Unpacking estrangement: Who goes No Contact?

0:00What's good, y'all? You're listening to Code Switch, the show about race and identity from NPR. I'm Gene Deppi. I'm half black and half Middle Eastern. And yeah, no, it's cool because from a young age, I got to see how two very different cultures abuse their children.

0:21So I was scrolling through IG when I saw this bit from this comedian. His name is Demetrius Fields. People who weren't hit as kids, they always want to make you feel bad for them. They're always like, well, my parents, they didn't physically abuse me, but they did emotionally abuse me.

0:39And it's like, dude, you think my parents beat me, but were there for me emotionally? Is that what you think was happening?

0:48So I laughed and I shared this with my followers, as one does. And then, just because I'm always nosy about how other people were parented, I asked them, okay, for people who were hit by your parents as kids, did your parents ever apologize to you? Not necessarily for the hitting, but for like anything? And people flooded my DMs in response. Lots of eye roll emojis, lots of apology. What's that? Or people saying, I'm in my 30s and my parents have never said sorry to me for any reason whatsoever.

1:22And then, an eyebrow-raising number of variations on this one. No, they did not. Which is why we don't speak today. So we decided to do a call-out about this. And y'all, we do call-outs all the time. But the response to this was not like anything we've ever gotten in the years we've been doing this podcast. Like, dozens of very candid emails. People clearly had a lot of stuff to get off their chest, and they needed somebody to talk to about all of it.

1:55And y'all, we appreciate you for talking to us about it. People wrote in stories about abuse. We got emails about people falling out because their politics were so incompatible with their parents. One person left us a 40-minute voice memo about her broken relationship with her mother.

2:16Sometimes it can feel like, all right, is everybody cutting off their parents? Because over the past few years, there have been these big features, these big articles about the growing trend of family estrangement in places like The New Yorker and Fox News. Literally, literally, y'all, just a couple days before I'm sitting down to record this, the New York Times had an op-ed headline, Cutting Your Parents Off Isn't the Answer. But are we seeing an epidemic of estrangement?

2:48We spoke to a researcher who says what's actually happening is way more nuanced than therapists and people on TikTok cavalierly telling folks to break up with their families of origin. And she says race and identity are all over the ways that people think about and talk about how and whether to cut ties with their families. Like, okay, for example, black mothers were the least likely to be estranged from their adult children, while black fathers were the most likely to be.

3:20I know, right? Like, what is going on there? Well, we are getting into what is going on there on this episode. What all this talk about estrangement reveals about what's changing about the ways we all think about family. Okay, so first things first, are we seeing an epidemic of people going, no contact? We talked to somebody who's been knee-deep in the data and research on this very question.

3:51Her name is Wren Rizik. I'm Wren Rizik. I am a professor of sociology and the director of the Center for Aging Families at Ohio State University. As it happens, Wren has a brand new book out called Families We Lose, a new explanation for family estrangement. And Wren says that despite all the chatter about people going no contact or low contact, we actually don't know all that much about it.

4:19A lot of the conversation was panic. This is a social problem. This is a growing epidemic. I kept seeing that over and over again. So as a researcher, I'm like, oh, whoa. First of all, we just went through a pandemic. So I was like, that's an interesting framing. Are more people cutting their family off? Or are we just talking about it more? Yes, exactly. And so as a research scientist, I'm like, actually, I can answer this question, right? I can start to untangle this. So I went to the research literature to see, okay, what have people been doing?

4:51How are people understanding that this is an epidemic and that it's growing? And, ugh, I have to tell you, I could not find good data. What I saw when people were reporting this growing trend and that it's out of control is basically reports from psychologists saying that more and more people were coming to their practice. And I know that that's not how we can measure prevalence. So to have some sort of healthy skepticism about that, I said, okay, well, I can kind of test this. So Wren crunched a bunch of numbers from the surveys about how often people say they talk to their families of origin.

5:28And based on the data available. I don't think that I have a definitive, no, it's not rising. I have a, it's definitely not rising at a proportion that is an epidemic rate. So Wren did this qualitative study, right, in which she interviewed hundreds of people who were estranged from their families. And she didn't really have to look that hard for interview subjects. You know, I joke that researchers are often begging people, have to pay them a lot of money to be, you know, interviewed and to be part of research projects.

6:00But not this study. I mean, I could have done interviews for years. And many people told me that this was the first time they'd ever told the story. And I thought, gosh, like that is, that is a gift to give to me. And I'm not really in those moments really thinking about research. I'm just, I'm just listening. But I felt like it was so, a lot of people felt, I found that they would tell me that they did want to help other people. And that they felt that telling their story would actually be helping other people.

6:31And by virtue of doing that, it helped them. And this is an important part of, in any stigmatized topic, when people feel ashamed, just speaking truth out loud is really important. And they would tell me, like, if they had mentioned that, oh, I don't talk to my mom anymore, they would experience stigmatization. People would be like, why? She's your mom. You got to, like, you got to do it. Or she's your sister. How could you cut her off? A lot of that they experienced. And that's why they didn't share their stories with other people.

7:03You know, this happened with us as well. It's like when we did a call-out, we said we were doing an episode about family estrangement. And we've done so many call-outs on the show over the decade we've been around. And we have never gotten this much response. Like, people were sending me DMs. They were like, I don't want this on the show, but I need to say this to somebody. It was like, oh, whoa, okay. Yes. It was like it seemed to be coming from, like, every direction. So obviously people have, like, a lot of feelings and a lot of people are experiencing this. But like you said, it's not clear that this is an epidemic. So why do you think that these giant legacy media outlets, ourselves, the New York Times, the New Yorker, are so interested in covering family estrangement, people cutting themselves off from their kin?

7:43Yeah. Well, I think there's probably two big reasons that's happening. The first is that people are talking about it more than ever before. So we have this happening on, you know, TikTok, on social media, on Reddit, that there are conversations that we're having that maybe weren't in the public eye. The second reason, I think, is actually a little bit more sociological. So we can think of lots of examples in history of how the family is a lens into cultural kind of conflict.

8:16So, for example, we could think about this in terms of divorce rates. Or childbirth rates, right, right now. Child fertility rates, same-sex marriage, abortion. All of these examples are in the family, and we see the family as a bedrock of our social order. This is a commonly held belief, goes to this notion of compulsory kinship, that this is really important to, we can say America, but I think in general it's like across the world. Most cultures have the family as an essential unit.

8:47Now, in the United States, it's a little bit more important because we don't have all the social safety nets that other countries do. You need your family to help you with child care and all sorts of other stuff. Child care, health insurance, housing, you know, all these various goods and services are actually relied on in the family, right? And so often when the family changes or maybe the family feels like it's changing, it becomes a site of panic. And so estrangement is an example of that, where we see, much like divorce, that the American family is failing, and this is another reason for that failure.

9:25And so it kind of gets at this sort of cultural clash that's happening in the United States. So that would be another reason that we think that it's getting so much attention. I do think it's a particular historical moment. You know, back in the day, if you maybe had conflict with a family of origin member and you might move away or you might create distance and, okay, maybe, I don't know, I'm imagining like you would write letters. I don't know, like you'd come visit once a year. You could maintain that distance in a way that maybe would prevent estrangement or maybe you just have this really low contact relationship.

9:59But today, you know, actually young adults, there's this great work by Karen Fingerman that shows that young adults today actually have more contact with their parents than ever in recorded history. Like this is a really intense time that we're expected to stay in relationships. But I do think that people who have gone to therapy and who have lived in the therapeutic discourses that exist today have a different way of thinking about their relationships. This same transition happened with marriage a few decades prior, right? We saw marriage transition from an economic thing into one that we do for love or for community or for personal growth.

10:35And the same thing is happening, I think, today with the family of origin. You write in your book, I'm going to quote you here, estrangement isn't the disease destroying families. It's the symptom of a disease that began long before. Family estrangement is not the cause of family breakdown. It is the consequence. It is the outcome of family members being on fundamentally different pages. There's no books on what it means to live every day as a family. So broadly speaking, how would you describe these different misaligned scripts that estranged family members are reading from?

11:08Yeah. So when we think about cultural discourses in the family, things that people pull, they're not directly doing it, but it kind of is like the water that they live in. Most of us grew up in a family culture that says we should be in relationships with the people that we were raised with and who raised us. And when people transition into adulthood, there's an opportunity to kind of shift how they think about family relationships. And that is a really pivotal moment.

11:38Now, people might estrange at that time. Some data suggests that the first initiation of estrangement might be around 23 or so. So what happens is, like, I can see this in my seven-year-old now, right? He's like, oh, this is our family culture. This is the things we do. I'm going to agree with it. I don't really have a choice. I'm a child. I have no power here. I have to live in this. When people become adults, then they start to be able to make their own decisions about the family cultures that they abide by. And when we become adults, we start partnering with new people.

12:13We start maybe having children of our own. We start talking to, like, people at the workplace and learning more about them and learning about how they interact. And so as a process of doing that, we might learn new communication skills. We become open to other modes of being and other kind of familial arrangements, right? Like, yeah. Exactly. When I told someone I was working on this episode, a friend of mine told me that when he was dating his wife and he met her family, and her family was really stable and affirming. And he came from a home in which he was, like, you know, on really bad terms with his dad who put his hands on him.

12:47And he was like, it took him so long to be comfortable in a family, like, to see his wife's family be very supportive of each other and resolve conflict in a way that, like, didn't involve threats. And he said it was a thing that sort of, like, he was surprised at how much he, like, he, like, wanted it and, like, his body sort of rejected at the same time. I was like, oh, like, what am I supposed to do with this sort of this family culture, as you said, that is so unfamiliar to me. Yeah, he wasn't used to it. Yeah. It didn't, yeah. I think a lot of people describe that. This might be why, when you ask parents why they think their child is strange, they often note an in-law.

13:24But that is not what the people I talk to say, and that your example would suggest, I'm not saying he's strange, but, like, it's actually that they see a different way of relating, and that changes them. They're like, oh, I can be different, and I want to be different. That's the key. They want to be different. There's another way to do this, yeah. Yeah, they don't necessarily want to operate in relationship as they always have. And so when they go back to their family, and they ask for accountability, they ask for change, they ask for mutual respect, and they ask for intentional connection and safety, and they don't get it, that is very hard.

14:02Because now they've learned, I actually deserve this kind of relationship, or I want this kind of relationship. This is a different kinship culture. I call it democratized kinship. And I desire this so much that maybe staying in the relationship with the family of origin that won't follow me along, I can't maintain it anymore. It's actually, like, painful, right? It's like, oh, it's really... It's like, I can see what it could be, and I can't get there, and so I need to remove myself from it, yeah. Exactly. And I think, like, some people that I talk to would consider going back to be in relationships with their family over time if they're able to show that they can kind of move a little bit.

14:42But I had people talk to me about how, like, you know, my mom said, I don't have to respect you. I gave birth to you. Right. And she's like, what am I going to do with that? That's not the kind of relationship I want. So, okay, I really want to pick your brain about this particular finding that made me go, huh, out loud. So you found that Black mothers are the least likely to be estranged from their children, while Black fathers are the most likely to be.

15:14And I was like, okay, maybe my group chats are more representative than I realize. So, Rin, like, what is going on there? Yeah. So this goes back to the quantitative survey that I did that started this whole project. And what this survey showed is that, on average, about 6% of adult children had an experience of estrangement with their moms, and about 26% had estrangement with their dads. But the most striking finding for me was this finding about Black mothers being the most secure relationships out of every other racial ethnic group and gender group.

15:49So Black mothers had the lowest percentage of estrangement relative to any other group in the study. And, by contrast, Black fathers had the highest, almost twice more likely to be estranged than people with their white fathers. And I think these are related to each other. It's almost entirely explained by co-residents. Right. The correlation between not living with your child and estrangement and later estrangement. Yeah. There's a big association. Like, if you don't live with your father in childhood, the rate of estrangement is much higher.

16:23So, in particular for this cohort, we see the incarceration boom really hit this group of men. And that is a huge barrier to a relationship with a child. Because, of course, it's incredibly hard to maintain relationships when incarcerated. So you have a lot of structural reasons that I think estrangement among Black men is so high and so low among Black women. Hmm. You say in the book that, like, mothers often hold the keys to the rest of the family, right?

16:54If you stop rocking with your mom, then if you have younger siblings, you probably can't talk to your siblings. You have aunties and uncles you can't talk to, right? Like, she is, like, sort of the gateway into all those people in a lot of ways. Yeah. And a lot of it is the historical legacies that we see as to why mothers are so central to the family in general. Ultimately, it means that the mother holds almost like an ideological value in the family. They do a lot of work. I mean, I think there's no doubt about it. The amount of labor that moms do, the emotional labor, often the financial labor, you know, household labor, it's immense.

17:29Mothers are amazing. And because they're so integral in our lives, when those relationships go sour, it can be incredibly painful. And for the people in the book, they really struggle to make that transition. And as a result, many of the people I talked to were cut off from their entire family. Once mom was cut off, no one else wanted to talk to them. Oh, yeah. And so you can imagine, like, a lot of people would not want to take that step, as it were. No, of course not. And, in fact, I think this is a really important time to mention that all the people in the book valued family so much.

18:05Everyone I talked to was very invested in family, with their spouse, with their children, with their communities, with chosen family. You know, again, I think the public discourse makes us think that people who are strange don't care about the family, or they're, like, selfish or individualistic. And that really wasn't what I found. I found, actually, they cared so much about the family that they really wanted good families. And they were trying their best to figure out a way to do that.

18:30Coming up. The people that I talked to were, like, if they would just kind of apologize and grow as a person, then I could be in relationship with them. Stay with us.

18:44Jean, just Jean this week, Code Switch. We've been talking about the supposed epidemic of family estrangement, of adult children cutting ties with their parents and their families of origin. And I've been picking the brain of Wren Rizik, who's a researcher at The Ohio State University, and who has a new book about this very thing. And her book focuses on why those adult children say they are estranged. I just want to point to an email we got from a listener named Lauren B., who asked us not to use her full name because she has a public-facing job, and she wanted to freely discuss the sensitive family dynamics in her story.

19:21So her email was about how her parents say they have no idea why she fell back after years of her calling them out on their racism. She wrote, I stopped calling and taking their calls. I wrote a few emails asking them to see my perspective, which they dismissed as, quote, ranting. I've had a lot of therapy about it. I've talked to basically anyone who will listen to me about it. I also know that my mother tells friends and family that she has, quote, no idea, end quote, why I slipped away, inviting them to speculate on my frame of mind.

19:54My questions for her are sitting in her inbox unanswered. So Lauren's email reminded me of the missing, missing reasons. So if you've delved into the no-contact spaces of the Internet, you've probably come across this. It's like it looms very large in the no-contact lore. So the missing, missing reasons is this lengthy essay that looks at the landscape of estranged parents' message boards and forums online. So these are places where people can get together and commiserate about being cut off by their children.

20:29And this essay, it's called The Missing, Missing Reasons because these estranged parents on these forums will often lament that their adult children never told them the reason they cut contact. They don't know why their kids don't rock with them anymore, even while those estranged parents will often vaguely allude to getting a long letter or an email or a series of phone calls from their child before their child went no contact.

21:00So I asked Wren about what she's found about how estranged parents think through getting cut off. I think it goes back to this notion of like a cultural value around what family is. So you can imagine if you're a parent and you have a notion of compulsory kinship that says these relationships are sustained no matter what, it doesn't matter, right? Unconditional love, unconditional relationship. Or this unconditional proximity, right? Exactly. Unconditional access. Joshua Coleman uses this word. He works a lot with parents and he uses the word like helping them understand that they're not entitled to another person's time, even their own child.

21:41So I think a lot of times that just isn't expected. I can totally understand that. Again, I have a little kid, but like I can understand. I'm like, you know, I put a lot of effort in here. Like I did a lot of work. And I also might, you know, as a parent, I know my brain like sometimes is not working properly or like I do things that I'm not proud of. And it's actually really hard to reconcile that within myself. And so I think especially for parents that don't have, you know, I don't know, access to therapy or resources or the knowledge or even dealt with their own childhood issues, right?

22:20That they're still swimming in that. And they think, because that's true, was true for them, that no matter what happens, they did it. They stayed in relationships with their parents, even though their parents did stuff to them that they were like happy with, right? And so they come at it with this framework that says it shouldn't matter. It shouldn't matter what I do because it didn't matter what you did when you were a kid, right? So that's their framework. And I think like if we can put it in those terms and make it less personal, that's what I hear over and over and over again and see in the sort of parent side of things.

22:56The adult child is coming at it from an entirely different perspective. And that's the clash that we aren't able to kind of come to terms with. That's the missing, missing reasons. Because when the parent, and this happens, when the parent can see, oh, it's not about these specific things. It's actually not about what happened in childhood. It's actually not about this specific event. It's not about the in-law. It's not about whatever it is. It's not specific. It's actually cultural.

23:26It's that the child desires a type of relationship. And I want to be able to give that to them. Then we can reconcile. And that's, again, I know it might be hard for parents to read my book because it is from the perspective of the child. But I think like, okay, if you could read it from someone else's story with a little distance, could you maybe see their perspective? Could you maybe understand where they're coming from? And my hope is that maybe that is possible and that people can kind of come to that understanding through this more cultural framework.

24:01You point out that a lot of the ways that people identify, right, their races, their sexual identities, their religions, that those things play a big role in how they explain this experience and the pressures around it. So you said, you know, like people said to you things about their families like, oh, you know, the people in my community, whatever community that is, we respect our elders too much. And we don't cut off our parents. We don't do that, right? What did the people you interviewed tell you? Yeah, I actually interviewed a really diverse sample across all these dimensions.

24:35And I can't tell you how many times I heard in X culture, in X communities, meaning in my community, this is the way it is. But everyone would kind of say very similar things. That was the thing I noticed when I was reading your book. I was like, oh, so people are feeling the same sort of longing for a different kind of relationship with their families. But they're saying that it's specific to them, specific to black folks or Taiwanese people or, you know, like. Yes, yes. And I think, like, you know, as a white researcher, when people would talk to me about, you know, their own racial ethnic background, there was a real tension between not wanting to pathologize, like, their communities and also pointing out some problems.

25:20And, you know, I was like, I see this everywhere. I don't think it's specific to one group of people. But I do think there are unique dimensions that, unique challenges that different groups have. One of those things that I'm thinking about that is very broadly felt but can feel very specific is I think there's an unstated, sometimes explicitly stated expectation that, like, when our parents get older, we will care for them, right? And I'm curious about how the weight of that role factors into the decision to cut off or distance themselves from parents, from the people that you spoke to, and how that might vary across different cultures.

25:57This is one of the hardest things, I think, for the people I talk to. Who watches my mom or my dad when they can't take care of themselves anymore. Everyone I talk to really still loved their family. And it was very painful to think about them. I actually would ask, like, what would allow you to reconcile? And then they would often bring up, oh, if my mom, you know, maybe was on her deathbed or something like that, what would I do?

26:28It's just different than caregiving, of course. I think at the stage that I talked to a lot of people, they were not sure what would happen if their parent called the needed caregiving help. In my other job as co-director of the Center for Aging Families, we do a lot of research on caregiving. And, you know, spouses are the number one caregiver, followed by adult children. Right. And so it is a really important question. I think maybe I would ask, when we have children, setting up the expectation that this is like a sort of tit for tat.

27:02That I cared for you when you were a kid and now you... Now it's my turn. Now it's your turn. Exactly. Yeah. A child can't really make that agreement. Yeah. And I think that that's a really challenging thing and something that is being challenged for many parents today. I personally don't expect my seven-year-old to be able to agree that when I'm older, he's going to caregiving for me. Of course, I want a relationship. But I think that that's something that, particularly right now, the aging generation expects to happen. I think actually overall, when we think about aging parents, my colleague Rachel Margulis has work on kinlessness.

27:36So people who don't have children, who will care for them? I think this expectation that our children care for us, which many communities across the world have this expectation, we might need to question a little bit. And I don't know that we should necessarily be relying on adult children to do that. Hmm. So I'm curious. You mentioned that there's all the stigma around familial estrangement. But, like, who stands to gain from that stigma? Because it doesn't seem like, oh, this is, like, obviously, these are ideologically conservative people.

28:07These are ideologically, you know, progressive people, whatever. Like, stigma around family estrangement seems to be broadly shared, pretty widely spread. Yeah. I think that's a really great point. I don't think this falls on necessarily political lines, although I do think religious lines potentially. Right. Because a lot of our religious edicts do revolve around, and the people I talk to talk a lot about that, you know, honor their father, their mother. As a central pillar, I also think having hierarchy built into a religious order is often supplanted onto the family. So when we think about who, especially if we're in a hierarchical kind of environment, who might benefit from parents maintaining authority over adult children, I don't really have the full answer for that.

28:50I think it's an open question. I think it's one to ask ourselves. Does a society benefit from it? I think many political commentators would say absolutely it does, right? A society benefits from compulsory kinship because it keeps the family together. Many view the family as, as I mentioned earlier, the bedrock of our social order. So we need to maintain it in order to maintain a traditional framework. But if you look at social rights movements, like you could put this in the same vein and say like, well, what happens when we start to allow people to choose their family formations in adulthood?

29:26Who loses? And again, of course, parents who've raised their children likely are harmed in that process. I also think about control and power. So who is in power, who is asking the questions around estrangement, and who is stigmatizing them will give you the answer to who benefits from estrangement not happening or being stigmatized. I mean, you mentioned this idea that parents have power over their children. And in recent years, there's been so much more discussion about the rights of children and this idea that, you know, parenthood can sometimes look like these other janky, not so great power dynamics, right?

30:04And I'm just really curious about how you see those conversations, you know, the ones about the rights of children relating to these tensions around what you call democratic kinship. This idea that equality should be a central pillar in how you organize your family. Okay. This is such a tricky question. I think in part because I talk to adults and I'm much, I feel much more sort of centered in my ability to speak as, as adults, as opposed to children, because I don't work with children.

30:36Sure. I think I've seen this term of childism, which is the idea that children are kind of less than adults or that they shouldn't have the same rights and autonomy than adults. So, you know, what I want to say is that, again, when people talk about estrangement from their families of origin, they'll talk about their childhoods. They'll talk about all the things that happened to them. But it's really what's happening in adulthood that actually is, is making the fissure occur.

31:10That's interesting. And the people that I talked to were like, if they would just kind of apologize and grow as a person, then I could be in relationship with them. I understand raising children is hard and I, and there's all these things they would go into their parents' background. You know, this is what I saw that their father do this to them and blah, blah, blah. But it really was what was happening in adulthood that the parent couldn't quite transition to seeing them as a full-fledged adult.

31:38And I think the language even like, you know, they're still a child. I'm still saying adult child. What a weird phrase, right? Right. It is a super weird phrase. And I don't have another language. Someone has one. They can let me know. But even that phrasing, I think, kind of keeps some kind of hierarchy between parents and children. And the people I talk to do not want that. Right. They just don't want the... Yeah. They want to be equals.

32:06Rin Rizik is a sociologist at The Ohio State University's Center for Aging Families. Her new book is called Families We Lose, A New Explanation for Family Estrangement.

32:17That's our show. But before we dip, we just wanted to thank the many, many, many people who emailed us or DM'd us or left us voice memos for this episode. I mean, y'all shared some really powerful and difficult things with us. And we do not take that lightly. So, again, thank you. And Awkward Pivot Time, you can follow us on Instagram at NPR Codeswitch. This episode was produced by Jess Kung. It was edited by Courtney Stein. And our engineer was Kweisi Lee. And I would be remiss if I did not shout out the rest of the Codeswitch Massive, right?

32:49That's Christina Kala, Xavier Lopez, Noor Gil, Leah Dinella, Dalia Mortada, Yolanda Sanguini, Barton Girdwood, Maya Dangerfield, and B.A. Parker. It's a big-ass band, y'all. As for me, I'm Gene Dempy. Beasy, y'all. Beasy, y'all. Beasy, y'all. Beasy, y'all. Beasy, y'all. Beasy, y'all. Beasy, y'all. Beasy, y'all. Beasy, y'all. Beasy, y'all. Beasy, y'all. Beasy, y'all. Beasy, y'all. Beasy, y'all. Beasy, y'all. Beasy, y'all. Beasy, y'all.

33:19Beasy, y'all. Beasy, y'all. Beasy, y'all. Beasy, y'all. Beasy, y'all. Beasy, y'all. Beasy, y'all. Beasy, y'all.