SUMMARY KEYWORDS

Family estrangement, Family conflict, Cultural shift, Parent education, Emotional cutoff, Relationship repair, Family definitions, Reconciliation, Social trends, Parental guidance, Emotional systems, Personal growth, Communication barriers, Mental health, Family dynamics

SPEAKERS

Tina Gosney

Tina Gosney  00:01

Before I even get into today’s topic, I want to tell you about something that I’ve heard quite a few parents tell me. They say that they’re scrolling their phone late at night and they’ll see this headline about family estrangement, or maybe they see a video where someone is describing about going no contact with their parent, and then the comment section is full of people saying things like, “Me too. Same thing happened in my family. And then you know something strange happens to them. They feel a little less alone, and a part of them feels worse because now it seems like this is everywhere, like something has broken this entire generation of families all at once, and they can’t help wondering, what happened?

Tina Gosney  00:48

Why is this happening to so many people right now, all at the same time? So if you’ve ever had this exact feeling, scrolling, wondering, you know, half comforted and half terrified, this is your episode, and if this is the first time that you’ve spent time with me, I want you to know a little bit about who’s talking to you today.

Tina Gosney  01:08

My name is Tina Gosney. I’m a family conflict coach. I’m also a parent educator, and I’ve spent years now sitting across from parents in this exact kind of situation, watching a relationship with a son or a daughter grow increasingly tense and then distant and maybe even silent, and wondering what to do with all of that, I built my coaching practice around one conviction that even when a relationship feels stuck, there is almost always a path forward towards something that is steadier, and this is the work that I am privileged to do every day, and that’s why this show exists. Today in this episode of Coaching Your Family Relationships, we are going to zoom out.

Tina Gosney  01:59

We’re not going to talk about one word, one conversation, one specific conflict or topic, we’re actually going to look at a much bigger picture, and that is why does it feel like family estrangement has reached these epidemic levels? What does the actual research say about this? And maybe more importantly, what does any of this mean for you in your specific family on an ordinary day? So let’s get into it. I’m going to be referencing a recent episode that I recorded on family estrangement with the researcher, you know, the person who conducted that research and then wrote scholarly articles on it. This is episode 224 of this podcast with Dr. Ren Reczek, and if this episode today, if this episode speaks to you, then you should go listen to episode 224, because that one is going to have even more information, maybe in even in a different a different light than this one will, so let’s look at the numbers. We’re going to start with the numbers because I think that really matters, and I don’t think most parents have seen this as plainly as I’m going to describe it right now. In 2025, there was a YouGov poll of 4,395 U.S. adults, nearly four in 10 people who responded to this poll said that they no longer have a relationship with one or more immediate family members. If we break it down even further, that includes 16% who are estranged from a parent, 10% from a child, 24% from a sibling. Notice that’s the highest number. 9% from a grandparent and 6% from a grandchild. Now let’s just sit with those numbers for a second. Nearly four in 10 adults, not four in 10 people who posted about it online, and not four in 10 people who go to therapy and talk about it, but 10 four in 10 adults. Period. This is a broad national sample. Are estranged from a close family member. Now, if you are a parent who has lost a relationship with your adult child, or you’ve watched your family fracture along some other line, I want you to actually let that number land. This is not a small, unusual thing happening only to your family. This is something that’s happening in an enormous number of American households at this exact moment. What does that mean? That you did not fail in some uniquely spectacular way that other families avoided.

Tina Gosney  02:41

This is episode 224 of this podcast with Dr. Ren Reczek, and if this episode today, if this episode speaks to you, then you should go listen to episode 224, because that one is going to have even more information, maybe in even in a different a different light than this one will, so let’s look at the numbers. We’re going to start with the numbers because I think that really matters, and I don’t think most parents have seen this as plainly as I’m going to describe it right now. In 2025, there was a YouGov poll of 4,395 U.S. adults, nearly four in 10 people who responded to this poll said that they no longer have a relationship with one or more immediate family members. If we break it down even further, that includes 16% who are estranged from a parent, 10% from a child, 24% from a sibling.

Tina Gosney  03:41

Notice that’s the highest number. 9% from a grandparent and 6% from a grandchild. Now let’s just sit with those numbers for a second. Nearly four in 10 adults, not four in 10 people who posted about it online, and not four in 10 people who go to therapy and talk about it, but 10 four in 10 adults. Period. This is a broad national sample. Are estranged from a close family member. Now, if you are a parent who has lost a relationship with your adult child, or you’ve watched your family fracture along some other line, I want you to actually let that number land. This is not a small, unusual thing happening only to your family. This is something that’s happening in an enormous number of American households at this exact moment. What does that mean? That you did not fail in some uniquely spectacular way that other families avoided.

Tina Gosney  04:45

You are actually living through something that a very large number of your neighbors, your coworkers, and probably extended family members are also quietly living through, and usually they do it without saying many things out loud. I know that does not erase your pain, but it and it doesn’t answer the questions of what to do next. But I want you to notice what it does do. It moves from something happening because of something specific to you towards something happening because of something bigger than you, and bigger than you things call for a different kind of response than a personal failure kind of thing does. We’re going to get into what kind of that of response that looks like, but first I want to spend some time on why this is happening at this scale, because understanding that changes how you carry it.

Tina Gosney  05:41

Before I move on, I want to take about 30 seconds to address something that really matters more than you might think. If this episode is helping you feel even a little bit less alone right now, then the most useful thing that you can do-and this is not just for me, but it’s for another parent who’s scrolling at night, who hasn’t found this show yet to help them? You know, this is to help them. Podcast apps use ratings and they use reviews to decide whose show to recommend to somebody. So when you leave a rating or a review, or maybe both, you’re not just telling me that you like the episode. You’re helping somebody else, another parent who’s in a very similar situation to you. You’re helping them find this podcast, and I want you to know that I read every single review that comes in, every single one. I am genuinely grateful for every single one, even the short ones, even the one that’s just leaving me five stars.

Tina Gosney  06:39

So, if today’s episode has been useful to you. I would really love it if you took a minute right now, or maybe later today, and then you left a rating, or maybe even a quick review, because it helps far more than you realize. Let’s get into this word epidemic, where it comes from, and why we need to maybe look at it a little differently. So you maybe you’ve seen the headlines describing how family estrangement is this epidemic, this crisis, something that is exploding in prevalence, and I understand why that language gets used, because when nearly four in 10 adults report this same experience, it can feel really urgent, and honestly, it feels even more urgent for the people that are living inside of it. But let’s be really careful here because I think that honesty is a lot more important than believing dramatic headlines. And I want to hold on to honesty in every episode of this show.

Tina Gosney  07:36

So let’s go to that that interview that I recorded with Dr. Reczek, episode 224. She is a sociologist, a professor at Ohio State University, and she has spent years researching family estrangement. And Dr. Riesik points out something really important: that there isn’t actually solid population level evidence that the rate of estrangements itself is climbing over time, but what has clearly increased is something different. That’s visibility, language, people’s willingness to name what’s happening in their family out loud and in public. So instead of quietly carrying it in shame, the way that many generations earlier did, people are saying it out loud. They’re posting about it. They’re talking about it. In other words, families may not be falling apart at a dramatically higher rate than they did, you know, a few decades ago. What’s changed, though, is that we can see it now. We have surveys asking direct questions about it. We have podcasts and articles and social media posts, giving people language and permission to talk about something that used to live very quietly behind doors.

Tina Gosney  08:53

And this distinction actually matters for you as a parent, because if you believe that everything is falling apart in some unprecedented way that never happened early in earlier generations. It’s so easy to spiral into a story about this total cultural collapse, one that can leave you feeling completely powerless. But if what’s really happening is that something ordinary and painful, something that has always existed at some level in families, is simply becoming more visible for the first time.

Tina Gosney  09:26

Well, that is a different story, and it’s it’s still hard, but it’s worth understanding. It’s not proof, though, that everything is just uniquely broken right now, and it’s not proof that your family specifically represents some new kind of failure that didn’t used to happen. So, if the rate isn’t necessarily new, then what is actually going on? Why are so many families experiencing this rupture at the same time, even if it’s not a brand new phenomenon?

Tina Gosney  09:58

This is where I think Dr. Reczek’s research can really be useful. It can really offer some useful understanding, and I want to walk you through it because I think it will reframe how you understand your own situation, or at least I hope it gives you some line to hold on to that you can begin to do a reframe of your own. In her book, and this is what we recorded the interview about. This is called “Families We Lose.” Dr. Reczek she argues that estrangement is not primarily caused by selfish or ungrateful adult children, and it’s not caused only by specific bad events in childhood either, although those can play a role. Instead, she argues that a lot of contemporary estrangement comes from a much deeper collision, and that is two people in the same family holding two fundamentally different ideas about what family is supposed to be.

Tina Gosney  10:58

The first idea is the one that most of us grew up with, you know, whether we named it or not. It just says that family of origin comes first, no matter what. You stay close to the people who raised you, and the people that you raised because of the role and the relationship that you have, the history that you share, the blood that’s between you. Loyalty and closeness aren’t things that you have to earn, or that you have to maintain through good treatment? They’re just simply owed because of their relationship. You know that is the definition that most of us grew up with.

Tina Gosney  11:29

The second idea, however, is newer, and Dr. Reczek talks about this, and this is at least as widely held cultural expectation, and it says something different about family. It says that family relationships are worth continuing to the degree that they’re actually good for the people in them. She points out mutual respect, safety, room to grow, and be held accountable when something goes wrong. Under this idea, the title of mother or father or son, or daughter does not automatically guarantee closeness. The quality of how people treat each other does.

Tina Gosney  12:10

And here’s the the part that I think is the most important for you to hear. Dr. Reczek’s research suggests that estrangement is not often about one specific fight, one specific incident. It’s what happens when one person in the family is operating from the first idea of family no matter what, and another person is operating from the second idea, family only if it’s good, and then neither one of them realizes that the actual disagreement is underneath all of these smaller incidents and arguments. If you’ve ever felt like you and your adult child are not even arguing about the same thing, and you keep having these same arguments over and over, maybe they’re just about a different topic each time, and you never really get anywhere. This might be why. You might not be having a disagreement about one conversation, one holiday, one comment.

Tina Gosney  13:10

You might be operating from two different definitions of what family is supposed to require in the first place. Now I’m going to pause right there, and before I go any further, I really want to talk to you as one parent to another. You are not starting from nothing. You, as the parent of an adult child, you have decades of life behind you that your child simply does not have yet. You have survived hard seasons. You’ve survived health crisis and relationship issues. You maybe have buried someone that you love. Maybe you’ve sat through conflicts that you thought might end, and you kept showing up for them anyway. Somewhere in all of that, you built real skills at tolerating discomfort and staying in a relationship with people, even when it got complicated. That skill is still in you; it still matters more right now, more than you realize, and probably more than you give it credit for. Here’s what makes this particular moment, strange though.

Tina Gosney  14:21

You’re not only older than your child; you’re living in a different relational world than they are, and they’re living in a different one than the one you grew up in. Think about what your child hears. There’s so many voices out there from culture constantly coming at us, they say things like, “Protect your peace, “Cut out anyone who doesn’t serve your growth. It says, “You don’t owe access to people who cut who cost you your mental health, and these voices are everywhere. And before I keep going on that line, I do want to give a little caveat.

Tina Gosney  15:00

Because when someone is being abused, cutting off contact is the safest, healthiest decision that that person could make. But none of that-I’m not talking to parents who abuse their children. That is a different subject. I do not work with parents who abuse their children. We are talking about parents who were doing the best that they could, and are now being bombarded with cultural messages that are not serving their family, and what I’m talking about is something quieter and much more common, and that’s the instinct to treat any relationship that becomes hard or confusing or uncomfortable as a relationship that must be ended, rather than one that can be worked through, and I’m going to gently push back on that instinct, because here’s what years of this work has shown me: avoiding a difficult relationship does not make a person stronger; it makes them more avoidant. It shrinks a person’s capacity to handle discomfort instead of growing through it. Real strength, the kind that actually holds up under pressure, gets built by staying and doing hard things, not by removing people and situations that might stretch you. Murray Bowen gave us useful language for part of this. He called it the emotional cutoff, the pattern of managing anxiety in a relationship by putting distance between you and the person who causes who you say causes the anxiety. So instead of working through what’s actually happening underneath, you’re cutting them off, and from the outside, cut off can look exactly like a healthy boundary, and sometimes it is, but often it doesn’t resolve the tension at all. It just kind of moves it, pushes it to the side, and moves it out of view, where nobody has to look at it anymore. And if you are the parent of an adult child, and you are watching your adult child pull away right now, or you have one that has pulled away. Here’s something that’s worth hearing clearly. Your job is not to convince your child to feel differently about you. You can’t do that, and trying it will usually backfire. Your job is to become a steadier, more capable version of yourself. Someone who can sit with hard things without collapsing, or attacking, so that your child has an actual living example of what increased capacity looks like. They don’t get a lecture about it; they get a model of it, and this is the exact work that I do with the parents that I coach every week. This is not comfortable work. I will not tell you that it is because it is. It is not. It asks you to keep growing at a point in life where a lot of people, you know, by this age we’re kind of content where we are, and a lot of people have just quietly stopped expecting more of themselves at this point, and at this age, it takes so much courage to look at your own patterns instead of just look at your child’s patterns. And I’ve watched parents do it, and I’ve watched parents be so courageous and brave, and I’ve watched what opens up when they do. So that idea, the emotional cutoff, is part of something bigger, and I want to zoom out on that for a moment because it helps to make sense of why this feels so disorienting and why it’s happening in so many homes simultaneously. Murray Bowen, who I referred to earlier, is a psychiatrist, and his work forms the foundation of a lot of what I teach on this show and in my coaching. He described families as emotional systems. We are all very interconnected, and that system is always working to stay in balance. It’s always working to keep the status quo.

Tina Gosney  15:44

I’m going to gently push back on that instinct, because here’s what years of this work has shown me: avoiding a difficult relationship does not make a person stronger; it makes them more avoidant. It shrinks a person’s capacity to handle discomfort instead of growing through it. Real strength, the kind that actually holds up under pressure, gets built by staying and doing hard things, not by removing people and situations that might stretch you.

Tina Gosney  16:20

Murray Bowen gave us useful language for part of this. He called it the emotional cutoff, the pattern of managing anxiety in a relationship by putting distance between you and the person who causes who you say causes the anxiety. So instead of working through what’s actually happening underneath, you’re cutting them off, and from the outside, cut off can look exactly like a healthy boundary, and sometimes it is, but often it doesn’t resolve the tension at all. It just kind of moves it, pushes it to the side, and moves it out of view, where nobody has to look at it anymore. And if you are the parent of an adult child, and you are watching your adult child pull away right now, or you have one that has pulled away.

Tina Gosney  17:05

Here’s something that’s worth hearing clearly. Your job is not to convince your child to feel differently about you. You can’t do that, and trying it will usually backfire. Your job is to become a steadier, more capable version of yourself. Someone who can sit with hard things without collapsing, or attacking, so that your child has an actual living example of what increased capacity looks like. They don’t get a lecture about it; they get a model of it, and this is the exact work that I do with the parents that I coach every week. This is not comfortable work. I will not tell you that it is because it is. It is not. It asks you to keep growing at a point in life where a lot of people, you know, by this age we’re kind of content where we are, and a lot of people have just quietly stopped expecting more of themselves at this point, and at this age, it takes so much courage to look at your own patterns instead of just look at your child’s patterns.

Tina Gosney  18:12

And I’ve watched parents do it, and I’ve watched parents be so courageous and brave, and I’ve watched what opens up when they do. So that idea, the emotional cutoff, is part of something bigger, and I want to zoom out on that for a moment because it helps to make sense of why this feels so disorienting and why it’s happening in so many homes simultaneously. Murray Bowen, who I referred to earlier, is a psychiatrist, and his work forms the foundation of a lot of what I teach on this show and in my coaching. He described families as emotional systems. We are all very interconnected, and that system is always working to stay in balance. It’s always working to keep the status quo.

Tina Gosney  18:56

When something shifts, even something as broad as an entire culture’s expectations about what family owes you and what you owe it-that shift does not stay abstract. It shows up inside actual households, in actual conversations, because actual people who love each other and are still finding themselves in conflict-that they don’t fully understand. Here’s what I want you to take from that: the tension that you’re feeling in your own home is not only about your particular family’s history, although that history does matter too. It’s it’s part of a downstream enormous cultural shift that’s happening underneath millions of households, at the same time as one long-standing definition of family gets challenged by your newer definition of family, you are not managing a problem that’s just unique to your own household. You are one household among many.

Tina Gosney  20:00

Feeling the same underlying pressure at the same moment in history, and this is exactly why the hope that I opened this podcast episode with matters here more than ever. When one person in a family becomes more grounded, begins to change the whole system, the entire relationship system can begin to shift, and we need for it to shift to keep up with this-the new cultural definition of family. This is true even when the broader culture around your family is genuinely in flux, as it is right now. You don’t have control over which definition of family your child has come to hold on to, or over the pace of cultural change that’s happening around all of us, but you do still really have influence over how steady, how curious, how non-reactive you become inside your own family relationships.

Tina Gosney  20:58

That influence doesn’t disappear just because there’s this big wave of culture that is a lot bigger than your household. If anything, your steadiness matters more, and this is the kind of shift that I get to help parents build all the time. We take practice taking this big swirling cultural scale pattern and bringing it down to the one relationship that is sitting in front of you. Now let’s go into the numbers that almost never make headlines because I think it’s the most important one in this whole episode.

Tina Gosney  21:33

We’re going to go back to that same 2025 YouGov poll. So, 70% of estranged parents said they would consider reconciling with their estranged child, and separate longitudinal research, including a study by Dr. Reczek that she co-authored with two other authors, it tracked parent and adult children over 13 survey waves between 1994 and 2018, and it found that of those who reported estrangement at some point, 81% of mothers and 69% of fathers were back in contact with their child in a later wave. The average was about two years. Now, if yours has been more than two years, please do not despair. Now let’s look at the other side too, because balance matters more to me than you know some tidy hopeful ending. The same research shows that adult children are less willing, on average, to say that they would consider reconciling with a parent, which tells us something about where the harder work in their relationship has to happen, reconciliation is not guaranteed, and it’s not quick, and it’s not entirely in your hands to control all on your own.

Tina Gosney  22:56

But what I don’t want you to miss is that estrangement, according to the best long-term data that we have, is frequently not permanent. For a majority of parents, it does become a chapter in their life, not the whole story of their entire life. It’s not the whole book. This does not mean it’s going to resolve on a particular timeline, or that it’s going to look the way that you pictured it, but it does mean that the quiet, private belief a lot of parents carry-that you know that things are simply over now-is often not what the data supports. Today, I’m not going to give you you know a few steps to to solve this because this is not what this episode is about. This is a big picture episode, and I want you to sit with the big picture for a while. You need to sit with this and try to understand it before we rush into try to changing things, rushing rushing into action. So instead, here are three things worth turning over in your own mind this week.

Tina Gosney  24:00

First, notice the story that you’ve been telling yourself about why your relationship is stranged or distant right now. Is it a story about your unique failure, or is it starting to include some room for something bigger moving through an entire generations of families right now.

Tina Gosney  24:23

Secondly, get curious-I mean, really curious-about which definition of family you grew up believing, and which one your adult child may be operating from. Not so you can decide who is right, just so you can start to see the actual shape of the disagreement underneath specific conflicts.

Tina Gosney  24:45

Third, remember your steadiness still counts, even inside something this big. Your goal should never be to convince your child to see things your way. It’s to become steady enough that. You are modeling the exact kind of capacity you hope that they will build too. A cultural wave does not cancel out what one grounded parent can offer one specific relationship.

Tina Gosney  25:14

If you find yourself wanting help sorting out which definition of family is actually operating in your own home, and what to do about the gap-that specific personalized work-is exactly what I do in my coaching. So this is where we go past the big picture understanding, and we look into your particular history, your particular child, and what repair could actually look like for you.

Tina Gosney  25:42

Let’s go into and let’s close with you know a few of the mistakes that I see parents make, and I’ll give you an idea of what to do instead. Mistake number one: using the scale of this cultural problem to excuse yourself from any self-reflection, knowing that this is a widespread thing does not mean that there’s nothing in your specific relationship that is worth examining. Both those things can be true at once.

Tina Gosney  26:11

Mistake number two is deciding that because so many families are going through this, that your own relationship just must be over, and there’s no point to continue trying. And sometimes, you know a parent who learns these statistics, they just decide to stop making birthday calls or sending a text or they stop leaving the door open at all. They start they start telling themselves to just be realistic about the odds, but the same research shows how common it is for how these types of situation will often resolve. So, treating a widespread pattern as a hopeless one, and quietly withdrawing because of it, that tends to close the door that you want your child to walk through.

Tina Gosney  26:52

Mistake number three is deciding that your child’s definition of family is wrong, because it’s different from the one that you have, and it’s different than the one that you grew up with. Different is not the same thing as wrong, and treating it as that way tends to deepen the divide that we’re talking about today.

Tina Gosney  27:12

If you’re going to get this right, it’s going to look something like this. You see a statistic like the one that I opened up with today, and instead of becoming more despair, more hopeless, it becomes a reason for you to feel a little bit less alone, and a little more curious about what’s happening in your specific family, your specific relationship, and a little more willing to keep showing up as that steady version of yourself for as long as it takes.

Tina Gosney  27:45

Here’s what I want you to take with you today: is that family estrangement has reached a visibility scale that can feel overwhelming, and that scale is real. But it isn’t proof that you have failed and that your family is beyond repair. It is evidence of a much bigger shift happening in an entire culture that is redefining what family means, and we see that playing out in millions of individual homes, including yours. You don’t have control over that larger shift, but you do have a real influence over how you show up inside your own relationship, inside one conversation, how you show up one week, one day at a time. The fact that you’re here listening to this tells me you’re probably already doing some of that. Tells me that you really care. You’re willing to look at the bigger picture instead of only that painful moment in front of you, and that really matters. I also want to remind you to look at the things that you’ve overcome. I want you to look at the strengths that you’ve developed in your life because that is important.

Tina Gosney  28:53

So take a breath and zoom out, and then come back home to what’s in front of you and what’s inside of you. Thank you for being here with me today. Remember, you don’t have to do this perfectly. You just need to keep working on how you’re showing up, because when one member of a family becomes more grounded, the whole relationship system can begin to heal. This is coaching your family relationships. I’m Tina Gosney. If this episode helped you to feel a little less alone today, I’d love it if you shared it with another parent who needs a little bit of help and a little bit of hope.