When Ideology Divides Families, Can Broken Bonds Be Mended?

Author Noelle Mering explores the cultural shift driving adult children to cut off their parents—and offers a roadmap toward healing and restoration.

Maintaining respect for each other can help preserve relationships, even during disagreements. Diem.ph/Getty Images

Noel Mering is a fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center and coauthor of three of the “Theology of Home” books, whose works have appeared in dozens of outlets. In 2020, traveling around the country to promote her book “Awake, Not Woke,” Mering’s favorite part of these events was the Q&A sessions. It was then that she noticed audience members asking one question over and over again: “What do I do about my grown children who not only have abandoned their faith and values but have also estranged themselves from us?”

“I started hearing that more and more,” Mering told The Epoch Times, and repeated some of the things these parents said about grown children who wanted little to do with them or had cut them off completely. “They’re living differently. They’ve abandoned the way we raised them. They’ll barely even talk to me, or can’t tolerate being around me, because we disagree on so many things.”

At one point, Mering mentioned this repeated response to her agent, who was the first to tell her about the no-contact movement. Mering had never heard of it, but soon found no contact popping up everywhere in the media and in her conversations with others. “It really is one of those things that happened swiftly and grew exponentially in a very short time, before I even had that name for it.”

Her curiosity aroused, Mering began researching this burgeoning trend of fractured families. The result is her soon-to-be-released “No Contact: How a Seductive Ideology Broke Families and Friendships and How We Can Repair Them,” a book in which this writer, wife, and mother of six lays bare the causes of this assault on the family and offers ways of healing the wounds it has inflicted.

The Bricks and Barbed Wire of Ideology and Estrangement

In both her book and in conversation with The Epoch Times, Mering makes clear that her investigation into the no contact movement precluded those who have separated themselves from their families for reasons of physical and real mental abuse.

Instead, she focused on families broken by the political and cultural divisions of our time, particularly those enflamed by events of the past 10 years. Through broad reading, talks with experts, and interviews with scores of family members on both sides of the no contact divide, Mering discovered the propellants other than ideology feeding the no contact explosion: the social media wars, our victim culture, the redefining of family by academics, and a me-first philosophy that elevates individual interests and welfare above everything else, including the family.

The combination of these forces underlies the new dynamic of estrangement. As Mering told The Epoch Times, “There have always been family members who have fallen away or estranged from each other. There’s abuse, addictions, maybe some mental illness, or there’s just some hard feelings, and we don’t know how to navigate these hard feelings, and so just can’t sustain this relationship, but it’s far more driven by ideology than it was before. People have always gotten into political fights, and family members could storm off, but it’s become more common to cut people off over ideology. It’s been seeded into our cultural imagination.”

This cutting of family ties is radically different from the past in another way. Then, the parents would typically, and much more rarely, initiate a break with an adult child based on behavior or belief. Today, overwhelmingly, these roles in going no contact are reversed. “A lot of these young adults are acting like they’ve become the parents, but they’re not good parents with proper authority. They’re authoritarian parents who are trying to educate their ignorant elders and are threatening them by never talking to them again if they say something that disagrees with their views. That generational shift is a big one, and it’s far more driven by ideology than it was before.”

Reconciliation often begins with small gestures of goodwill rather than agreement on difficult issues. Ippei Naoi/Getty Images

The Pain and Sorrow of Broken Families

A 2025 YouGov survey found that 38 percent of Americans are estranged from some family member. Just as Mering had learned, among the top causes for no contact cited by those surveyed are political and values differences, social media influences, and “therapy culture.” These divisions exact an enormous emotional toll on those involved: guilt, grief, a sense of failure, and thwarted love.

One of the worst stories Mering heard involved a son who had gone no contact but who returned home to say goodbye to his dying father near the end of the COVID-19 pandemic. “He left in a huff because some people in the home were not vaccinated, and the father and the mother were utterly heartbroken. ‘This is probably your last chance to be with him,’ the mom told her son, ‘he’s on his deathbed,’ and he said, ‘I know, but it’s a principle.’”

Later, having abandoned his father on his deathbed, he became doubly furious with the family after assuming they were voting for Trump in 2024 and declared them “on the wrong side of history.”

Blood Is Thicker Than Water

Those who bail on their families often seek out “chosen families,” that is, friends who substitute as families. At first, these chosen families may work, but for many of the no-contact instigators Mering interviewed, disappointment followed.

“You can only really learn mature love if you understand givenness, and the chosen family rejects that framework entirely. The chosen family is a petard hoisted on its own petard because the chosen family can just as easily unchoose you. If it’s predicated on choice, then no one’s obligated to anyone. There were stories of people who abandoned their families, and it worked well when they were young, had energy, and were healthy, but now they’re having a life crisis, or they’re ill, or lost their job, and the chosen family isn’t really sticking around for them anymore. These people realized ‘I need people who are obligated to me.” These ideas fail over and over.”

Binding Up the Wounds

Near the end of “No Contact,” Mering reminds readers that “the estrangement epidemic wasn’t born from ideology alone.” It’s backed by “countless small and large failures”: a lack of generosity and forgiveness, our culture’s stress on “hyper-individualism,” a misuse of therapy and the “elevation of the victim identity,” and the “decline of the spiritual.”

From her research, conversations with counselors, and interviews with families who have either repaired broken relationships or are still suffering from them, she gathered advice on how to bind up the wounds when the opportunity presents itself. She shared these ideas with The Epoch Times:

• Hold fast to your principles without making demands of the other. For those possessed by an ideology, any line of compromise will keep changing. Whatever you do will never be “enough for a real, true reconciliation.”
• Don’t try to control your adult child, or for that matter, your parent, through arguments. “You make an enemy of yourself by being such a nag that the person recoils even farther.”
• Beware of giving unsolicited advice to a grown child who is living independently. “Paradoxically, if you’re not giving too much advice, they might be more open to coming to you for counsel.” 
• Have a “posture of curiosity” laced with love. Asking questions “can really diffuse moments of tension and argumentation.” Instead of correcting someone’s opinion, ask, “I want to understand why you think that.”
• Recognize their dignity as individuals by steering conversations away from areas of conflict. “Tell me about your work, your struggles, your triumphs, your joys, your sufferings, your friendships. I love that you read a lot, or that you’re so creative, or that you’re such a great storyteller. Affirm things about them that have nothing to do with their politics or ideology. That’s creating goodwill.”

For those parents who are completely cut off from their children, Mering recommends always keeping the door open. Meanwhile, some parents she interviewed stressed the value of letting go of controlling the situation and instead nurturing relationships that are alive and well. Some found comfort and strength by mentoring mothers and fathers in a similar situation or by joining a support group. Others, said Mering, “turned their pain into intercession, offering their pain as a prayer for their child’s healing.”

Pitting ideology against ideology is a losing battle for families, a war in which there are no victors. Mering’s message for all those involved in such conflicts is to seek out common ground, to speak truth but softly and with love, “to examine ourselves with the same honesty we ask of others,” and to be quicker with forgiveness than with condemnation, all with the abiding desire of healing, reconciliation, and restoration.