The number of people estranged from a family member is on the rise. A 2025 YouGov poll found that 38% of American adults were estranged from a family member, whether a sibling (24%), a parent (16%), or a child (10%).
Estrangement is complicated, but a trend is emerging among younger generations. Younger people increasingly judge their family ties through the lens of “democratized kinship,” which holds that family connections should be based on mutual respect, intentional connection, and emotional security. Previous generations saw family ties as obligational and rooted in loyalty.
What personality trait do estranged parents share?
An interesting study published in Frontiers in Psychology found a trait common among many parents estranged from their adult children. The study says that parents who have a strained relationship with their children and rated above average on the extraversion scale were 79% more likely to be estranged from their children. On the enthusiasm scale, enthusiasm was the trait that best predicted estrangement.
That may sound strange to some parents who must be thinking: “Why am I more likely to be estranged from my adult child if I am enthusiastic about our relationship?”
“This inverts the standard story. The parents in this sample who were cut off did not score highly on domineering. They were scoring high on warmth,” Richard Blake, a psychology PhD researcher and author of Cut Off: How Therapy Culture is Fueling the Parental Estrangement Epidemic, writes on his Substack. “A parent high in enthusiasm shows love through frequent, energetic, emotionally expressive contact. That is what love looks like from the inside. From the outside, in a relationship that is already strained, the same behavior reads as someone who will not let up.”
Why is enthusiastic warmth such a problem?
PsyPost elaborated on how enthusiastic warmth may feel completely different for parents and adult children experiencing a strained relationship:
“In their view, the connection to enthusiasm points to a potential mismatch in relationship needs. The researchers propose that highly enthusiastic parents may seek frequent, emotionally expressive contact, which an adult child in a strained relationship may experience as overwhelming, demanding, or poorly attuned to their need for emotional boundaries.”
If the child wants space and the parent keeps pushing as if nothing is wrong, things are bound to take a turn for the worse.
On the adult-child side of the equation, the study found that adult children with a strained relationship with their parents who ranked highly on openness to new experiences had 78% lower odds of estrangement from a parent. The study also found that adult children with a bachelor’s degree or master’s degree had 72% lower odds of cutting off their parents than those who graduated from high school.
Ultimately, the study shows that what one person may see as expressing warmth may be seen as smothering, or worse, being completely out of step with their child’s feelings.
“If you have been cut off, and you were nothing but loving, this study suggests that might not be the defense you think it is,” Blake wrote. “Warmth that is not calibrated to what the other person can absorb stops arriving as warmth. Chasing feels like love from the inside.”
