When a relationship between a parent and an adult child becomes deeply strained, enduring personality traits may help explain why some families stay in contact while others cut ties completely. A new study published in Frontiers in Psychology indicates that among people experiencing family tension, more extraverted parents have higher odds of being estranged by an adult child, whereas adult children who score higher in openness to experience have lower odds of initiating a cutoff. The findings suggest that basic temperament may shape how individuals interpret and respond to ongoing family conflict.
Parent-child estrangement occurs when a parent or an adult child intentionally reduces or completely severs contact with the other, a rupture estimated to affect between 6% and 28% of people at some point in their lives. Past scholarship on why families fracture has largely focused on severe life stressors, such as childhood abuse, parental divorce, or substance misuse, alongside broader demographic patterns. For example, a national longitudinal study of U.S. families found that 26% of adult children reported a period of estrangement from their fathers compared to 6% from their mothers, with rates varying across gender, race, and sexuality.
Beyond major life disruptions and demographic factors, researchers have examined how clashing beliefs and shifting cultural standards destabilize family bonds. In a 2015 study of mothers and adult children, differences in personal values strongly predicted estrangement, whereas an adult child’s violation of serious social norms did not.
Expanding on the role of belief systems, the author of a 2025 qualitative study of estranged U.S. adults argued that younger generations increasingly evaluate family ties through a cultural script called “democratized kinship.” Rather than viewing parent-child bonds as permanent obligations requiring unconditional loyalty, this newer framework treats family relationships as conditional on mutual respect, accountability, intentional connection, and emotional safety.
The authors argue that neither painful family history nor changing cultural expectations can fully account for why one strained relationship ends in estrangement while a similar one endures. Many parents and adult children navigate sharp political disagreements, mismatched expectations, or difficult memories without cutting off contact. Lead author Jag S. Gill of Adler University, working with independent researcher Matthias J. Barker and Carl P. Nienhuis of the University of the Fraser Valley, proposed that individual personality traits help bridge this gap by shaping how people react to both family stress and cultural norms.
To test this idea, the researchers drew on Five-Factor Theory, a major psychological framework that organizes personality into five broad, biologically rooted dimensions: extraversion (sociability and assertiveness), agreeableness (warmth and cooperativeness), conscientiousness (self-discipline and organization), neuroticism (stress sensitivity and negative emotion), and openness to experience (curiosity and mental flexibility). According to this theory, these core dispositions interact with a person’s environment to shape their relationship expectations, beliefs, and coping habits.
Previous work has already linked personality tendencies to interpersonal friction and how people handle disagreements. For instance, an earlier survey on personality features and relationship cutoffs found that people with stronger borderline tendencies, which involve emotional instability and volatile attachments, reported a greater number of estranged relationships. Within the standard Big Five traits, a 2020 meta-analysis on conflict resolution linked extraversion to a more dominating conflict style, though also to compromise, while openness and agreeableness were linked to compromise and collaborative problem-solving.
Although estranged family members in earlier studies often blamed a “clash of personality” for their fallout, no prior study, according to the authors, had quantitatively tested whether the Big Five traits predict parent-child estrangement. To investigate this question, Gill and his colleagues analyzed survey responses from members of an online parent-child estrangement support community founded by Barker.
Unlike studies that compare estranged families to harmonious, low-conflict households, this cross-sectional design (meaning data were collected at a single point in time) focused entirely on individuals already experiencing family strain, allowing the team to examine what separates strained but ongoing relationships from complete cutoffs.
Out of roughly 2,000 community members invited by email in the fall of 2024, 582 completed the survey, representing a response rate of about 30%. After removing respondents with missing information, the final sample included 520 U.S. residents: 368 parents (averaging 60 years old, 95% White, and 93% women) and 152 adult children (averaging 39 years old, 82% White, and 87% women) from separate, non-matched families. The anonymized data from the survey are available from the authors upon request rather than posted publicly.
Participants reported how often they saw their parent or adult child in person and how often they communicated by phone, text, or email. Respondents were classified as estranged if they both saw and spoke with their relative once a year or less (or not at all), while those with more frequent contact were categorized as remaining in a strained, non-estranged relationship.
Based on this definition, 48% of the parents were estranged (none of whom had willingly initiated the cutoff), and 35% of the adult children were estranged (all of whom had willingly initiated the separation). Everyone also completed a 100-item personality questionnaire that measured the five broad Big Five traits alongside ten narrower sub-traits (two for each broad dimension), and the researchers ran separate statistical models for parents and adult children that adjusted for age, gender, race, education, marital status, and, for adult children, sexual orientation.
Among parents, extraversion was the only broad personality trait associated with estrangement status. After accounting for demographic characteristics, parents had 79% higher odds of being estranged by an adult child for each one-point increase in extraversion scores. When the researchers looked closer at the two narrower sub-traits that make up extraversion (enthusiasm and assertiveness), each one-point increase in enthusiasm was linked to a 57% increase in the odds of estrangement, whereas assertiveness was not statistically significant. The remaining broad traits (agreeableness, conscientiousness, neuroticism, and openness) and their sub-traits were not statistically significant predictors among parents.
At first glance, the link between parental extraversion and estrangement may seem surprising, since extraversion is commonly associated with warmth and outgoing sociability. Because enthusiasm rather than assertiveness was the sub-trait that predicted estrangement, the authors suggest the link may not be limited to dominance or control.
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.
A different personality pattern emerged among the adult children in the study, where openness to experience was the sole broad trait linked to estrangement status. Each one-point increase in overall openness was associated with a 78% reduction in the odds of having cut off contact with a parent, and its two narrower sub-traits, intellect (curiosity and engagement with abstract ideas) and openness (receptivity to emotions, aesthetics, and new perspectives), predicted lower odds of estrangement by 60% and 57%, respectively.
None of the other personality traits or sub-traits were statistically significant predictors for adult children. In the authors’ reading, adult children who score high in openness tend to possess greater mental flexibility and tolerance for differing values, which may help them navigate perceived slights or ideological disagreements with their parents without cutting off contact.
Several demographic patterns also stood out in the analysis. In the broad-trait model for adult children, respondents holding a master’s or doctoral degree had 72% lower odds of being estranged compared to those with only a high school education, though this educational difference was not statistically significant in the narrower sub-trait model.
To explain why advanced education might be linked to lower odds of estrangement, the authors offer two possibilities: higher education may foster problem-solving skills and cognitive complexity that help adult children manage difficult family dynamics, or it may provide financial security that buffers families against chronic economic stress.
Among parents, being divorced was not a statistically significant predictor of estrangement, which the researchers note is likely because divorce and similar family stressors were common across both the estranged and strained-contact groups. An adult child’s own marital status was also not a statistically significant predictor in the adult-child models.
As with all research, there are some caveats to keep in mind when interpreting these findings. Because the survey captured responses at a single point in time, it cannot establish that personality traits cause estrangement; going through a painful family rupture could also alter how people view and report their own personalities. In addition, the parents and adult children in the sample did not come from the same families, making it impossible to see how a parent’s and child’s personalities interact or whether family members would rate each other’s traits the same way they rate themselves.
The researchers also ran many statistical tests across two groups, including a relatively small sample of 53 estranged adult children, without adjusting for the chance of false positives, and several of the detected links only barely reached statistical significance, which makes the results best treated as preliminary.
The makeup of the sample further limits how broadly the results can be applied. Participants were recruited from a single online support community for family estrangement, with about 30% of roughly 2,000 invited members choosing to respond, and the resulting sample was overwhelmingly White, straight, and female. P
eople who actively join an online support group and opt into a survey may differ in important ways from those who handle family distance privately. For instance, although mothers in the study had more than three times the odds of being estranged compared to fathers, the authors caution that men made up only 7% of the parent sample, meaning the gender gap likely reflects who joins support groups rather than a broader rule about mothers and fathers.
Finally, although the researchers used Five-Factor Theory to propose that personality traits shape conflict styles and attitudes toward “democratized kinship,” the survey did not directly measure those intermediate beliefs or behaviors. Future studies that track both parents and adult children over time, ideally starting before an estrangement occurs, will be needed to test these proposed pathways directly. Incorporating questionnaires that measure specific conflict habits, expectations around family obligation, and perspectives from multiple family members could further illuminate how basic temperament interacts with family stress.
The study, “From strain to estrangement: the role of personality in predicting parent-child relational outcomes,” was authored by Jag S. Gill, Matthias J. Barker, and Carl P. Nienhuis.