27% of Families Go "No Contact." Here's How You Prevent It in Yours
There's a new trend I've been watching closely: family members who go "no contact." One study estimates 27% of Americans have gone no contact with a close family member (that's roughly 68 million people), according to Karl Pillemer's national survey out of Cornell. If you're reading this in Santa Barbara County, there's a decent chance you already know what that looks like from the inside. A sibling you haven't spoken to in years. A parent whose calls go to voicemail. A child who stopped coming home for the holidays and never quite explained why.
Estrangement rarely arrives as one explosive event, though sometimes a big fight can lead to stone cold silence for years. More often than not, however, it builds over time when smaller issues go unaddressed, until one day nobody picks up the phone. In my practice, I see this happening with parents who quietly and regretfully choose to disinherit a child they haven't spoken to in years, as we work through their estate planning decisions.
Where it starts
I've spent nearly 25 years watching families fight, first in the courtroom, then at the mediation table helping spouses divorce with intention, and now in estate planning and probate court. What all those years working with fractured families taught me is that the fracture almost never happens at the moment everyone points to later. Divorce doesn't estrange a family. Death doesn't estrange a family. It's the conversation that never happened that does.
The research backs this up in a way I didn't expect. Clinical psychologist Dr. Joshua Coleman has found that roughly seventy percent of estrangements between a parent and adult child follow that parent's divorce. But kids don't usually walk away because their parents split up. They walk away because they were asked, directly or by implication, to choose a side or to blame one parent over the other. And a family that never resolves that conflict often carries it straight into the next fight: the one over the will.
The five fault lines
The same pattern continues on the estate planning side. From my perspective, the fault line shows up for one of five main reasons. First, kids who were asked to pick a side during a divorce years earlier and never fully came back from it. Second, an inheritance divided unequally with no explanation, which reads as unfair even when there was a good reason behind it. Third, blended family favoritism, biological children and stepchildren each quietly convinced the other one got the better deal. Fourth, the surprise beneficiary nobody saw coming, a house or an account left to one child "to share fairly," except the law never actually requires anyone to share. Fifth, and maybe the most common of all: silence. No family meeting. No explanation. No chance for anyone to ask a hard question out loud before it turns into a grievance nobody says out loud either. When the conflict shows up after somebody has died, it often becomes a permanent rift.
What I know about this from the inside
After my mother passed, my father remarried when I was in college, and I have a half brother from that marriage. As my dad got older and his health started to decline, I found myself struggling to have important conversations with my stepmother about his care and eventually about putting together his estate plan. Those conversations didn't go the way I hoped. My stepmother is protective of what she wants to see go to her son, and it's created a crack between us that I'm still navigating.
I don't have a tidy ending for that story. Some of these things stay unresolved for a long time, maybe permanently, and I've learned not to pretend otherwise because my own family is not immune to conflict just because I specialize in helping others through it. What I do know is that I built the second half of my career around trying to catch these moments earlier, for other families, before they calcify into the kind of silence I've seen firsthand.
Why I built the Family Legacy Meeting
Most estate planning attorneys hand you documents and send you home to figure out the family part on your own. That's how surprises happen. That's how someone finds out at the reading of the will that they weren't who they thought they were to their own parent.
The Family Legacy Meeting is different. Once your plan is in place, we bring your family into the room, not to negotiate your decisions, but to hear them explained, in your own words, while you're still here to explain them. Why the house goes to one child and not the other. Why your stepchildren are or aren't included the way they expected. Why you made the choices you made. It's the conversation that seventy percent of divorce-related estrangements never got, and the one most estate plans skip entirely.
I also offer what many others don't: a free plan review every three years. Because I know my clients' lives will change, their family dynamics will change, their assets will change, and their decisions will change. So I make sure their plan changes with them.
If you're ready to have that conversation on your own terms, while you still can, schedule your complimentary 15-minute Kickstart call. We'll talk about what a Life & Legacy Plan, and a Family Legacy Meeting, could look like for your family.
