TL;DR
A 2026 study of 75 Danish parents age 75 and older found 49.3% reported sorrow, 46.7% were classified as ambivalent and 4% reported relief.
The ambivalence number needs care. Researchers combined “sorrow and relief” with “I don’t know,” and acknowledged that this can blur mixed feelings with uncertainty.
Longitudinal research shows estrangement status can change. Moving out of a study’s estrangement category is not the same thing as emotional reconciliation.
No contact tells you one thing with some confidence: two people aren’t in contact. It doesn’t tell you how either of them feels.
A new paper in the Scandinavian Journal of Psychology sharpens that distinction. The researchers studied 75 Danish parents age 75 and older who were estranged from at least one adult child. The average parent was 82. Of that small sample, 49.3% reported sorrow, 46.7% were classified as ambivalent and 4% reported relief.
Relief was there. It just wasn’t common.
The more interesting number is 46.7%, and it needs a caveat.
The number that needs a caveat
The study asked parents how they were affected by the broken relationship. The response choices included sorrow, sorrow and relief, relief and “I don’t know.” The researchers grouped the second and fourth answers together as ambivalence.
That choice matters. Someone who says “I feel sorrow and relief” is describing mixed emotion. Someone who says “I don’t know” may be doing the same thing. Or they may be uncertain, emotionally distant, angry in a way the choices didn’t capture or simply unable to put the experience into one of the available boxes.
The researchers knew this was a problem. In Andreas Nikolajsen’s dissertation, which contains the study, the ambivalence measure is discussed directly as a limitation. The dissertation also revisits a small set of follow-up interviews. Among three interview participants who had answered “I don’t know,” one looked closer to indifference, another described anger and sadness without clear mixed feeling and a third showed obvious contradiction about future contact.
So I wouldn’t write that 46.7% of estranged parents feel two opposing emotions at once. The study doesn’t prove that.
What it does show is that almost half of this particular group didn’t fit cleanly into sorrow alone, and very few chose relief alone.
There are more limits. The sample was small, Danish, age-specific and recruited through municipal preventive-health professionals rather than through a representative national sample. The data were collected from early 2021 to mid-2022 and the design was cross-sectional. This is useful evidence about 75 older parents. It isn’t a map of every estranged family.
Contact can change without reconciliation
Older research complicates the status question further.
A U.S. longitudinal study by Rin Reczek, Lawrence Stacey and Mieke Beth Thomeer used 13 waves of National Longitudinal Survey of Youth data from 1994 through 2018. Among adult children who had been classified as estranged and were observed again later, 81.3% of those estranged from mothers and 68.6% of those estranged from fathers were later classified as “unestranged.”
Those are large numbers. They also don’t mean that 81.3% reconciled with their mothers in the ordinary meaning of the word.
The study defined estrangement through combinations of contact frequency and reported closeness. Becoming unestranged meant the relationship later crossed back over that study’s contact or closeness threshold. A phone call, more frequent contact or greater reported closeness can change a research category without telling us that trust was restored or the old conflict was resolved.
Megan Gilligan, J. Jill Suitor and Karl Pillemer found something similar from another angle. They interviewed 61 older mothers about 274 adult children at two points seven years apart. Relationships did move in and out of estrangement, but the movement usually reflected gradual changes in contact and closeness rather than one dramatic event. The authors also wrote that they didn’t find cases where the mothers felt a full reconnection had happened.
A relationship can become less estranged without becoming what either person once hoped it would be.
More than one feeling fits inside the same decision
The parent side isn’t the only place this gets complicated.
A 2025 qualitative study by Andreea Nica interviewed 30 people who had exited family relationships. Twenty-six were adult children and four were parents, so the sample leaned heavily toward the adult-child perspective. Participants reported positive feelings associated with severing ties while the study described the overall effects on wellbeing as mixed.
That doesn’t make no contact good or bad. It tells us the emotional result isn’t one thing even in a group largely made up of people who had done the leaving.
I think that is where some of the language around estrangement gets too clean. We can know that a person chose distance. We can know that the distance remains. We may even know the reason they gave for it. None of those facts gives us direct access to everything they feel once the door is closed.
Someone can be certain about a boundary and uncertain about the loss. Another person can feel relief and still grieve what the relationship was supposed to be. Those are possibilities, not claims about any particular estranged parent or adult child.
The distinction matters to me because it prevents a status from becoming a diagnosis.
What silence cannot tell me
I wrote before about no contact from the other side of estrangement. That piece was about cause: the same language can sit on top of very different histories, and an outsider usually can’t know which history they’re looking at from the phrase “no contact” alone.
This is a different limit.
Even when the status is clear, the feeling isn’t.
I won’t use a study of older Danish parents to claim that an estranged adult child secretly wants contact. I won’t use a qualitative study of mostly adult children to claim that leaving always brings relief. I don’t think either move respects the research or the people inside these relationships.
The newer work is more useful when it makes the categories less certain. Sorrow can be present. Relief can be present. Some people report both. Some can’t name the feeling cleanly. Contact can resume without a full reconciliation. Distance can remain while the emotional life around it keeps moving.
That is about as far as the evidence lets me go.
I can know there’s no contact. I can’t turn that fact into access to someone else’s inner life.
Author’s Note
This article combines personal reflection with discussion of published research. It doesn’t claim to know the private feelings, motives or intentions of anyone in my family or anyone else’s. The studies cited here describe specific samples and measures and should not be generalized beyond their limits. This article is not legal, psychological or clinical advice.
Resources
Andreas Nikolajsen, Lars Larsen, Bjørn E. Holstein and Christine E. Swane, “Sorrow and Ambivalence of Intergenerational Estrangement in Later Life”, Scandinavian Journal of Psychology, 67(3), 697-707, 2026. Cross-sectional study of 75 estranged parents age 75 and older.
Andreas Nikolajsen, Intergenerational estrangement in later life: mental health, sentiments, and coping for older parents, Aarhus University PhD dissertation, 2024. Contains the study’s recruitment details, sentiment percentages, construction of the ambivalence category and discussion of its limitations.
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, 2023. Uses longitudinal NLSY data to estimate estrangement and subsequent unestrangement.
Megan Gilligan, J. Jill Suitor and Karl Pillemer, “Patterns and Processes of Intergenerational Estrangement: A Qualitative Study of Mother-Adult Child Relationships Across Time”, Research on Aging, 44(5-6), 436-447, 2022. Prospective study of 61 older mothers and relationships with 274 adult children across seven years.
Andreea Nica, “From family estrangement to empowered exits: new emotional developments”, Frontiers in Sociology, 10:1663618, 2025. Qualitative interviews with 30 family exiters, including 26 adult children and four parents.
Analytical note: the argument that no-contact status cannot reveal a specific person’s emotional state is my interpretation of the research above. None of these studies tells us what any particular estranged parent or adult child privately feels.