38% of Americans Are Estranged From Family. What Drives It, and How Families Come Back Together.

More than a third of American adults are currently cut off from someone in their family. In a 2025 YouGov poll of 4,395 adults, 38% said they were estranged from at least one relative. Siblings topped the list at 24%, followed by parents at 16% and children at 10% (YouGov, 2025). A national survey led by Cornell sociologist Karl Pillemer put the figure at 27% (Pillemer, 2020). The two numbers differ because the questions differed, but either way, the person missing from your holiday table has plenty of company.

Dads lose touch more often

Researchers at Ohio State followed about 8,000 parent–child relationships for more than two decades. Over that time, 26% of adult children went through a stretch of estrangement from their father. For mothers, the figure was 6% (Reczek et al., 2023). Daughters were more likely than sons to pull away from fathers. Gay, lesbian, and bisexual adult children were far more likely to be estranged from their fathers, while their relationships with their mothers looked like everyone else's.

German data show the same split. Over a ten-year window, about 20% of adult children became estranged from their father, compared with 9% from their mother (Arránz Becker & Hank, 2022).

Why people walk away

Ask the adult children and the parents, and you hear two different stories. Adult children estranged from a parent most often point to manipulative behavior (34%), abuse (34%), and lies or betrayal (31%). Parents estranged from a child most often cite lies or betrayal (24%), conflicting values (21%), and fallout from a divorce (20%) (YouGov, 2025). The two sides mostly agree on who left. Among parents, 46% say their child ended the relationship, and among adult children, 38% say they were the ones who walked.

Where they part ways is on why.

Rin Reczek, a sociologist at Ohio State, interviewed 68 estranged adults and found that cutting off contact was rarely impulsive. Most described years of mistreatment, broken promises, or ignored boundaries before they went quiet. She frames the conflict as two competing ideas of family. One holds that blood ties must be kept at any cost. The other expects family to earn its place through accountability, respect, and safety (Reczek, 2026). For all the headlines about a "no contact" epidemic, she also found no evidence that estrangement is actually rising.

What it costs

Estrangement shows up in people's well-being. A study of more than 5,000 German adults found that those estranged from a parent or a sibling reported lower life satisfaction and more depressive symptoms. The effect was strongest in people cut off from both (Hank, 2024). The study can't tell us which came first.

Many rifts end

In the Ohio State data, 81% of estrangements from mothers and 69% from fathers eventually ended (Reczek et al., 2023). The German numbers are lower: 62% of adult children grew closer to their mother again, and 44% to their father (Arránz Becker & Hank, 2022). Willingness depends on where you sit. Seventy percent of people estranged from a child say they would reconcile, compared with 35% of those estranged from a parent (YouGov, 2025). The person who left is usually the harder sell.

What repair looks like

Pillemer interviewed about 100 people who had reconciled with family, and their approaches had a lot in common. They stopped relitigating the past and gave up on getting the other person to sign off on their version of events. They decided on the minimum relationship they could live with, whether that meant a short lunch or one holiday a year. They kept reaching out over time, because anger cools and circumstances change. They also set clear terms. In one case, an adult daughter told her mother she was welcome to visit as long as she kept her opinions about the daughter's parenting to herself (Pillemer, 2020). Pillemer is just as clear that some estrangements, particularly those involving abuse, are necessary.

John Gottman's research was done with couples, but his findings on how hard conversations go wrong apply to anyone trying to come back to the table. He found that the first three minutes of a conflict conversation predict how it ends 96% of the time (Gottman & Silver, 1999). He identified four patterns that reliably damage relationships: criticism, contempt, defensiveness, and stonewalling. He also showed that once someone's heart rate climbs past 100 beats per minute, their ability to listen drops sharply. A reunion that opens with a list of grievances floods everyone in the room before anyone has finished their coffee.

His most useful finding for families may be this one: 69% of conflicts in relationships are perpetual. They come from lasting differences in personality and values, and they never fully get resolved (Gottman & Silver, 1999). Families estranged over values may be waiting for an agreement that rarely arrives. Pillemer's reconcilers left the original argument unsettled and stopped needing to win it. Whether that is possible in your family, or wise, is a separate question. Nonetheless reconciliation comes from understanding that something may never change and deciding when the benefits outweigh the costs.

References

Arránz Becker, O., & Hank, K. (2022). Adult children's estrangement from parents in Germany. Journal of Marriage and Family, 84(1), 347–361. https://doi.org/10.1111/jomf.12796

Gottman, J. M., & Silver, N. (1999). The seven principles for making marriage work. Crown.

Hank, K. (2024). Emerging ideas: Family estrangement and its association with life satisfaction and depressiveness in adulthood. Family Relations, 73(5), 2937–2944. https://doi.org/10.1111/fare.13063

Pillemer, K. (2020). Fault lines: Fractured families and how to mend them. Avery.

Reczek, R. (2026). Families we lose: A new explanation for family estrangement. NYU Press.

Reczek, R., Stacey, L., & Thomeer, M. B. (2023). Parent–adult child estrangement in the United States by gender, race/ethnicity, and sexuality. Journal of Marriage and Family, 85(2), 494–517. https://doi.org/10.1111/jomf.12898

YouGov. (2025, August 7). Family estrangement: How often and why it happens. https://yougov.com/en-us/articles/52733-family-estrangement-how-often-and-why-it-happens