Severance Days

The Pandemic of Family Estrangement

“Family estrangement has moved from the margins to the mainstream,” writes Noelle Mering for The Federalist. The idea of going “no contact” with one’s family was once a rarity—an action reserved for the most egregious acts of abuse or neglect. But no longer. Oprah recently held a forum for adult children and parents who had severed ties; the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and New Yorker have all recently published essays on the rising trend of American adults who are estranged from a family member. The trend is real, and it’s growing. According to an August 2025 YouGov poll, 38 percent of American adults consider themselves estranged from a parent, child, sibling, grandparent, grandchild, or some combination thereof.

A closer look at the poll data reveals some disturbing trends. Among those who report estrangement from a sibling, the most-common reasons cited were personality conflicts (29 percent), lies or betrayal (29 percent), and manipulative behavior (26 percent). For children estranged from a parent, the reasons were manipulative behavior (34 percent); physical, emotional, or sexual abuse (34 percent); and lies or betrayal (31 percent). And for parents estranged from their adult children, the reasons are most often lies or betrayal (24 percent), conflicting values or lifestyle (21 percent), and fallout from divorce (20 percent).

What lies behind this trend? Are family members becoming more abusive, manipulative, greedy, dishonest, etc.?

Intentional Distancing

Perhaps. But more likely, therapeutic culture, combined with a heavy dose of identity politics, has turned things that used to simply be tolerated, such as Dad’s tendency toward political jokes or Aunt Judy’s position on vaccines, into “toxic” traits that merit severing ties. Writes Mering,

To understand this peculiar moment, it helps to situate this newer version of family estrangement within the latest iteration of identity politics, the logic of which invites us to recast all relationships as adversarial. Such black-and-white thinking is full of moral clarity but lacks moral complexity. It therefore tends toward excessive corrections that sacralize entire victim classes.

Many therapists don’t help. Dr. Joshua Coleman, author of Rules of Estrangement: Why Adult Children Cut Ties and How to Heal the Conflict, writes that “therapists’ perspectives often uncritically reflect the biases, vogues, and fads of the culture in which we live.” In this age, those biases tend to be highly individualistic, aimed at personal fulfillment and happiness rather than at moral duty. “With the exception of parenting small children,” he continues, “encouraging individuals to feel some sense of obligation or care for family members is not typically on most therapists’ agendas.”

For many, the pandemic exacerbated this behavior. The New Yorker highlights the journey of one young woman, Amy, from a seemingly happy daughter in a Christian household to “no contact” with either parent or any siblings. Covid-19 played a role in Amy’s story. With the relationship with her parents already deteriorating, their refusal to be vaccinated as a condition for attending her wedding was the final straw. For families with somewhat better relationships, the pandemic may have served as a time to come together and take care of one another. For those fraught with strain, however, differing beliefs about the virus and how to respond to it were all issues ripe for powerful disagreements.

Trauma: A Case of Concept Creep

All this said, real reasons exist for one to sever ties with a family member. In some extreme cases, such as physical or sexual abuse, it is the healthy thing to do. But the current growing trend of estrangement reflects two realities. The first is best summed up in what a 2020 paper terms “The Creeping Concept of Trauma.” “Trauma, in its broadest sense,” wrote German pathologist Georg Eduard von Rindfleisch in 1884, “is any external attack which forcibly alters the physical or chemical composition of a part or the whole of the body.” The authors of the 2020 paper write that, compared to 1884, the “broadest sense” of trauma has become “a great deal broader,” with such experiences as “uncomplicated childbirth, graduate school, media violence, or overheard sexist remarks” now being described as traumatic. The language we use to describe unpleasantness or hardship or difficult family members has changed, and so too has our reaction to it. We have become less willing to bear one another’s burdens in the form of navigating complicated relationships or putting up with poor behavior.

Second, the growing trend of family estrangement reflects shifting views on what exactly it means to be a family. Coleman writes that seeing family ties as optional rather than obligational is a decidedly new phenomenon:

Deciding which people to keep in or out of one’s life has become an important strategy to achieve … happiness. While there’s nothing especially modern about family conflict or a desire to feel insulated from it, conceptualizing the estrangement of a family member as an expression of personal growth as it is commonly done today is almost certainly new.

Family: A Case of Concept Decay

“Family” used to refer to blood ties that bore with them a sense of obligation and duty and often included shared property or interests. Now, “family” is something you create, based on personal beliefs and desires. Family relationships exist to make you happier.

The Bible has much to say about family duties. Children are to honor their parents (Exodus 20:12). Husbands are to love their wives, serving them as Christ served the Church, and wives are to submit to their husbands (Ephesians chapter 5). Parents are to raise their children in the nurture and admonition of the Lord (Ephesians chapter 6). Nowhere is there a caveat stating that these rules only apply as long as one’s mental health isn’t threatened, or only if Mom and Dad validate one’s life choices, or only if everyone speaks nicely at Christmas dinner.

The “moral complexity” that Noelle Mering mentions is worked out exactly in such conundrums. Loving one’s family might look like limiting time spent at a relative’s house precisely to maintain the best possible relationship. Honoring thy father and mother might mean forgiving perceived injustices and moving on with the humility to accept one’s role as a son or daughter. Nurturing one’s children might mean creativity in navigating difficult relationships with grandparents, so as to allow those relationships to exist at all. Loving one’s adult children might mean allowing space for disagreement, with prayer that a wayward child might return.

The relationships we have may not be the ones we want. But they are the relationships we are called to, and they are the places wherein we may eventually find richness and reward, even if only in the satisfaction of having done our duty. By the grace of God, preserving these relationships may also lead to true reconciliation. Also by the grace of God, they most certainly will contribute to our sanctification.