Luna, 26, no longer speaks to her father. There was no single betrayal or dramatic rupture. What ended the relationship was his insistence on obedience and dominance.

“In his head it’s like, ‘I’m the father, you’re the daughters, we do things my way,’” she told me. Luna explained that she was “not willing to have a relationship like that,” and that her terms for contact were straightforward: “We could only have a relationship where you understand that I’m a person, and I’m not just gonna do whatever you want me to do whenever you want me to do it.”

He refused to accept those terms. After numerous attempts to make the relationship work, she walked away.

Family estrangement has become a fixture of talk shows, advice columns and social media. It is also the subject of my new book, Families We Lose.

Much of the current media coverage frames estrangement as an epidemic produced by therapy culture. My research suggests that this framing misses what is actually happening. I conducted 68 in-depth interviews with adults who went no-contact with a parent, sibling, grandparent or other relative. (All participant names, including Luna’s, are pseudonyms used to protect their privacy.)

I found that estrangement is less a story of trauma or selfishness than a clash between competing expectations: an insistence on loyalty, duty and forgiveness on one hand, and a longing for respect, emotional safety and personal growth on the other.

Falling birth rates raise the stakes

Estrangement is fairly common.

In a 2022 study, my colleagues and I used national survey data that followed parent-child relationships over several decades. Over that period, 26% of adult children in the U.S. experienced a period of estrangement from their fathers, and 6% reported a period of estrangement from their mothers. Our findings were consistent with a 2020 national survey by sociologist Karl Pillemer, which found that 27% of Americans were estranged from a relative, or roughly 67 million people.

Headlines often treat figures like these as evidence of a sudden crisis. But no study has tracked estrangement rates over time, and nothing in the existing data shows that it is skyrocketing.

Still, estrangement can have different consequences today. People have far fewer children than in most of human history, so the loss of one relationship may carry greater weight. Two generations ago, a parent might have had several other children with whom to maintain close ties; today, many parents have only one or two.

Smartphones have also created expectations of constant contact and connection within families. Even adult children who have quietly distanced themselves by moving away or limiting contact may still face regular requests for connection through texts, phone calls and social media. That can be stressful, emotionally taxing and make it harder to set boundaries.

The people I interviewed often had difficult childhoods, and some had experienced abuse. But they rarely pointed to childhood as the direct cause of estrangement. Instead, they cited the poor quality of their relationships with parents and other relatives in adulthood.

‘Kinship culture clash’

For them, the path to estrangement was usually gradual, marked by mounting tensions and unresolved conflicts. It emerged when they recognized that a parent or sibling would not, or could not, treat them the way they wanted to be treated. For most, that meant accountability and growth, intentional connection, mutual respect and safety.

Molly, 36, described a lack of accountability as the reason for her estrangement from her mother, Cindy, a decade ago.

Molly told Cindy: “You’ve done all these horrible things. I just need you to acknowledge it. I feel like I’m owed an apology.”

Molly said her desire for accountability was a basic need in any relationship. “I didn’t feel like that was asking too much, but apparently it was. I put the ball back in her court, and she’s just sitting on it,” she said.

Most of the people I interviewed recognized that they had different definitions of what family should look like and feel like. In my book, I call this a “kinship culture clash.”

Divorce offers a familiar example of this kind of shift.

For most of American history, marriage was shaped by economics, law, religion and social pressure. People stayed married because that was what one did, and there were few alternatives that did not leave one spouse — usually the woman — socially ostracized and financially destitute.

Then, as sociologists Andrew Cherlin, Anthony Giddens and Stephanie Coontz have argued, marriage transformed into a relationship judged by its ability to provide love and support, promote ideals like fairness and lead to personal growth. Once marriage was understood as something that had to work for each spouse, divorce became thinkable, then ordinary.

Should family ties always bind?

The family you are born into can carry the same tension.

Ties to parents and siblings are often expected to be permanent and unconditional, reinforced by cultural norms and laws that bind parents and children to one another even after children become adults. For example, 27 states have filial piety laws that require adult children to bear financial and, in some cases, direct caregiving responsibility for aging parents. This is part of what I call “compulsory kinship.”

Under this framework, you show up at Thanksgiving no matter what was said last year, because your family is your family. You take your father into your home to care for him when he gets sick, because he is your father.

This model does help many Americans. It can ensure aging parents have adult children to care for them, while adult children may have a place to call home, no questions asked.

By contrast, the estranged people I talked to for my book adhere to what I call “democratized kinship,” a framework that generally reflects views of contemporary marriage.

In this model, family bonds require mutual respect, reciprocity and support in order to continue. Genetics take a back seat: anyone can become family, just like anyone can become a spouse, but no one is automatically family.

Neither family framework is new, and neither belongs to a single generation. Some people have always held relatives from their family of origin to different standards of care. Queer people have been building chosen families for generations.

What I chart in this book is the conflict between these two ways of thinking.

Estrangement often happens when these ideas of family collide and cannot be reconciled — when one person insists that biological or origin ties and hierarchies reinforce the family unit, and another insists that behavior does. That is Luna’s story. Her father relied on the logic of age and hierarchy — “Because I’m your father and I said so” — and she demanded to be treated as a person first and a daughter second.

A family that works for you

People who leave their families of origin are not rejecting family altogether.

In a recent study drawing on these same interviews, I show that estrangement can act as a catalyst for what I call “redoing family.” After cutting off contact with one family member or multiple relatives, people commonly rebuild kinship networks, bringing friends, partners, in-laws and neighbors into roles once reserved for blood relatives and constructing new family units organized around support and reciprocity.

Luna is not on her own because she no longer talks to her father. Her family today includes her sister, whom she talks to multiple times a day, and a large group of friends.

“I think you can have your chosen family, and whoever in your biological family you connect to,” she told me. “Everybody just gets to choose who they feel they have a real, intimate, deep connection with. And that’s your family.”

She did not want less family. She simply wanted a family that works.

Rin Reczek, Professor of Sociology, The Ohio State University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com