{"id":34462,"date":"2026-08-24T10:32:20","date_gmt":"2026-08-24T14:32:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/?p=34462"},"modified":"2026-08-23T12:51:50","modified_gmt":"2026-08-23T16:51:50","slug":"when-but-theyre-your-family-isnt-reason-enough-to-stay","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/2026\/08\/when-but-theyre-your-family-isnt-reason-enough-to-stay\/","title":{"rendered":"When \u2018but they\u2019re your family\u2019 isn\u2019t reason enough to stay"},"content":{"rendered":"

She\u2019s your mom.\u201d \u201cThey\u2019re your family.\u201d \u201cBlood is thicker than water.\u201d<\/p>\n

For generations, these familiar idioms have illustrated what\u00a0Rin Reczek<\/a>\u00a0and Emma Bosley-Smith, co-authors of the 2022 book \u201cFamilies We Keep: LGBTQ People and Their Enduring Bonds with Parents\u201d<\/a>\u00a0(NYU Press), term\u00a0compulsory kinship<\/a>: the social expectation that biological and legal family ties must be preserved at all costs.<\/p>\n

In their book, Reczek, a professor of\u00a0sociology at The Ohio State University<\/a>, and then-Ohio State doctoral student\u00a0Emma Bosley-Smith<\/a>\u00a0(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\u2019s follow-up book, \u201cFamilies We Lose: A New Explanation for Family Estrangement<\/a>,\u201d published this week by NYU Press, Reczek explores what happens when adult children decide that family obligation is no longer reason enough to stay.<\/p>\n

Overall, her research has found that adult children who go \u201cno contact\u201d with one or both parents elect estrangement as a last resort, and to free themselves to create a chosen family environment that meets their needs.<\/p>\n

Reczek has\u00a0studied complex family dynamics<\/a>\u00a0for about 20 years, and she said that changing family structures often shoulder the blame for the social problems of our time. While researching \u201cFamilies We Keep,\u201d 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 happening around adult children going \u201cno contact\u201d with family members \u2014 in the news, on podcasts, on social media, etc. \u2014 the dominant narrative was one of panic and stigmatization<\/strong>.<\/p>\n

Family estrangement is the latest in a long history of what Reczek calls \u201cfamily panics.\u201d Take, for example, rising divorce rates. \u201cWhen 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,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

As shifts in American family life stream across our 24\/7 content feeds, historically private decisions become public conversations \u2014 and people can mistake them for the end of family life as we know it.<\/p>\n

\u201cTo frame estrangement as just bad for society is inappropriate,\u201d Reczek said. \u201cWhen we see that kind of panic around it, it\u2019s a signal that it\u2019s 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.\u201d<\/p>\n

There\u2019s an unspoken societal expectation<\/strong> 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. \u201cEstrangement really cuts to the heart of that agreement, which never really was agreed upon by the child who was brought into the world,\u201d Reczek said. \u201cThat is why it\u2019s so painful for a lot of parents, understandably. They thought that their life would look a certain way, and now it doesn\u2019t.\u201d<\/p>\n

In \u201cFamilies We Lose\u201d and a related article in the\u00a0Journal of Marriage and Family<\/em><\/a>, Reczek sought out the real-life stories behind the current estrangement panic. She conducted in-depth interviews with 68 estranged adults across the U.S. in 2023, tracing their family histories from childhood to the present day. Each participant was actively \u201cno contact\u201d with at least one family member, and their periods of estrangement ranged from short-term to decades-long, sometimes repeating in cyclical patterns.<\/p>\n

The data shows that estrangement is rarely the direct result of a single childhood event, a social media trend or \u201ctherapy speak.\u201d Instead, Reczek found it is driven by an unresolvable culture clash between those holding onto compulsory kinship and those embracing a different way of doing family: democratized kinship.<\/p>\n

\u201cIf compulsory kinship<\/strong> creates the burns of inequality, then democratized kinship and its values of quality and equality are the balm,\u201d she writes in \u201cFamilies We Lose.\u201d Familial relationships created under democratized kinship \u2014 with friends, co-workers, neighbors and others \u2014 are guided by shared values like accountability and growth, deep connection, mutual respect and safety. Estrangement, she argues, is caused by \u201cthe conflict that arises when one family member changes from compulsory to democratized kinship but the others fail to make the same transition.\u201d<\/p>\n

Reczek also debunks the myth that adult children who experience or initiate estrangement do so because they don\u2019t care about family \u2014 that they\u2019re selfish and individualistic. \u201cThat couldn\u2019t be further from the truth,\u201d she said. \u201cThey care so much about family. They want to have healthy families, and they have very high standards for what a healthy family is.\u201d<\/p>\n

Going no contact<\/strong> is rarely a spontaneous or easy decision. More often, it\u2019s the final straw after years of mistreatment, miscommunication or boundary violations. Pundits have blamed mental health professionals for driving estrangement trends, but Reczek found nothing to validate that claim.<\/p>\n

The people she spoke with described therapy as a space where they were able to work through some of the pain of their family relationships, and, through that process, learn more about the kinds of values that they had for their relationships. \u201cIt wasn’t that the therapist was encouraging them to do anything,\u201d Reczek said. \u201cIt was more that the therapist was teaching them about what healthy relationships could look like.\u201d<\/p>\n

Another powerful catalyst for adult children, Reczek found, is becoming a parent. Raising children brings memories of their upbringing into sharp relief, prompting them to set firm boundaries, or sever ties entirely, to protect the next generation from experiencing similar harm.<\/p>\n

Ultimately, Reczek hopes the public conversation around estrangement<\/strong> moves toward a broader acceptance of modern family life \u2014 one that honors personal choice and agency in adult relationships.<\/p>\n

\u201cMaybe family doesn\u2019t look like the way we thought it would, but it hardly ever does,\u201d she said. \u201cBeing open to those possibilities is a really important thing for all of us.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

She\u2019s your mom.\u201d \u201cThey\u2019re your family.\u201d \u201cBlood is thicker than water.\u201d For generations, these familiar idioms have illustrated what\u00a0Rin Reczek\u00a0and Emma Bosley-Smith, co-authors of the 2022 book \u201cFamilies We Keep: LGBTQ People and Their Enduring Bonds with Parents\u201d\u00a0(NYU Press), term\u00a0compulsory kinship: the social expectation that biological and legal family ties must be preserved at all… <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":34463,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"rop_custom_images_group":[],"rop_custom_messages_group":[],"rop_publish_now":"no","rop_publish_now_accounts":[],"rop_publish_now_history":[],"rop_publish_now_status":"pending","neve_meta_sidebar":"","neve_meta_container":"","neve_meta_enable_content_width":"off","neve_meta_content_width":70,"neve_meta_title_alignment":"","neve_meta_author_avatar":"","neve_post_elements_order":"","neve_meta_disable_header":"","neve_meta_disable_footer":"","neve_meta_disable_title":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[321,789,349,9],"tags":[888,274,852,889,890],"class_list":["post-34462","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-aging-2","category-family","category-happiness-2","category-parenting","tag-estrangement","tag-expectations","tag-kinship","tag-no-contact","tag-panics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34462","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=34462"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34462\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":34464,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34462\/revisions\/34464"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/34463"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=34462"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=34462"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=34462"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}