicker than water." For generations, these familiar idioms have illustrated what Rin Reczek and Emma Bosley-Smith, co-authors of the 2022 book "Families We Keep: LGBTQ People and Their Enduring Bonds with Parents" (NYU Press), term compulsory kinship: the social expectation that biological and legal family ties must be preserved at all costs. In their book, Reczek, a professor of sociology at The Ohio State University, and then-Ohio State doctoral student Bosley-Smith (now an assistant professor at Alma College) examined the great effort adult children often make to maintain strained or painful ties with their families of origin.
Now, in Reczek's follow-up book, "Families We Lose: A New Explanation for Family Estrangement," published this week by NYU Press, Reczek explores what happens when adult children decide that family obligation is no longer reason enough to stay. Overall, her research has found that adult children who go "no contact" with one or both parents choose estrangement as a last resort and to free themselves to create a chosen family environment that meets their needs. Reczek has studied complex family dynamics for about 20 years, and she said that changing family structures often shoulder the blame for the social problems of our time.
While researching "Families We Keep," she was surprised by the lack of scholarly literature available on the topic of family estrangement. And when she looked at the current cultural conversations around adult children going "no contact" with family members—in the news, on podcasts and on social media—the dominant narrative was one of panic and stigmatization. Family estrangement is the latest in a long history of what Reczek calls "family panics." Take, for example, rising divorce rates.
"When divorce rates were rising and we saw increases in states allowing no-fault divorce, we also saw a lot of panic around the fall, or decline, of the family," she said. According to prior research cited in the book, about 6% of U.S. adults are estranged from a mother, while roughly 23% are estranged from a father at some point in adulthood. Reczek notes there is no empirical evidence showing estrangement rates are surging.
As shifts in American family life stream across our 24/7 content feeds, historically private decisions become public conversations—and people can mistake them for the end of family life as we know it. "To frame estrangement as just bad for society is inappropriate," Reczek said. "When we see that kind of panic around it, it's a signal that it's touching on a change in how people think about family.
Estrangement has been happening throughout history; maybe the publicness of it has become really scary to people." There's an unspoken societal expectation that parents will take care of kids when they are little, and when those kids grow up, eventually the roles will reverse, with the kids caring for their aging parents. "Estrangement really cuts to the heart of that agreement, which was never really agreed upon by the child who was brought into the world," Reczek said. "That is why it's so painful for a lot of parents, understandably.
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