Hey {{ first_name | Reader }},
You have almost certainly had this thought:
A famous person gets estranged from a parent, the story runs for a week, and somewhere in the back of your head, a theory forms.
They were a big personality. Larger than life. No wonder the kid cut them off.
A study came out in June, and I want to walk you through the interesting part.
Gill, Barker and Nienhuis (2026) surveyed 520 people in strained family relationships. Three hundred and sixty-eight parents and 152 adult children, all in the United States, were recruited from the same online estrangement community. Everyone in the sample was already in a difficult relationship. Some had tipped into full estrangement, and some had not. The researchers measured personality using the Big Five Aspects Scale (my favorite tool for measuring personality) and asked which group people fell into.
Among parents, one trait moved. Higher extraversion came with 79% higher odds of being cut off by an adult child (OR = 1.79, p = 0.031). Agreeableness did nothing. Conscientiousness did nothing. Neuroticism, which is where most people, me included, would have put their money, did nothing at all.
The Big Five Aspects Scale splits extraversion into two parts. Assertiveness covers the take-charge, dominant, run-the-room end. Enthusiasm encompasses warmth, positive emotion, energy, and a desire for frequent contact.
Assertiveness came back flat for increasing chances of being cut off (OR = 1.02). Enthusiasm accounted for the entire effect (OR = 1.57, p = 0.039).
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.
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 behaviour reads as someone who will not let up.
Agllias (2016) found the same thing on the adult children’s side, where estranged parents are described as demanding or overly focused on their own needs in the relationship.
Two people. One behaviour. Two completely different readings of it.
So back to the celebrity theory.
Almost all famous performers are high in enthusiasm. To show that the trait matters for them, you would need estranged celebrities to score higher than non-estranged ones. Nobody has that data. What you have instead is a trait that is close to universal in the population you are trying to explain, which makes it useless as a discriminator.
In short, this is like noticing that most injured basketball players are tall.
The second problem is worse. You are not looking at a representative sample of famous families. You are looking at the ones where somebody talked. A celebrity estrangement becomes visible precisely when one party has media access and a reason to use it. The general population rate of parent-child estrangement runs somewhere between 6% and 28%, depending on how you measure it. Before you claim it happens more to famous people, you would need to clear that bar, and the visible cases do not tell you whether you have.
There is a third thing, and it is probably bigger than personality anyway. Fame rewires a family's economics. Money moves in directions it normally does not. A parent becomes an employee, a manager, or a gatekeeper. That is a structural change to a relationship, and the Big Five has nothing to say about it.
So the celebrity version does not survive. What survives is the part that applies to you, and it is harder to hear.
If you have been cut off, and you were nothing but loving, this study suggests that might not be the defence you think it is. Warmth that is not calibrated to what the other person can absorb stops arriving as warmth. Chasing feels like love from the inside.
Now the limits…
The sample was self-selected from a single online support group, one founded by the study’s second author. It was 95% White, roughly 93% mothers, entirely American. Personality was measured after estrangement had already happened, so the causal arrow could point the other way entirely, and the authors say so. People rated their own personalities, which is the exact measurement problem you would worry about here.
One more thing: None of this applies where there was abuse, neglect or real harm. Plenty of estrangements are the right call, and no amount of warmth was ever going to change them. This is about the murkier middle, where two people are each completely certain they were the reasonable one.
I highly recommend reading the study.
Hold steady,
Richard
P.S. The back cover of the book is now finalised and…
I have begun creating a course to help estranged parents who want to work on their situation and to accompany my book. If that sounds like you…
References
Agllias, K. (2016) ‘Disconnection and decision-making: adult children explain their reasons for estranging from parents’, Australian Social Work, 69(1), pp. 92-104. Doi: 10.1080/0312407X.2015.1004355.
DeYoung, C.G., Quilty, L.C. and Peterson, J.B. (2007) ‘Between facets and domains: 10 aspects of the Big Five’, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 93(5), pp. 880-896. Doi: 10.1037/0022-3514.93.5.880.
Gill, J.S., Barker, M.J. and Nienhuis, C.P. (2026) ‘From strain to estrangement: the role of personality in predicting parent-child relational outcomes’, Frontiers in Psychology, 17, 1859494. Doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2026.1859494.