It is easy to fall into the trap of thinking estrangement is something that is on the rise, but is that reality?
For decades family relationships have been researched and there is no real evidence to support that.
As far back as 1817 we can read about Mozart being estranged from his father, if we dig deeper it goes back.
Others include Charlie Chaplin, Marlon Brando, Ernest Hemingway, Bette Davis, Howard Hughes, and Joseph Stalin, all of whom had strained or broken family relationships at different points in their lives.
- The family of Henry VIII was full of ruptures — daughters declared illegitimate, shifting loyalties, and long periods of separation.
- Charles Dickens became estranged from several of his children and publicly separated from his wife in a way that scandalized Victorian society..
- In royal history, estrangements were often political as much as personal — for example between Mary, Queen of Scots and her son James VI and I.
- Ancient myths and religious texts are packed with family division too: Cain and Abel, King Lear and his daughters, Greek tragedies like Oedipus.
What changes across cultures isn’t whether estrangement exists — it’s how people deal with it.
In Ancient Rome, family was basically tied to power and law. If things went wrong, people could be disinherited, exiled from the household, or publicly humiliated.
In a lot of East Asian cultures shaped by Confucian traditions, family loyalty was treated as a moral duty above almost everything else. That didn’t stop conflict happening, though. It just meant people were often expected to hide it, endure it, or carry on for appearances’ sake.
In medieval Europe, family arguments could literally turn into wars. Land, inheritance, religion, marriage — everything was tied up together.
And in places where huge extended families lived together, like traditional joint-family systems in South Asia, estrangement didn’t always mean physically leaving. Sometimes people just stopped speaking. Separate kitchens got set up. Families split into branches while still living side by side.
A lot of Indigenous and clan-based cultures treated family breakdown differently too. Because identity came from the wider group, being excluded from the family could affect your whole place in society. But many communities also put much more effort into reconciliation and mediation before relationships completely broke down.
Modern Western culture is unusual because we now talk about estrangement mostly in emotional terms — trauma, boundaries, healing, emotional safety.
For most of history, survival mattered more than emotional wellbeing. People often stayed connected because they had to.
But the actual feelings underneath? The resentment, disappointment, favouritism, grief, betrayal — none of that is new at all.
Families have probably always been the place where people experience both their deepest love and their deepest hurt.
