“My mother would not stop giving my wife criticism on every topic, career, diet, child care, home decorating, make up, clothes, and more. No amount of polite discussions, yelling, and threats by me made it stop. … So I cut mom out for the most part,” one Reddit user recently explained to another. This is just one post of thousands across social media featuring advice about the choice to go “low contact” or “no contact” with family members.

These posters, as well as advice columnists and even psychologists in the 21st-century Anglophone West, often posit family estrangement as a solution to messy family relationships.

Such advice feels in many ways distinctly modern, perhaps even distinctly North American; a recent poll suggests that 38% of U.S. adults are estranged from a family member, compared to one in 12 in Australia. But family estrangement is far from new, as my research on Europeans in the 17th and 18th century shows. For thousands of years, different pressures—both economic and emotional—shaped when estrangement might occur and what people were expected and willing to tolerate in their relationships.

Medieval and early modern European folklore is full of individuals, mostly men, taking the risk to venture out on the lonely road. And some of their tales begin with a family rift. The eponymous hero of the 13th-century German tale of Parzival breaks his mother’s heart by leaving home to become a knight against her aspirations for his life. She immediately dies, and the opportunity for reconciliation disappears.

Parzival goes on to achieve greatness, love, and even a family reunion with a long-lost brother. But he was probably the exception rather than the rule. We might speculate that the many beggars and vagrants who lived on the road in this period did so because life at home was no longer bearable. The road brought its own difficulties. Many communities remained wary of strangers, happy to provide a few days’ hospitality but not permanent settlement.

Strong familial identities also complicated family estrangement. Early modern Europeans lived in a hierarchical world that encouraged people to understand themselves as part of large family-oriented networks. Children were a single point in a long lineage, and their role was to support its flourishing. The wealthier the family, the greater the investment in the family line. Obedience to parents was not only a central religious command but how children demonstrated their love.

Children who disappointed their parents were subject to severe discipline, even shunning. Love was a valued emotion, but marriage bound two families together, so children needed to cooperate with their parents to find a spouse that worked for everyone. The Scottish aristocrat Isobel Hay disowned her son when he eloped in 1682: “If his choice be hapy, it will be the beter for him, however … I am not resolved to understand that by any particular acquaintance with the gentlewoman or further intimate correspondence with him, who to my sade grief hath behaved in such a foolish manner towards me.” Hay would not meet her son’s wife, nor further engage with him.

Her distant relative and contemporary, Anne, Duchess of Hamilton, made a similar decision in 1687 when her son married without her consent. Anne’s husband was a little more pragmatic when told of his own brother’s rash marriage 10 years later. He pretended not to know and told a third party to tell his brother, Dumbarton, not to mention the marriage to him! Faking ignorance maintained their emotional ties. The truce did not last; Dumbarton became increasingly angry at the family’s refusal to meet his wife.

The decision to shun a family member was not easy. Letters show that brothers and sisters sought reassurance from each other that a defense of family honor was worth the sacrifice of a relationship with a child. The shunned children were often equally distraught. “I cannot bring myself to believe that after all your love and affection to me from childhood to the present you will do violence to your own heart and condemn me to misery now,” begged Letitia Tennent to her father William, an Irish banker, when he refused to accept her choice of husband in 1831.

Family networks extended well beyond the immediate nuclear household, and could include the families of servants who lived on aristocrats’ estates over generations. They, too, experienced estrangement, especially in mid-18th-century Europe, as the growth of wage labor began breaking down traditional aristocrat-servant bonds. When the Duke of Hamilton died prematurely in 1742, his English wife fired the household servants in Scotland. A longstanding servant, and one with a generational attachment to the family, James Taylor “has never bin [been] within the dukes house sence he left them[.] he thinks the dutchess has not used him well nor any of the dukes servants for they make grate complante of her,” another newly unemployed servant explained to her boyfriend. Betrayal and estrangement emerged as new economic conditions changed the boundaries of who counted as kin.

More generally, the replacement of six-month, year-long, and seven-year contracts with a weekly wage liberated individuals from all sorts of connections. With cash in their pockets, people were freer to leave behind employers, towns, and their families. The need to tolerate a difficult family life to achieve financial security declined. People were also encouraged to think beyond the family and its needs to their own success—a change in attitude as well as economics.

Not everyone benefited in the same way. The single, childless, and poor found it easier to walk away from family ties. Women who immigrated to North America in the 19th century were usually young and single. Many sent money home to their parents and siblings, but disappearing was a viable option, too.

A bad marriage might end in desertion, and it was typically husbands who left. Trials for bigamy highlight the opportunities to rebuild family life in a new place with a new identity—and men predominated amongst those convicted. As today, their reasons for leaving their families were often mundane—marriages that became “uncomfortable,” that made individuals unhappy.

Women with children often became stuck in place; they needed family support for childcare and survival. The lists of many towns’ poorest were often full of deserted wives with young children, unable to work and without a support network. Estrangement from wider family, as well as a spouse, could leave people with very few options.

Over the 20th century, the growth in welfare systems reduced the risk of having to fall back on family resources, and higher levels of education and wages for people of all backgrounds supported independence from the wider kin group. New psychological accounts of the self encouraged people to distinguish their own interest from that of the wider family. As people no longer identified so closely with their family group, the possibility of family estrangement became less daunting.

Reddit shows that breaking contact with your kin remains difficult. “It’s in the past but it hurts like hell,” puzzled one estranged child.

“I am with you on this! It sucks indeed,” another sympathized. That going no contact remains emotionally challenging even now reflects that this history of obligation and affection has not entirely been left behind. Our responsibility to work toward the interest of our kin continues to haunt what family involves.

Katie Barclay is an Australian Research Council Future Fellow and professor in history at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia. She writes widely on emotions, gender, and family life and is the author, most recently, of The Kiss: A History of Passion and Power.

Primary editor: Sarah Rothbard | Secondary editor: Eryn Brown