TL;DR
Karl Pillemer’s national survey found 27% of U.S. adults reported estrangement from a relative. Rin Reczek and colleagues found periods of estrangement from fathers in 26% of respondents and mothers in 6%.
Those studies show estrangement is fairly common. They don’t establish that its rate is rising.
The experience may still have changed as families got smaller and smartphones made constant contact easier to expect.
Twenty-seven percent is a big number.
It isn’t a trend line.
Those two facts keep getting folded into one another in the current conversation about family estrangement.
Karl Pillemer’s 2020 national survey of more than 1,300 U.S. adults found that 27% reported being estranged from a family member. Rin Reczek and her colleagues found another pair of large numbers using national longitudinal data: 26% of respondents experienced a period of estrangement from their fathers and 6% experienced one from their mothers during the years observed.
Estrangement isn’t rare.
Whether it’s becoming more common is a different question.
The number and the line
Reczek’s new book, Families We Lose, came out August 18. In an article published alongside it, she made a distinction I wish appeared more often in the estrangement conversation.
She wrote that headlines often treat prevalence estimates as evidence of a sudden crisis. But, as she put it, no study has tracked estrangement rates over time and nothing in the existing data shows that estrangement is “skyrocketing.”
That deserves some care because the studies behind the biggest numbers don’t measure the same thing.
Pillemer asked about estrangement from parents or children, siblings and extended relatives. Reczek’s population study focused on adult children’s relationships with mothers and fathers. The definitions, samples and methods differ too.
Put 27% next to 26% and the numbers look comparable. They aren’t two points on a timeline.
One tells us how common estrangement was in one national survey across several kinds of family relationship. The other estimates how many respondents experienced a period of estrangement from a parent across repeated observations.
Neither number tells us that the rate went up.
Following people isn’t the same as following the rate
There’s an obvious objection here: Reczek’s parent-child study was longitudinal.
The researchers used linked National Longitudinal Survey of Youth data, with young-adult relationship measures beginning in 1994 and observations extending through 2018. They could see when estrangement first appeared for respondents and whether an estranged relationship later crossed back into the study’s unestranged category.
That’s one reason the paper is useful. It follows relationships across part of a life course instead of taking one snapshot.
But following people over time isn’t the same thing as publishing a comparable national estrangement rate for 1994, then 1996, then 1998 and showing whether that rate moved upward. The study estimated prevalence, timing and subsequent unestrangement within the cohort. It didn’t produce the historical population trend that an “estrangement is rising” claim would require.
Reczek’s August article makes that distinction directly: the existing data don’t establish a surge.
The word longitudinal sounds like trend data because time is involved. The question is what changed across that time. In this study, researchers followed people’s relationships. They didn’t measure a national rate at repeated historical points and compare the points.
What “epidemic” asks of the evidence
Family estrangement isn’t a disease, so epidemiology is only an analogy here.
Still, if we borrow the word epidemic as something more precise than “a lot,” it quietly asks for a baseline. The CDC defines an epidemic as more cases than expected in a population or area during a particular period.
A high number by itself isn’t enough. You need some idea of what would normally be expected. A claim that the problem is rising asks for something else: comparable measurements across time.
Right now, according to Reczek, the estrangement literature doesn’t give us that historical series.
Maybe future research will. Estrangement could be increasing. Changing family norms, technology, politics, therapy culture and many other things give researchers plausible questions to test.
Plausible isn’t measured.
For now, “fairly common” is supported. “Skyrocketing” isn’t.
The experience may still have changed
This is where Reczek’s argument gets more interesting than a fact-check.
A stable rate wouldn’t mean estrangement feels the same as it did fifty years ago.
She points to smaller families. Losing contact with one child in a family of two changes the shape of a parent’s family differently than losing one relationship in a much larger sibling group. The national rate could stay flat while the practical weight of each rupture changes.
She also points to smartphones. A relationship that once might have faded through distance now exists beside a device that can reach someone all day. Texts, calls and social media create an expectation of availability that didn’t exist in the same form a few generations ago.
I think visibility can change too. Estrangement now has a much larger public vocabulary around it. People can name it, search for it and find other people living through it. Greater visibility can make a phenomenon feel newly everywhere without proving that it is newly more common.
Those are different kinds of change.
The frequency might change. The experience might change. The visibility might change.
We shouldn’t assume one because we can see another.
One family doesn’t need a national surge
I’ve spent a lot of pages here writing about what estrangement can do inside one family. None of that requires a rising national rate.
One relationship can be devastating without being evidence of a national acceleration. An adult child’s decision to end contact can be deeply consequential without proving that a generation is abandoning family. An estranged parent’s grief doesn’t become smaller if researchers eventually find that the national prevalence has been fairly stable.
The danger in the epidemic story is that it invites a cause before we have established the trend. Once a culture decides something is surging, the next question is what caused the surge. Therapy. Entitlement. Abuse. Social media. Politics. Pick the explanation first and individual families start getting sorted into it.
The research record doesn’t support that shortcut.
Reczek’s 68 interviews can tell us a great deal about how those participants understood the families they left and how many of them built family afterward. Her 2026 Journal of Marriage and Family paper uses those interviews to study exactly that.
Sixty-eight people who were already estranged can’t tell us what percentage of the country is estranged or whether that percentage rose across decades. That’s not a criticism of the study. It’s simply a different question.
Different evidence gets to answer different questions.
For now, I can say estrangement is common. I can say one estrangement can change a life. I can’t say the country is moving up a line the research hasn’t drawn.
Author’s Note
This article discusses published research and public commentary about family estrangement. It doesn’t claim to explain the motives, circumstances or private experiences of any particular estranged parent, adult child or family. The studies discussed use different samples and definitions and should be interpreted within those limits. This article isn’t legal, psychological or clinical advice.
Resources
Rin Reczek, “The real reason many Americans are cutting ties with their parents and siblings,” The Washington Post / The Conversation, August 18, 2026. https://www.washingtonpost.com/ripple/2026/08/17/the-real-reason-many-americans-are-cutting-ties-with-their-parents-and-siblings/
Rin Reczek, Lawrence Stacey and Mieke Beth Thomeer, “Parent-Adult Child Estrangement in the United States by Gender, Race/Ethnicity, and Sexuality,” Journal of Marriage and Family, 85(2), 494-517. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/jomf.12898
James Dean, “Pillemer: Family estrangement a problem ‘hiding in plain sight’,” Cornell Chronicle, September 10, 2020. https://news.cornell.edu/stories/2020/09/pillemer-family-estrangement-problem-hiding-plain-sight
Rin Reczek, “Redoing Family After Estrangement,” Journal of Marriage and Family, 88(4), 932-945, 2026. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/jomf.70065
Rin Reczek, Families We Lose: A New Explanation for Family Estrangement, NYU Press, August 2026. https://nyupress.org/9781479838783/families-we-lose/
CDC, Principles of Epidemiology, epidemic definition. https://archive.cdc.gov/www_cdc_gov/csels/dsepd/ss1978/lesson1/section11.html