The Families We Lose Book

Families We Lose:
A New Explanation for Family Estrangement

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As society becomes more polarized around political and cultural beliefs, family estrangement has received increased attention. Going no contact with a parent, sibling, grandparent, or other extended family members is often portrayed as a sign of the further fraying of society, sometimes even as a result of selfish choices that privilege the rights of the individual over the ability to compromise. In Families We Lose Rin Reczek takes a different view, arguing that going no contact isn’t done on a whim by selfish people, or due only to specific individual circumstances. Instead, she argues that contemporary family estrangement is indicative of a more fundamental culture clash in the very meaning and expectations of family in the US today. Reczek shows that estrangement is sparked by a confrontation between the traditional culture—which demands the family of origin is unconditionally forever—and a rivaling idea of family that values the quality of contact, focusing on equity, accountability, personal and relationship evolution, mutual respect, and maturity. At stake in the clash between compulsory and democratized kinship is a battle to determine the very meaning of “family” in the US today.

Based on in-depth interviews with a diverse set of adults who are ‘no-contact' with one or more family-of-origin member, Reczek reveals how these adults set new expectations about family. She shows that estrangement can be a path to healing, self-acceptance, and democratized configurations of family around the shared values of mutuality and intentional community. Shifting the focus from family reunification to family freedom, Families We Lose imagines a world where adults are empowered to choose who gets to be in their family – even if it means leaving some ties behind.

What experts are saying about Families We Lose:

"Stories about family estrangement are proliferating, but most of these are told by the parents and grandparents who get left behind. With Families We Lose, finally we hear from those who are doing the leaving. Best of all, this important book helps to demystify the phenomenon, beyond too-simple explanations of unhappy people lured to estrange from others by therapy or social media. Instead, Rin Reczek points out that what we are seeing is a collision of two cultural ideals of what counts as family, and what we ought to expect from family members. With poignant accounts from people who insist upon a new model of democratized kinship, Reczek counters popular concern about why those who estrange themselves “don’t value family.” Instead, as this book demonstrates, they value family so much, they are willing to invent new relationships to pursue a better version of it. Families We Lose goes beyond the headlines to add some important voices missing from the current conversation, and to give us some vital analytical tools to make sense of them." ― Allison Pugh, author of The Last Human Job: The Work of Connecting in a Disconnected World

"Reczek's clearly written and accessible book does what the best sociology does: takes things that we think of as individual or interpersonal and reveals to us their social and cultural causes. In this timely work, Reczek counters panicky public discourse about family estrangement as a trendy moral failing of 'kids these days' and instead asks us to consider how different ideologies of family clash to produce the phenomenon of estrangement. Rooted in people's first-hand experiences, this book sheds much-needed sociological light into the so-called private world of family trauma, disagreement, and grief, as well as belonging and joy. A must-read for scholars of family, culture, gender and sexuality, intersectionality, and interpersonal violence." ― Paige Sweet, author of The Politics of Surviving: How Women Navigate Domestic Violence and Its Aftermath