The Drift Is Real. It Doesn’t Have to Win.

Most families love each other. That was never the question.

The question I keep coming back to is why so many of us, good families, close families, still drift past one another in the same house, year after year, without ever quite meaning to. I’ve felt it in my own home. I’d guess you’ve felt it in yours.

For a while I figured it was just me, just my family, just this busy stretch of life. Then I started reading, and it turned out the drift is everywhere, and the research on it is sobering.

In 2023, the U.S. Surgeon General did something I’d never seen before. He issued a formal public health warning, not about a virus or a drug, but about loneliness. About half of American adults say they feel lonely, and only 39% feel truly connected to others. And it isn’t only sad, it’s dangerous: being disconnected carries a health risk on par with smoking fifteen cigarettes a day. That one stopped me cold.

We’re simply together less than we used to be. Between 2003 and 2020, the average American’s in-person time with friends fell from about an hour a day to twenty minutes, and for our teenagers it dropped by nearly seventy percent. And so much of what pulls us apart now sits right in our pockets. By seventeen, the Institute for Family Studies finds, a kid is online close to twenty hours a week. A teenager in a lower-screen home spends about four hundred fewer hours a year on a device than a high-screen one. Four hundred hours. I think about all the conversations that could live in those hours.

Our kids are carrying it, too. In the CDC’s latest survey, 40% of high schoolers said they felt persistently sad or hopeless, and among girls it was 53%. These aren’t fragile kids. They’re ordinary ones, in ordinary homes like mine and yours, holding more than we always see.

I’ve watched a quieter version of it in my own kids. Over the last while they’ve pulled back from the world outside our door, and not just from the big things. The party, the practice, yes, but also the small stuff, the spur-of-the-moment “come hang out,” the get-together that used to just happen on its own. Big or small, organized or spontaneous, more and more the answer is “no thanks.” I don’t think there’s anything wrong with them. I think they’re worn down in a way I’m still trying to understand, and I don’t believe mine are the only ones.

Here’s what I’ve come to believe, though, and it’s the hopeful part. None of this means we don’t love our families. Love was never the thing we were missing. What’s missing is a way to tend that love on purpose, because closeness, left alone, doesn’t hold. It drifts. One study found that one in four American adults, about sixty-seven million people, is estranged from a relative right now. That kind of distance almost never comes from one big blowup. It gathers quietly, over a thousand ordinary days when nobody meant any harm.

Love was never the thing we were missing.

But there’s one study I can’t stop thinking about.

In 2001, two researchers at Emory University asked children twenty simple questions about their own families. Do you know how your parents met? Do you know where your grandparents grew up? Do you know a hard time your family came through, and how? The more a child knew about their family’s story, the stronger their sense of control over their own life, the higher their self-esteem, the better they believed their family worked. It turned out to be the single best predictor of a child’s emotional health and happiness. And when the September 11th attacks came, just weeks into the study, the kids who knew their family stories were the most resilient of all.

I love that finding, because of what it isn’t. It isn’t the right school or the right income or a perfect, tidy home. The thing that protected those children most was simply knowing the story of the people they came from, and knowing they belonged to it.

That, to me, is the hope hiding inside all the hard numbers. The answer to so much of what aches in family life isn’t expensive or complicated or far away. It’s connection, the plain, sturdy kind: knowing each other’s stories, asking the questions that actually matter, building a shared sense of who we are.

But I’ve learned it won’t happen on its own. That’s the one thing the research makes painfully clear, and my own life keeps confirming it. Left to the current, families drift. Closeness has to be chosen. It has to be tended, the way you’d tend anything alive that you didn’t want to lose.

That’s why I built PeaceTree.

PeaceTree is a gentle, guided way to tend your family on purpose. It isn’t therapy, and it isn’t for families in crisis. It’s just a warm, unhurried path for ordinary families who feel there’s something worth protecting and want to be a little more intentional with the people they love most. It helps you understand your family’s story, ask the questions that open real conversations, and build the kind of connection the research says our kids carry for the rest of their lives.

You don’t need a reason to begin. You don’t need anything to be wrong. You just need to be willing to turn, a little more on purpose, toward the people at your own table.

Because the studies are clear, and so, if I’m honest, is my own heart: the drift is real, but it isn’t destiny. A family can be tended. And a tended family is one of the most protective, most healing things any of us will ever belong to.