About 27% of American adults have cut off contact with a family member at some point, roughly 67 million people, according to Cornell sociologist Karl Pillemer’s national estrangement research. What happens after that cutoff has been harder to pin down: grief without end, quiet relief, or something that resolves? A 2026 study in the Journal of Marriage and Family followed people on the other side of estrangement to find out, and the answer is neither reconciliation nor permanent rupture. Researchers are calling it “redoing family.”
The Study: 68 People, One Question
The research, led by Ohio State University sociologist Rin Reczek and titled “Redoing Family After Estrangement,” is built on in-depth interviews with 68 adults who had cut ties with at least one family-of-origin member — a parent, sibling, or other relative. The interviews, conducted in 2023, captured estrangements ranging from recent to decades-long. Rather than tracking whether the relationships eventually healed, the researchers set out to understand what “family” comes to mean once the person someone grew up calling family is no longer in the picture.
The finding that emerges isn’t a tidy split between people who reconcile and people who stay estranged forever. Instead, the study treats estrangement as the start of an active process. People don’t subtract a family member and simply move on with a smaller family — according to the research, they tend to rebuild what family means to them, often from the ground up.
Why the Cutoff Happens in the First Place
In describing the research through her university, Reczek framed the split at the root of most estrangements as a clash between two ideas of obligation: “compulsory kinship,” the belief that blood alone creates a lasting duty to stay close, and “democratized kinship,” which judges relationships by whether they’re actually safe, respectful, and mutual.
Reczek was careful to note that cutting a family member off is rarely a snap decision. “They care so much about family,” she said of the people she interviewed. “They want to have healthy families, and they have very high standards for what a healthy family is.” The estrangements in her study tended to follow years of strain, not a single argument.
Choice Becomes the New Definition of Family
The clearest pattern across the interviews is a shift away from biology as the thing that makes someone family. Participants described building their sense of kinship around choice instead — deciding, deliberately, who counts as family based on how those people actually treat them.
That shift showed up in three patterns. Some leaned on peer-based support networks — friends, housemates, and community members who became the safe, trustworthy connections that family used to be, at least in theory. Others formed mentoring bonds with older adults outside their family, describing coworkers, community members, or the parents of friends as unconditionally supportive surrogate elders. And many simply deepened the relationships they still had with extended family they hadn’t cut off, treating those remaining ties as more central than before.
Not a Deficit — a Redefinition
What’s notable about the study’s framing is what it pushes back against. Much of the existing conversation around estrangement treats it purely as loss — a hole where a relationship used to be. This research instead positions family as a “mediated practice rather than a static institution”: something people actively construct and revise, rather than a fixed structure that either stays intact or breaks. As Reczek put it, “Maybe family doesn’t look like the way we thought it would, but it hardly ever does.”
That reframing matters for anyone estranged and wondering whether they’re doing family “wrong.” The research suggests the more common experience isn’t a permanent absence — it’s a rebuild, often leaving people with relationships that function the way family is supposed to, even without shared DNA.
What the Cornell Research Adds
Pillemer’s decade-long project at Cornell, described in his book “Fault Lines,” adds a piece the newer study doesn’t focus on: what happens for people who do eventually reconcile. Describing his own findings, Pillemer said that “people who are estranged from a family member feel deep sadness, long for reconnection and wish that they could turn back the clock.” But among those in his research who did reconcile, the process rarely hinged on getting an apology or an admission of wrongdoing. “Most eventually felt much better after the reconciliation, even if it wasn’t perfect,” Pillemer said, describing people who stopped needing the other person to validate their version of events and simply built forward instead.
The Throughline
Line up the two bodies of research and a consistent picture forms. Whether someone reconciles or builds an entirely new support system, the common thread isn’t closure in the way people often expect it — a clean apology, a return to how things used to be. It’s redefinition. People decide, on their own terms, who counts as family and what that relationship needs to look like going forward.
For the millions of people currently navigating a family cutoff, that may be the most useful finding in either study: estrangement doesn’t have to end in one of two outcomes. There’s a wide, well-populated middle — new chosen family, deepened old ties, or an eventual reconciliation built on different terms than before — and most people who go through it end up somewhere in that middle, not stuck at the moment of the cutoff itself.
