Major changes in the social relationships of people fleeing collective violence are what often characterizes processes of forced migration and displacement. It is difficult to predict what direction these changes will take in ongoing violent conflicts, while people face difficult escape routes and in light of precarious living conditions in the regions of arrival. To what extent can the term “fragility” contribute to analysing and conceptualizing these changes? We will explore this question from the perspective of figurational sociology and biographical research, focusing on the transformation of family figurations. We understand fragility as a period in which the figurations in a family change very abruptly and the development of dependencies and power balances within the family becomes unclear. Based on case reconstructions of a family from Iraq and a family from Syria, we will present typical processes through which fragile figurations arise in the context of flight and analyse what consequences these can have. We argue that the emergence of abrupt changes within family figurations cannot be explained by a single cause and not only by sudden new contextual developments. Rather, both long-term and short-term processes contribute to the emergence of tipping points that can potentially lead to fragile family figurations. Whether they indeed lead to fragility depends on the interaction of these processes (including the family history) in a specific socio-historical situation.