Why some families stop speaking
It's Been a Minute
NPR
4.6 • 8.8K Ratings
🗓️ 28 November 2025
⏱️ 22 minutes
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Summary
27% of Americans are estranged from at least one family member, and the term "no contact" is increasingly being used to describe estrangement between adult children and their parents. But is estrangement happening more often, or are we just more open to talking about it? And is our culture around family shifting?
Brittany sits down with journalist Kui Mwai and Whitney Goodman, licensed marriage and family therapist and the host of the Calling Home podcast, to find out.
This episode originally aired on December 17, 2024.
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Transcript
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| 0:19.2 | Whitney, your work is about improving relationships between adult family members. And because of that, |
| 0:26.0 | you work with both estranged adult children and parents. And you've done some surveys with each. |
| 0:32.8 | What themes are you seeing pop up in how and why estrangements are happening on a personal level? |
| 0:39.3 | Yeah, so this was really fascinating. I was able to survey a little over 2,000 estranged |
| 0:45.0 | adults who are estranged from their parents. And something interesting that I found is that |
| 0:49.6 | most of the reasons that people are reporting are why they became estranged are to do with emotions in |
| 0:55.9 | some way. So about 98% of those adults said that they believed that their parents were |
| 1:02.0 | emotionally immature and that was a reason for their estrangement. I'm sorry, wait, what was that |
| 1:06.7 | percentage? It was around 98%. I'm sorry. I've never heard of so many people agreeing |
| 1:13.0 | on one experience on a survey. That's wild. That is wild. Yeah. So that was really surprising to me. |
| 1:20.8 | And then the other ones had to do with experiencing emotional neglect. And most people were |
| 1:25.4 | reporting that it was emotional neglect both in childhood |
| 1:28.4 | and adulthood, and then also emotional abuse, both in childhood and adulthood, which something |
| 1:34.2 | I've also found that is kind of echoed by these results is that most of the adults aren't |
| 1:40.0 | reporting that they can't, like, get over something from childhood with their parents. Most of them |
| 1:45.6 | are upset that the behavior is still continuing in adulthood and that nothing is being done |
| 1:51.3 | to stop it or change it even after they have come to the parent and said, hey, I want you to work |
... |
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