The public now knows that Brooklyn, Victoria and David Beckham’s son, has cut off contact with his famous parents. No one should crow about this, but their troubling news has at least had one positive outcome: a media profile has been delivered to an emerging trend, a change in the pattern of relating that is generating very mixed reactions.
Stepping back, when initially hearing about the difficulties the Beckhams were having, it was tempting to mock. Celebrities, well, surely they are fair game. There was also likely to be a dash of schadenfreude in the mix. A more personal response to the news might also have been glimpsed. One might want to say we are not like them. It couldn’t possibly happen to us, but get real, as it just might happen to you. Any feeling of relief one had in hearing their news was premature. It has become apparent that stories like theirs are all about. It is getting into all our heads that there are no cast-iron, perennial guarantees when it comes to relationships. It only takes one party to say It doesn’t feel right. This isn’t good for me and, well, it’s curtains for the family show.
Pre-dating the chez Beckham bedlam, reports have long indicated that an increasing number of citizens are opting out of the family. A 2024 feature in The New York Times focused on Patrick Teahan, a USA therapist with a ‘massive YouTube following’ who specialises in coaching his clients to ‘go no contact’ to recover from abusive parents and the childhood trauma they have occasioned. More structurally, the torrent of first-person accounts detailing experiences of family dysfunction now being broadcast on social media seems to be directly implicated in the ascent of the family divorce/alienation/estrangement phenomenon.
Let’s not panic. Reliable quantitative data documenting the scale of this trend remains elusive. One study by Karl Pillemer, a Cornell University sociologist, reported that 27% of respondents in his survey said they were estranged from at least one relative. Subject selection in his sample, surely, could not have been representative, how the period of alienation was defined, and more, also remains moot, but this report is not out of sync with other reports; a UK study—the StandAlone report—claimed a figure of 20% Sometimes described as a ‘silent epidemic’, the phenomenon is not only happening somewhere over there. Two reports in the Australian edition of The Guardian in January (22.01.2026; 24.01.2026) quote local experts who testify to the conclusion that the same pattern is present in this country. One empirical study put the local number of estrangements at 1 in 12 families.
Across these reports, a theme emerges: a political economy is at work, fuelling the rise in family cut-outs. Having expanded the construct of trauma so that it is almost all-embracing, and having been successful in mainstreaming the importance of ‘looking after my mental health’, this interest group is coaching its subjects to actively review whether they really had the childhood they should have had. On reflection, do you think you were always adequately protected?; Did you always feel cared for—can you remember ever feeling put down, left out or neglected?; there is so much new research on trauma, on how pervasive it is. Did you ever feel threatened or were you ever actually roughed up? Best, it is contended, is that you eschew guilt and—at last!—put yourself first. The language and the attention are seductive.
Of course, there are, and always have been, egregious examples of transgression, of the violent traducing of trust, in a relatively large number of families. In their contemporary presentation and with respect to their cartwheeling long-term effects, these anomalies warrant close attention. For certain, families can be a nightmare. But let’s be clear. No family ever lives up to the Summertime fantasy:
One of these mornings
You’re gonna’ rise up singing
But, till that morning nothing‘s going to harm you
Why? ‘Cos mummy and daddy are standing by.
For better and for worse, this fairy tale presents both an unachievable threshold and an indelible myth; the former is evident in the fact that no one can honestly say that ‘As a child, I always felt perfectly cared for’, and the latter is evident in the myth that is endlessly propagated in many of even the most knowing cultural productions. Recently, this unsinkable myth was recycled in the celebrated movie One Battle After Another, whose ending defaulted to a corny and highly sexist resolution. The ideal father‒daughter dyad is reunited with the prodigal mum.
The term ‘needs’ has become a key industry weapon in the project to therapeutically socialise its clients. Loaded with rhetorical ammunition, its rote use generates a diabolical scenario that constructs a deadly binary: Did you, or did you not, always have your needs met? There is nothing glib about this frame. Given no one has ever had their feelings and interests perfectly met, what is created is a wounded child, a therapist and a simple disposition. This order was neatly stated by Dr Zena Burgess, Australian Psychological Society chief executive officer: a cut-out is appropriate if the child has ‘grown up in a family that does not meet their needs for love, identity and belonging’ (as quoted in: The Guardian). Crucially, few can make the case that they have failed this criterion.
Further heightening the dramatic theatre is the status-boosting accord given to first-person statements. If the therapist has been successful in socialising the client to put themselves first and claim their trauma, their experience of family dysfunction, their narcissistic attention-seeking mother, whatever nomenclature alleging culpability, it follows that the client can righteously ‘stand in my truth’ and accuse freely. The horizon of awareness so constructed effectively ostracises tolerance and compassion, let alone personal accountability.
Not discussed so far is that another form of significant-other relationship—friendship—is also likely to become increasingly fractious. Again, this possibility is difficult to quantify; many respectable studies have reported that the number of people who say I am lonely / I do not have a friend has been climbing for more than a decade. This general finding established, it is the notion of relational fractiousness that may well deserve particular attention, as this issue not only has weight in its own right, but it is likely to be a common factor that links what is apparently happening in families and what is happening in non-familial personal relationships. The background contention girding this interest can be simply stated: social epidemiologists have consistently found that the incidence of illnesses such as cardiovascular disease, dementia, stroke and cancer—as well as a range of mental health presentations— diminish is so much as citizens have a firm relational base. The summary is clear. In good times, a strong relational base tends to ward off illness and, if illness does occur, a stock of reliable relationships ameliorates the impact of, as they also promote recovery from, illness. This finding has a clear implication. Fractiousness in our significant other relationships violently antagonises the likelihood that one’s relational base will become, and then remain, secure.
Personal relationships also build the ‘us’—the kaleidoscope of social relations that vivify the Gemeinschaft domain. Without privileging any class of association, this domain includes immediate and extended family, friends, workmates and the connections that evolve in and around one’s patch. Playing out politics on a small stage, at its best, this creative assembly realises the bonds that are the wellspring for solidarity, mutual aid and a sense of belonging.
With respect to this context, as the process of family estrangement is being promoted by trusted authority figures—a process that effectively normalises what was previously transgressive—might a similar process be occurring with respect to friendships? For example, in the respectable public press, there are numerous accounts that say (something like) ‘I’ve just unexpectedly fallen out with my bestie.’ This material is not only found in the advice columns, but it is also appearing in high-profile opinion pieces that feature one of today’s favourite role models—the young, or not quite so young, female journalist (Brodie Lancaster and VVV from The Age Spectrum feature come to mind). The details provided to the reader in these essays tend to be sketchy, but generally include the following statements: I had to break off because X was not reciprocating/not listening, or the converse, I’ve suddenly been de-friended, ghosted. I just don’t know why she stopped responding to my texts/tweets/Instagram messages.
A particular development talks to the possibility that friendships are becoming more fractious—that it is sensible, even mandatory, to ‘curate’ your social network. Coming to prominence in 2021 with the vigorous debate that followed the publication of Kate Murphy’s ‘How you should re-arrange your post-pandemic ‘friendscape’’ (The New York Times, 7 June 2021), the suggestion was straightforward: each of us should ‘prune’ those relationships that do not ‘work’ for us. In normalising the transactional, in eschewing the ethical, this logic renders each and every relationship contingent. If I decide this, or that, relationship is not fit for my current life course purpose—and, more crucially, if the attitude that informs such a calculus becomes culturally normalised—each of every affiliation is subject to deletion. No class of relationship should be beyond practical appraisal. If family and friendship relations both become more fractious as a result of normalising this logic, who is entitled to complain?
Broader factors feed into the atomising protocol. Not least of these are the convenience technologies—bots, AI companions, GPS and much more. The regular use of these devices not only behaviourally normalises an ‘it’s all about me’ mindset, but these applications are also resetting our neural pathways to process information with the user as the sole reference point. Inevitably, inasmuch as this results in the horizon of awareness being bounded by the i-me-my-mine, the other disappears as a unit of moral equivalence and imaginative concern. As Dr Burgess reckons, the centrality of my ‘needs’ means the other either works for me, or they fail to be adequately in my service.
The revered psychologist Abraham Maslow reported that ‘self-actualisation’—being above the ‘deficit need’ for human connection—is the highest form of human development. This immiserating ideal has found its way into private consciousness through countless textbooks and high-toned discussion. It is a generator of fractiousness, an agent for the fissiparous, as the me-only is deified. Inasmuch as this false god is worshipped, there is a self-destructive consequence: the relational base is undermined and, over the longer term, scuttled. What is needed, really needed, is that which opposes the dividing practices that are bearing down from so many directions.