The break in a family business isn't the blowup. It's a definition of loyalty no one agreed to update.

You have a name in your head right now. A relative on the payroll — a sibling, a cousin, maybe your own adult child — whose performance you have not addressed in any of the ways you would address it if the last name were different. You have told yourself it is not the right time. You have told yourself it would break something that took decades to build. What you have not told yourself, because it is uncomfortable, is that the thing keeping the conversation off the calendar is not strategy. It is a rule about what family owes each other that you inherited and never examined.

A new study out of Ohio State gives that rule a name, and it is not about business at all. Sociologist Rin Reczek spent 2023 conducting in-depth interviews with 68 adults across the United States who had gone no contact with at least one family member, tracing each person's family history from childhood to the present. The work, described in an article in the Journal of Marriage and Family and expanded in her new book, Families We Lose: A New Explanation for Family Estrangement (NYU Press), is qualitative — interviews and self-report rather than a survey with a representative sample — and it is not built to tell you how common estrangement is. In the same release, Reczek notes that prior research puts it at roughly 6 percent of U.S. adults estranged from a mother and 23 percent from a father at some point, and that there is no evidence the rate is rising. The panic around estrangement, she argues, is a separate phenomenon from the estrangement itself.

What her interviews found is that estrangement is almost never caused by one blowup. It comes from a mismatch between two definitions of family. Reczek calls the older one compulsory kinship — a term she coined with Emma Bosley-Smith in their 2022 book on adult children and their parents: the expectation that biological and legal ties are preserved no matter the cost. The alternative she names in the new work is democratized kinship — relationships, inside or outside blood ties, held together by accountability, mutual respect, and safety, and treated as something that has to be maintained rather than assumed. Estrangement, in her interviews, shows up when one person shifts from the first model to the second and the rest of the family does not shift with them.

They care so much about family. They want to have healthy families, and they have very high standards for what a healthy family is.Rin Reczek, The Ohio State University — as quoted in Ohio State News

That line is aimed at the assumption that people who cut ties are selfish or careless. Reczek's interviews found close to the opposite: the people who left had unusually high standards for what a relationship should provide, and left because the relationship in front of them could not meet those standards no matter how long they waited.

Here is why this lands differently for you than for almost anyone else in the building. Your managers can hold people accountable to a job description. You are often the one person whose accountability runs into a second contract nobody wrote down — the family one. When a relative underperforms, misses deadlines, or treats other employees in ways you would never tolerate from a non-relative, they're family does not just excuse the behavior. It functions as an instruction to everyone watching about which standard actually governs the company: the one on paper, or the one in the bloodline. Your team already knows which one wins. That is what they are pricing into their own loyalty to you.

The part the research doesn't say, but that I'll say plainly: Reczek studied parents and adult children, not businesses, and nothing in her interviews speaks to payroll, succession, or equity splits. But the mechanism she describes — a family holding on to an old, unconditional definition of loyalty while someone inside it has quietly moved to a conditional one — is exactly what shows up in family companies. The founder generation was often raised on compulsory kinship: you show up, you don't complain, you don't leave. The generation now doing the work increasingly expects what Reczek calls democratized kinship even inside the business — respect, clear standards, and safety, extended to family and non-family employees alike. When an owner refuses to update which model the company runs on, the eventual exit — a resignation, a sale, a sibling who stops speaking to you — reads as sudden. It rarely is. It is usually the last of many quiet decisions to protect the old rule instead of the relationship.

The thing to do this week is small and specific. Pick the one working relationship in your company that currently runs on they're family instead of a standard you could write down. Have one direct conversation — not about the past, about going forward — where you state plainly what accountability, respect, and safety look like in that role from here, for them and for you. You are not asking them to stop being family. You are telling them, out loud, which contract is actually in force.

If you suspect this rule is running more of your company than your org chart admits, the Leadership Profile is built for exactly this: what you default to under pressure, and what it is costing you without your noticing.