The Anatomy of the Deep-Dive Estrangement Article

What the "longreads" have missed.

A couple of weeks ago a friend DMed an Instagram post about an article about adult children going “No Contact” with their parents.  She knew how much I’ve been thinking about estrangement of late and wanted to know what I thought about the article. So, I read it—warily. 

I say “warily” because before this summer, the media’s way into talking about estrangement has usually come out of a celebrity “opening up” about a family estrangement of their own. (Kate Hudson’s relationship with her biological father comes in for this treatment regularly.) 

But over the past few months, several high profile national publications have published long, reported pieces about estrangement. The New Yorker is one of them, so I’m going to use this New Yorker article as an example to tell you about the patterns I see in the way these longer, seemingly more “in-depth” articles are structured. Here’s what they all have in common: 

1. Something “new” is happening: One thing these articles all have in common is an insistence that something has changed lately. As a former journalist, I know why these articles do this. It’s right there in the word: “news.” They’re writing NEWs, meaning something has to be happening right now with this topic in order for editors to decide to publish a story on this instead of something else. That’s why all these stories have to say some version of this excerpt from the New Yorker article: 

Something has changed now, and that change is causing increased awareness. But what, exactly, has changed? Well, it could be… 

2. It’s happening as a result of the pandemic: This is actually a fascinating line of inquiry, and to give the New Yorker article credit, the writer Anna Russell doesn’t actually directly claim the pandemic has caused an increase in family estrangement. Rather, Russell uses an anecdote from the pandemic: an adult daughter named Amy, who had already had a strained relationship with her parents, stopped seeing them at the start of the pandemic because of travel restrictions. Then, Amy and her partner got the COVID vaccine as soon as it became available, while her evangelical Christian parents refused to get vaccinated. Amy then barred them from attending her wedding. Soon after, she stopped speaking to them altogether and blocked them on her phone, email, and social media.

I would love to read more about how the pandemic has affected our familial relationships. Because it has! Just as it has affected every person’s lives on so many levels. But, it’s impossible even to correlate an increase in estrangement with the pandemic, for reasons I will get to in…

3. Family estrangement is on a pendulum, and the pendulum is swinging “too far” to one side:  I always look in these articles for the reported evidence—the actual data—that shows that family estrangements are a) more common than they’ve ever been or b) more commonly talked about than they’ve ever been. 

The data are never included. That’s because, as far as I can tell, those data don’t exist. (Please, correct me if I’m wrong. I’d love to know if I’ve missed something.) The only reliable stat I can find on estrangement in the U.S. comes from Karl Pillemer’s research, and it’s the stat I introduced in my first post for this newsletter: 27 percent of his survey respondents reported being estranged from a relative. In his work, he provides evidence for extrapolating that survey to estimate that 67 million people nationally are estranged from a family member.

So, the reporters don’t have access to data that prove that estrangement has increased over time, or is increasing right now, because those data don’t exist. Instead, the articles tend to cite how many online support groups exist, the rise of family estrangement “influencers” (which I’ll talk about in future articles, for sure) and those influencers’ social stats. E.g. in the New Yorker: “The Reddit forum r/EstrangedAdultChild now has more than forty thousand members. Another group, r/raisedbynarcissists, is creeping toward a million.”

But do those numbers prove estrangement is either more prevalent or less stigmatized then it was in, say, pre-Internet days?  I mean, you have 40,000 people on an international Reddit thread, but the survey estimates 67 million people in the U.S. alone are estranged. How is this proving that people are more comfortable sharing openly about their estrangements than they used to be?  Even the narcissists support thread with 1 million members isn’t about estrangement, specifically. 

4. “(Adult) Kids today, amirite?”: Not only do these articles either imply or state directly that estrangement is more prevalent than it used to be, but they often go on to insinuate that adult children today choose estrangement for pettier reasons than they used to. Even though, since we don’t have good data on whether estrangement is increasing, we obviously also have no data on why people are choosing estrangement, and whether those reasons are changing. 

Instead, this is the part of the newspaper or magazine article which inevitably turns to Joshua Coleman for a quote. Coleman is a clinical psychologist who has developed a niche working with parents who have been cut off to reach out to their adult children and try to forge a reconciliation. Says the New Yorker: 

Coleman believes that estrangement is becoming more common, in part because of “changing notions of what constitutes harmful, abusive, traumatizing or neglectful behavior.”

Here is what he told the New York Times six weeks earlier: 

Behind this wave of estrangements, Dr. Coleman says, is an ever-lower threshold for what we view as “trauma.”

Pretty much the same paraphrased quote. But, in the articles I’ve read, Coleman never cites data for his claim. Of course he has plenty of anecdotal evidence: he specializes in working with parents whose adult children have cut them off, which is why I wish he would be more specific about how the reasons have changed over the years. Is it the reasons that have changed, or is it that his work has become more specialized over the course of his career? 

5. The reporter really wants to reserve judgment, but… 

Sometimes, deep-dive articles from national publications will include some commentary: once they build the narrative to Coleman’s theory that estrangement is more common and happens for more trivial reasons than it used to, the reporter then feels freer to wonder aloud about the legitimacy of the cutoff. 

Here’s Russell, the New Yorker reporter: 

The thing about listening to someone’s else’s family drama is that it’s really none of your business. Nevertheless, we all have opinions. While reporting this story, I sometimes found my allegiances shifting. When I spoke to adult children who had found some peace after distancing themselves from their parents, I felt relieved. But when I spoke to a mother who had not heard from her daughter in more than ten years—who didn’t know where she was, or how she was doing—I felt her pain, keenly. … As a new parent myself, I felt scared at the idea that I might somehow screw up, and my child would reject me.

Many of these articles have a faint, but noticeable aroma of “How could you?” or even “How could I?” in the case of first-person essay. Or else, at least, “Sure, you’re hurting. But isn’t estrangement going too far?” (See the pendulum in #3.)

Although articles like this one in the New Yorker often relate fascinating, detailed personal stories and observations, we don’t have enough data to draw the basic conclusions that estrangement is on the rise or that the reasons for estrangements are changing.

On the other hand, there is obviously interest in investigating estrangement. I mean, here I am, starting a whole Substack on this topic. Articles in national publications are being published for a reason: People want to talk about it. Is it more people than it used to be? Or is it the case that the people who want to talk about it have just gotten louder? 

I have no idea! The great thing about starting a Substack, rather than writing for a newspaper/magazine/ “legacy” journalism outlet, is that I don’t have to prove that something has changed. And without the pressure to prove that something is different now, Estranged is free to engage in the public conversation about estrangement in a different way. 

I believe that beyond placing blame, judging whether someone has the “right” to cut someone else off, or overidentifying with one “side” or another, we are missing a whole pile of interesting and fruitful ways to discuss and reflect on family estrangement. That’s what we’re doing here. I’m excited and daunted by this project and grateful to everyone who is joining me to think more deeply about estrangement. 

In the meantime, let me know in the comments if any of this resonated with you. Did you read the New Yorker article and love it? What did I miss?