As a child, Sarah* would look at her family name on her passport and not feel any connection to it. Her relationship with her father was virtually nonexistent — he had spent the majority of her childhood in prison on drug offenses, while her mother singlehandedly raised her. So when Sarah turned 16 — the age you can legally change your name in the U.K. — she took the leap to swap her dad’s surname for her mom’s.
“It gave me a sense of control over a situation that I felt was very unfair to me,” says Sarah, now 25 and working as a music publicist. “I was allowed to decide for myself, whereas everyone else told me how I should feel or that I should excuse his behavior.”
The topic of whether you should keep an estranged parent’s name has been thrust into the spotlight after 21-year-old Zahara Jolie-Pitt, daughter of movie stars Brad and Angelina, filed to drop “Pitt” from her name last week, just days after her 24-year-old brother Maddox did the same. Reports suggest a deepening family divide after a 2016 airplane incident in which Pitt, who shares six kids with Jolie, allegedly became violent and frightened their children. Pitt was cleared of all charges in an FBI investigation into child abuse allegations later that year, but the former couple became embroiled in a legal battle that lasted eight years until they reached a divorce settlement in 2024. Other Pitt children have publicly distanced themselves from their father: Shiloh, 20, was the first child to drop Pitt from her name, on her 18th birthday in May 2024, while Vivienne, 17, has appeared to drop the name informally.
The decision to legally remove an estranged parent’s name from your own is often a way for a person to free themselves from the past. Harry Kersh, a 31-year-old videographer, dropped his father’s last name, Majin, after his parents went through a difficult divorce when he was 19. “It was a messy situation and it spurred me on to distance myself from that emotionally and turn over a new leaf,” he says. “At the time, it was freeing… It was helpful on an emotional level.”
Today, Kersh doesn’t have much of a relationship with his father. He has two younger siblings, who haven’t changed their names. “The strangest part of it for me is now having a different name to my siblings,” he says. “But we have a great relationship and they respect my decision and reasoning.”
While the idea of cutting ties with a parent may sound extreme, it is far more common than you might think. In August last year, a YouGov poll found 38 percent of American adults were estranged from a family member — most commonly a sibling (24 percent), a parent (16 percent), a child (10 percent), a grandparent (9 percent) and a grandchild (6 percent). A 2022 Ohio State University study found that 6 percent of adult children had a period where they had little or no communication with their mothers. For fathers, the figure was 26 percent. In the U.K., charity Stand Alone has suggested that around one in five families may be affected by estrangement.
Becca Bland, a London-based family counsellor and coach specializing in family estrangement, says that a person might remove a parent’s name if that family member has “delivered them a lot of trauma” in that relationship. “Dropping that name helps them reform their identity around something healthier,” she says.
Amanda Ann Gregory, a Chicago-based complex trauma psychotherapist and author of the book You Don’t Need to Forgive: Trauma Recovery on Your Own Terms, says that the decision to change a name rarely stems from anger or the prospect of “getting even” with a parent. In Gregory’s experience, clients who go through this process are usually motivated by a desire to strengthen their sense of self-worth and identity. “They change their names because it no longer fits. It doesn’t represent who they are anymore,” she says.
Gregory says clients rarely make the decision on impulse. “This is often something that has been thought about over a long time and researched,” she says. Some of her clients have had people call them by their new last name to test out how it makes them feel. “There’s usually a lot of [emotional] steps that somebody will go through before they decide to do this because this is a big change.”
Bland says that she would never give someone a yes-or-no answer when they’re considering dropping a parent’s name, but would ask them to interrogate their feelings further. “It’s about asking what part of you is speaking when you want to change the name?” she says. “Is it your child part… your adult part? Is it something that wants to distance you from the pain?”
“I would never make the decision lightly, but if it’s going to help them deal with the trauma, get over it and move forward in their life, why not?” she says.
There is still a huge stigma attached to estrangement, particularly when it comes to children who have voluntarily withdrawn from having a relationship with their parents. People who choose to go no-contact or change their surname often face judgment from relatives who see the decision as disruptive.
When Sarah dropped her father’s name, she became estranged from his side of the family, too. “They thought I was going against family traditions, like respecting your elders,” she says. “I didn’t speak to certain members of my dad’s side of the family. They had their reasons; I had mine.” In the past year, Sarah’s father has been released from prison, and she is in the process of slowly rebuilding contact with him and the rest of his family.
“There is a belief in our society that if someone shares genetic makeup with you, they should have more entitlement in their relationship with you,” says Gregory. “I wish people were more aware of how this influences them when they’re forming their opinions on whether ‘estrangement is bad’ or ‘estrangement is good.’”
Bland agrees. “What we have to recognize is that family relationships are as fragile and as brittle as our marital relationships or our romantic relationships,” she adds. “Just because these are people bound by genetics, it doesn’t mean we won’t have patterns that annoy each other, hurt each other, or bring each other pain or addictions.”
Even though her reconciliation has begun, Sarah says she doesn’t regret changing her name. “I just felt like this last name represents me more and I feel more pride carrying it than I do with my dad’s last name,” she says. “To me, if you have one parent that is doing the heavy lifting... it makes perfect sense to have a name that represents them.”
Kersh hasn’t looked back, either. “There was a lot of admin to going through the process of changing the name, and people in your life have to get used to it too. Still, I have no regrets whatsoever.”
“Names are funny, really,” he says. “We get given them as babies and then that’s kind of our identity, possibly, forever.”
* Names have been changed
