Cousins are disappearing. Is this reshaping the experience of childhood?

February 14, 2024 9:31 PM

Families are narrowing worldwide, according to a new study, and cousins are dwindling (SL CBC)
posted by wowenthusiast (91 comments total)

Captain Beefheart warned us…
posted by doubtfulpalace at 10:35 PM on February 14 [4 favorites]

Honey, I Shrunk the Kin.
posted by Paul Slade at 11:04 PM on February 14 [31 favorites]

It's all in perspective. If you are hung up on cousins being close genetic relatives, maybe. But cultures that extend the mother father aunt uncle cousin nomenclature to cultural relatives (through skin family or moiety say as Australian Aboriginal peoples do), then you can have dozens of cousins you haven't met yet. 'Oh, you old Jack Chalmers boy. His mum was my aunties' grandmother's sister's son's daughter. Pleased to meet you, cuz.'
posted by Thella at 11:15 PM on February 14 [24 favorites]

My mother is a family history buff (well, you say buff, I say obsessive), but has such a fractious relationship with her siblings that hanging out with cousins was never really a thing that I did as a juvenile7. Now, of course, they have all followed their parents down ugly rabbit holes of military worship, racism, and outright fascism, I have made sure to cut myself off entirely from them.

Mum, however, is still digging up news stories (mostly police reports) about long-ago cousin-ish relatives. Recently, she's started buying a particular brand of (expensive) UK-made jams and preserves because the owner of the company is probably a 5th cousin. For whatever reason, she began to insist that I visit the factory if I'm ever in the UK again "because it's probably your 5th cousin there!"

I loked at her for a long moment and said "Ma, I've blocked every single one of my 1st cousins from any kind of contact, and haven't seen my younger brother in 15 years. Why the actual fuck do I want to go to a jam factory in fucking Wigan or something to meet someone who's a 5th cousin probably?"

And that's my story about cousins. Which is nice.
posted by prismatic7 at 11:26 PM on February 14 [55 favorites]

I think its sad and a bit alarming that children are such a rare sight these days. At the same time, I just want to tell the writer of the article that many adults are estranged from their siblings or have very toxic relationships with them, so the disappearance of cousins doesn't make a difference.
posted by Didnt_do_enough at 12:28 AM on February 15 [17 favorites]

I’m surprised the article doesn’t talk about the financial problems around having children - there is a link to another cbc article about the economic difficulties of having kids, but nothing in the linked article. Seems to me that less cousins indicates a wider, societal problem around child raising.
posted by The River Ivel at 12:55 AM on February 15 [34 favorites]

Surely if you go to Wigan it's pies all the way?
posted by biffa at 1:14 AM on February 15 [4 favorites]

I grew up among Greek-Americans, and I took from that very little beyond a sense of the really fluid use of the word "cousin". People will try to correct me and be all "oh but isn't that like third cousin, second removed..." and I just shrug like who cares: they're family in some extended sense.

I was used to powerful muscle-bound weightlifting jocks going soft around the eyes and pulling out rolled-up wallet photo sets of extended family members, and gushing about how sweet their little anipsia is out in Federal Way. And if you pegged them on the actual relation, sometimes it would include a link like "And my grandfather grew up with this boy in the Old Country and they Came Over together, and vowed to name their sons after each other..."

So yeah, I really like the use of "auntie" and "uncle" among the African Diaspora, as it fits the way I was raised to understand these relations.
posted by rum-soaked space hobo at 1:24 AM on February 15 [37 favorites]

"They're missing out on that big family experience", call me a cynic but I'm glad I had a hard pass on that.

I'm the last in a line of onlies on mum's side (her people were Didicoy [and I'll be pissed if mefi management take this comment down for use of that word], and not approved by dad), and didn't have any affinity with my dad's people, but I've seen so many seriously dysfunctional 'normal' size families in my life, I know a lot of cases where murder occurred (of other sibs, and of parents). Took a long time to grow into being comfortable as an only, but better that the alternative ime.

NZ birthrate is in freefall, with stark year on year declines, so blood cousins are gonna be rare here too.
posted by unearthed at 1:33 AM on February 15 [3 favorites]

This is skating over the impact of migration and divorce - there might be cousins, but when were you going to meet?
posted by Barbara Spitzer at 1:57 AM on February 15 [6 favorites]

I have 32 first cousins, and I mostly consider myself very lucky in that. It was always known that if my parents had passed, I had other families to slot right into, other kids who were not strangers, but close family and peers.

Of course, almost none of those cousins are having kids. For the people who thought we were building a dynasty, they forgot to account for climate change and the economy.
posted by Audreynachrome at 3:03 AM on February 15 [16 favorites]

I grew up as an only among local cousins, and that’s a family structure I couldn’t replicate for Little e. She has a bunch of second cousins, but they all live out of state, we’re not in especially close contact with the parents, and we haven’t seen any of them since the pandemic began. It’s one of the aspects of my own parenting I feel worst about — it does feel like I’ve failed to provide my child with something key — and yet it’s not obvious, without aunts or uncles in the picture, what we could have done differently, save having a bunch more kids ourselves to make cousining possible for the next generation. But the two-parents-one-child nuclear family is what I grew up with, so that itself seemed natural. And I don’t know how we’d have done with multiple kids, to be honest.

I realized a few years ago, when thinking about the then-current one child policy in China, that such a structure eventually means nobody is related to anybody except their two parents and their one child. Even though I’d already seen in my family that this was true, it was a shock to think of extrapolating this to a whole society. Feels like the difference between soil and sand.
posted by eirias at 3:44 AM on February 15 [16 favorites]

I think I was lucky, in that growing up, all my first cousin's family ended up relocating from various places around The Land of My People, The Bronx to New City, NY. So I had the first cousins on my father's side and my mother's side all in the same town.

Fast forward to today, and while we're in Albany, NY, my sister and my wife's brothers live in Florida and/or Pennsylvania, so there isn't that "Just come over for dinner" thing going on.
posted by mikelieman at 4:17 AM on February 15 [3 favorites]

What’s interesting is that my grandparents moved away from their families when my parents (born 1955 & 1957) were fairly young. So my parents didn’t grow up around their cousins (though they may have gotten shipped off to an aunt/uncles for a summer here and there). But I have 25 cousins (18 from my dad and 7 from my mom) and almost all of us lived within a hour of each other. I was babysat (and the later taken to parties) by my older cousins and I baby sat some of my younger cousins. It was amazing having that many kids of all ages running around at family get togethers. Things really only possible when people stay in the place they grew up. And now as adults family stuff is even more fun. I understand that our family may be rare in that we’re actually pretty functional and while we don’t all agree on politics (and some are even rabid) that shit is absolutely not allowed when family gets together. We’re lucky that everyone is adult enough to keep that stuff personal.

My kids will have at most 4-5 first cousins, but I would consider all of my cousins’ kids to be cousins to my kids (which they technically would be 2nd cousins anyways). I’m pretty grateful that my paternal grandparents bought some land in the middle of nowhere Texas so we all have a place to gather and continue to enjoy our time together at “The Compound” even if we live all over the US. My maternal side is not so close and so I doubt my kids will even meet my cousins there other than once or twice at funerals (they don’t even get together for weddings anymore).
posted by LizBoBiz at 4:19 AM on February 15 [5 favorites]

Surely whether more or less cousins is a good or bad thing can only be determined if those cousins are assholes or not?
posted by MisantropicPainforest at 4:30 AM on February 15 [15 favorites]

My mother has 2 brothers and a sister, and they're all on good terms; there's a weird tendency in that side of the family for some people to move back to that corner of Massachusetts after wandering a while (I joke that it's our "family compound"). First my grandparents moved from CT to there because grandpa was retired and looking after his mother and our family cranberry bog, then my uncle settled near there a while before moving to Arizona, then my parents moved there when they retired to look after Grandpa, and then two of my cousins moved from Arizona back there themselves, then my brother moved there after wandering the world (and he even bought grandpa's old house from my mother and took over the cranberry bog to boot).

My brother actually was much closer in age to a cluster of our cousins - the ones who moved back to that part of Massachusetts - and was tight with them, and so now my niece and nephew are tight with their kids to the point that they call each other "cousins" as well.

But one of my cousins who moved back to Massachusetts lived in NYC for a while, trying to make a go of it as a musician. (He's REALLY good.) We're a little on the arty side, to the point that when M joined me at a friend's New Year's party he joked to my friends that "EC and I are the family freaks". He's now got kids and has settled down more while I'm still the weirdo unmarried and childless one still, but there's still some kind of "hey, yeah, I recognize your vibe" sympatico thing going on, and that was a good thing when you WERE one of the family freaks, and you knew that even if your parents and brother didn't get you, at least some times out of the year you would be meeting up with the cousins and there would be at least one other person who was similarly stuck in a spot where parents and siblings didn't get them and you could look across the table at each other all "yeah, I get you."

This past Thanksgiving when we all gathered there was a jam session that broke out between that cousin, my brother, and another cousin's husband. i very, very rarely sing in front of people, but M was playing guitar, and he knew "Angel From Montgomery," and....yeah.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 4:43 AM on February 15 [6 favorites]

Migration seems like a huge factor. When I grew up, my entire extended family all lived in the same city. So family events were pretty large and I was close to my cousins and saw them often. We grew up together. My older cousins introduced me to good music in the time of cassette tapes and radio. But slowly, people started moving away, and now few of us live near each other. There are economic forces at play, there - the region where I grew up was in decline, so people had to move for careers. It's kind of wild to think that in the span of one generation both sides of my family went from Western New York/Buffalo born-and-raised to scattered all across the country.

My sister is the only of my siblings to have kids, but even if I or my brother did, we are so far spread geographically that we wouldn't be able to build the kind of childhood we had.
posted by misskaz at 4:43 AM on February 15 [5 favorites]

I grew up with a lot of cousins on both sides; the Florida cousins are about what you would expect as adults, the Texas cousins (Mexican or half Mexican) seem to relish creating family drama. I don't keep up with any of them and I don't feel poorer for it.

Growing up, we were a tight little nuclear family as my mom was the only child of her immediate family that lived outside of Texas. Aside from our custody trips to see my dad in Florida, we didn't interact much with any members of either family outside of phone calls. So for me, the "gee shucks what are kids gonna miss" angle of this story falls flat. Sometimes family is just family, not tight knit clans. I am so good with that.
posted by Kitteh at 4:50 AM on February 15 [2 favorites]

All this concern about "the children" without ever changing the policies that fail to support "the children." All the while, concern trolling about the wrong kinds of children (the queers, the poors, the immigrants) and simultaneously undermining adulthood (brains don't even finish developing until 25! why do kids live at home longer? who's going to care for the olds?).

Kinder, Küche, Kirche v 3.0 anyone?

Who knew the venn diagram of late-stage capitalism and fascism was a circle?
posted by kokaku at 4:53 AM on February 15 [22 favorites]

Birth control, changing societal mores, climate change, the cost of living, looming fascism, rampant enshittification, AI/automation…as someone who probably wouldn’t have had kids even if times were better it kind of amazes me that anyone still wants to have them at all.
posted by The Card Cheat at 4:59 AM on February 15 [10 favorites]

The Pill came out about the time my only sibling was born, and we were the first of our generation. Despite the large families of the previous generation, I only ever had three first cousins. Two have died, and the third dropped out of sight and can't be found, despite the fact that she legally owns our grandparents' land. There are only four kids in the next generation, and two are determined to be child free, so the concept of first cousins has completely died out in my family.
posted by Miss Cellania at 5:03 AM on February 15

My kids are growing up without cousins, and that's weird to me. I was an only child, without many friends, and so my cousins were a pretty big lifeline for me--family reunions, after-church lunches, holidays, any time I could see them, I was happy. But that way of life was already on its way out in my generation, with me being an only, and my cousins all coming in pairs, instead of the big families from prior generations. Now I hardly ever see my cousins, maybe just at funerals. (Well, and on Facebook, but that does not inspire closeness.)

The end of the article points out that you can find your own family, but that's really not the same at all, because you don't find your cousins--they're just there, when you're little, and you grow up with and around and in relation to them.
posted by mittens at 5:06 AM on February 15 [5 favorites]

Impact of environmental factors on human semen quality and male fertility: a narrative review

Plummeting sperm counts, shrinking penises: toxic chemicals threaten humanity: Erin Brockovich

Scientists Warn of Fertility Loss in Many Species Due to Climate Change

Heatwaves can 'wipe out' male insect fertility:
Study of beetles could explain global decline – and also be a warning to humankind

Male fertility thermal limits predict vulnerability to climate warming

Climate change: male infertility caused by heatwaves may result in mass extinction

Sulfur dioxide pollution tied to degraded sperm quality

Reproduction is an incredibly complex and energy-intensive process that's highly dependent upon environmental factors. As our environment deteriorates, we can expect this trend to continue.

Our species isn't healthy anymore.
posted by MrVisible at 5:10 AM on February 15 [11 favorites]

What do you mean that cousins are disappearing? The entire series of Perfect Strangers is for sale on Apple iTunes remastered in 4:3 HD. Now we so happy, we do the dance of joy!
posted by Servo5678 at 5:12 AM on February 15 [5 favorites]

Surely whether more or less cousins is a good or bad thing can only be determined if those cousins are assholes or not?

As the number of cousins increase, the probability of them *all* being assholes decreases. I think.
posted by Audreynachrome at 5:20 AM on February 15 [5 favorites]

I was never close to my cousins, even though I had some, but my aunts were a really important support and role model to me growing up. They supported my parents (morally and sometimes financially), and they showed alternative models for existing as adult women. They demonstrated that not every family had to be like my family, that it was possible to find your own way as an individual.

I'm definitely sad that two generations after me there'll be no aunts and uncles in the family. I'm also sad for all the folks who end up dealing with parental old age on their own without siblings to lean on, especially when the family dynamic was complicated and messy and nobody else really understands what it was like.
posted by quacks like a duck at 5:20 AM on February 15 [7 favorites]

NZ birthrate is in freefall, with stark year on year declines, so blood cousins are gonna be rare here too.

The UK is in a similar decline and purely anecdotally as an elder middle-class millennial, the large majority of my friends are childless by choice.

I grew up in a small family without cousins so large families and these extended networks along familial lines are pretty alien concepts to me. I agree on the reasons for the decline quoted by others above: migration, less dependence on traditional family hierarchies for survival, big cities, cost of living, political climate etc. are all factors. I have my "found family" and that seems like the rule rather than the exception amongst my peers.
posted by slimepuppy at 5:21 AM on February 15 [4 favorites]

I'm also sad for all the folks who end up dealing with parental old age on their own without siblings to lean on, especially when the family dynamic was complicated and messy and nobody else really understands what it was like.

QFT.
posted by eirias at 5:27 AM on February 15 [2 favorites]

On the one hand, I really enjoyed my cousins growing up. I didn't have many friends as a kid, and they were the easy-mode friends who had always been there. I still miss the summers when collective round-robin baby-sitting agreements meant every day I was at a different cousin's house with all my other cousins.

On the other hand, cousins are like the Facebook activity timeline: you're always being reminded of how much "better" some of them are doing relative to you. And because they're family you have to be there to celebrate even though you're feeling kind of empty inside that things aren't going as well for you. There are a couple cousins whom I feel very bad about having not attended their weddings because I was not in a very good place at the time.
posted by RonButNotStupid at 5:40 AM on February 15 [7 favorites]

I have one cousin who is effectively like my little brother and a stepsister that feels more like a cousin. I grew up with six first cousins (two of which I'm still reasonably close to), and a couple of second cousins/first cousins once removed that were my age and thus I was also pretty close to. My family is big and noisy and dysfunctional but I love most of them. I don't think I could have gotten through a few grandparent deaths without cousin support (my sister does not do funerals), and the experience of having an are you fucking kidding me?is this really happening? when your alchoholic grandfather's ex-congressman best friend puts on a fake Sean Connery accent and starts hitting on your bereaved aunt at said grandfather's post-funeral cocktail party/wake or your grandmother starts talking about how the Waffle House is a prostitution ring (Everybody knows! or your other seventy-eight year old grandmother drinks four shots of tequila and starts grinding on the groomsman on the dance floor at your worst cousin's wedding (the one at may or may not have had her own face carved on a mermaid body into a cream cheese on the reception buffet line) or whatever. Cousins are often great, even though families are usually a disaster. And I'm happy to report that my two little sisters (biological and step) had their first (and maybe only) kids two months apart from each other. They live across the country from each other, but I'm hopeful at holidays and what have you the two of them will be able to hang out and compare notes. I will, at the least, be happy to dish on both of their mothers, like any halfway decent spinster aunt.
posted by thivaia at 6:20 AM on February 15 [9 favorites]

We're pretty much seeing the same thing as in the article; fewer siblings, fewer siblings having fewer kids, etc.

My family has a bit of a weird structure; the people my biological daughter knows as her 'cousins' are actually my first cousins; I'm the oldest of my generation and I have aunts and uncles not much older than me.

This is because none of my siblings have kids; my mom's side of the family, there's only one other person in my generation, who is also my daughter's age. My daughter's biological mom had one brother, no kids on that side either (as far as I know).

When I remarried, we inherited a couple of cousins in the same generation as my bio daughter; that side of the family (my wife's sister's inlaws) is very Catholic, so there's a growing number of cousins there but that makes them...3rd cousins? 2nd cousins once removed? So there's cultural pockets of mass-cousin-creation still going on.

I have to admit, Reservation Dogs (which is such a good show) took a little while to figure out who was related to who, due to what other's have mentioned, 'cousin' isn't a strictly biological connection, it's a community connection.
posted by AzraelBrown at 6:24 AM on February 15 [1 favorite]

I'm an only child. My mom's brother died in a plane crash two months after I was born and her sister died of MS. Neither had kids. My dad's sister never had kids and his brother had 2 - one adopted, one biological. The adopted cousin passed away from cardiac arrest after a lifetime of living with HIV, and for various problematic reasons (not his fault at all) was not around much as an adult. So I've really had 1 cousin that I saw on anything close to a regular basis throughout my life - and that wasn't very regular. I did see my 2 stepsisters fairly often. My half sister from my dad's remarriage, not nearly as much.

I do have a wealth of 2nd and 3rd cousins who I've seen every two or three years at family reunions, and I cherish them, but they didn't come to my wedding when I invited them, and I wasn't invited to any of theirs.

I often wish I'd had a bigger family, and one not completely torn apart by divorce and dysfunctional sibling relationships. This idea of cousins who are just around, who are always there and know you, who you were growing up, that sort of gestational familiarity - it is appealing. But the grass is always greener, right?
posted by grumpybear69 at 6:25 AM on February 15 [3 favorites]

Genetically, I have a few cousins, but since they and their parents turned out to be assholes and contact was cut off, functionally I don't have any cousins, or for that matter, aunts or uncles. When I was a kid we lived thousands of miles away so they were people I'd see sometimes on summer vacation but otherwise wasn't close to them. So I guess I grew up in what the article is describing, but it seemed normal and I never felt like I was missing something. (That they all turned out to be assholes and contact had to be completely cut off is regrettable, but since they turned out to be the kind of assholes where it is a permanent condition, not a temporary blowup, that was the right decision and I have no qualms about that.)

In contrast, my coworker's entire family still lives in the same midwestern city where he and his wife grew up. They moved out west for work but after a little while they moved back specifically so they and their kids could be embedded in that tight extended family. Almost the entirety of their social life is with that extended kin network and they love it and will never leave again. I can see the appeal, but it also looks kind of claustrophobic, like living in a small village where everyone knows everything you are doing.
posted by Dip Flash at 6:32 AM on February 15 [2 favorites]

As the number of cousins increase, the probability of them *all* being assholes decreases. I think

To a point, maybe, but eventually you get into quiverfull families and all bets are off.
posted by jacquilynne at 6:38 AM on February 15 [4 favorites]

Kids don’t need biological cousins. What they need is a stable community that includes other kids. Getting mighty tired of explicit or implicit pressure for other people (almost always women) to make more babies.
posted by vim876 at 6:50 AM on February 15 [54 favorites]

Agreeing Thelle et. al. ... "cousin" here in New Mexico, USA means a blood relative, an in-law relative, or possibly just a good friend of the family. I come from a culture where cousin definitively meant first cousin and coming to NM, this was an interesting lesson (as well as a number of other cultural differences)
posted by falsedmitri at 7:03 AM on February 15 [2 favorites]

Agreed, vim876. I didn't find out until some years later that initially my MIL had a very difficult time accepting that I did not want children (my husband's family is very big on family). Honestly, I am glad I never found out about it at the time because I don't think I would have been able to keep my cool.
posted by Kitteh at 7:04 AM on February 15 [2 favorites]

I have a friend who grew up with many, many cousins. This is what I remember of a story he told me.
His grandmother made a book with all her children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren in it- over a hundred descendants- and gave everybody a copy of it.
My friend had a nephew who was at college, met a woman he was interested in, and when she took him to her room, he looked around and asked, "Why do you have my Nana's book in your room?"
Ooops
posted by MtDewd at 7:04 AM on February 15 [7 favorites]

To a point, maybe, but eventually you get into quiverfull families and all bets are off.

Funny but true. I don't have much of a relationship with the evangelical wing of the family (technically step), and sometimes I think I'm one of the only people they know who is not like them.

And to that end ( and in my experience) almost every oversized religious family has a black sheep/apostate/punk/ former missionary who knows they will lose most of their family when they come out/leave the church/start transitioning etc and sometimes their already-damned, heathen, commie queer cousin by marriage is the easiest person to reach out to.
posted by thivaia at 7:06 AM on February 15 [4 favorites]

When I came out, two of the biggest supporters in my family were my closest first cousins - the daughters of my father's younger sister. (He's oldest of four - then there's the one with the supportive cousins, the one no one speaks with much, and the youngest one who's divorced and never had kids.)

I know that if I had to go to California for some emergency reason (the east coast has become a hotbed of transphobia the same way Florida has, as an example), I could probably beg a room from one of them until I got on my feet.

(My mother's side is all in Germany, in a town called Chemnitz, near Dresden, and I'm not sure of their reaction if a similar thing happened and I hopped the pond.)
posted by mephron at 7:10 AM on February 15 [1 favorite]

Before I was born, my father’s sister married a man with the last name Cousineau (they pronounce it “Cousin-O”). Consequently, I grew up thinking his kids’ names were Cousineau because they were my cousins.
posted by flarbuse at 7:13 AM on February 15 [12 favorites]

Wages for homework, wages for childcare
posted by eustatic at 7:17 AM on February 15 [3 favorites]

Just because you have cousins doesn't guarantee closeness. I have six first cousins in my area and none of them are interested in that. I get on better with the other coast relatives, but can't see them as much.
posted by jenfullmoon at 7:18 AM on February 15

Yah, as mentioned above, geography, the economy, and the need to get away from family crazy.
Grandparents were all about extended family. They had 4 kids. My parents were still involved with cousins, but geography, ya know. They produced the 5 of us late boomers, me the eldest, but split up due to parents dying when I was 10. We did well to OK with housing, health care and retirement. I don't even have much of a relationship with my siblings, let alone cousins.
I have 5 grandkids, all girls from both daughters, 2 from one and 3 from the other. Oldest daughter's ex had a problem with keeping it in his pants (and child support, but that's another story) so the 3 girls have 4 step sibs, but they don't hang out much. The girls know their cousins, both maternal and paternal, more just to talk to (geography and flakyness.) I hope the girls are our last generation.
How they could afford to have kids with a chance of doing well, let alone not living in poverty, is beyond me. Maybe three of them will get by OK, but the two divergent ones don't have a chance. They're still at home in their 20s. They have housing, food, love, and shitty minimum wage job they'll hate more and more, but health care is scary, and the chance of further education is doubtful. The chance of progressing, their own home, and good retirement probabally won't happen. Mom's life was well on track until the ex ran out on her and the economy happened, now it's a crap job and a retirement that will probably provide the bare minimum. Divorce and single motherhood sucks.
As far as I can see, their step siblings and paternal cousins will scrape by or live in poverty. If they have kids, it won't be on track to have a good life for sure.
TLDR:
It's a shitty world out there anymore. We don't need more people and their cousins weighing down the planet. Let there be more platypus instead.
posted by BlueHorse at 7:45 AM on February 15 [2 favorites]

Surely whether more or less cousins is a good or bad thing can only be determined if those cousins are assholes or not?

I have 20+ cousins. There is a wide distribution of personality types. Some of my uncles are legit terrible people (dominionists and assholes), but the condition is not heritable, or at least it doesn't have to be. A plethora of cousins at family gatherings helps keep everyone entertained. I'm still close (the kind of close where you don't have a chance to talk often but when you do you immediately reconnect) with my next-oldest cousin.

There were indirect effects that were unfortunate, but, overall, I'm glad I have an unusually large number of siblings, especially as our mom gets older. We certainly have our conflicts, but we have managed to keep it together, perhaps by all living in different states so we have less opportunity to get on each other's nerves. The family group text runs on photos of kids and pets.
posted by praemunire at 7:47 AM on February 15 [1 favorite]

Interesting.

My dad was 50 when I was born, so my cousins on his side were adults, (one a dentist, one a nuclear scientist working at Los Alamos) (One a great guy, one a complete asshole, but I digress). My cousins on my mother's side were teenagers when I was growing up. I have reconnected with one of the older cousin's kids on FB, and one mother's cousin is still in the loop. Not sure if any of my kids have met my niece and nephew. And none of my kids seem to be going to have kids anytime soon. Given, all this going on, yeah, there are going to be fewer cousins moving forward.
posted by Windopaene at 7:55 AM on February 15

Having children used to be an economic boon for a family.

It is now a (significant) economic drain.

Pretty much nothing can be done about this unless that dynamic were to somehow change (how?).

It also used to be the case that a lot of kids did not make it to adulthood, so larger families made a lot of reproductive sense. In much of the world that is ancient history, too.
posted by teece303 at 8:02 AM on February 15 [1 favorite]

I had three bio cousins I never really saw and have no connection to. Meanwhile, my parents had a number of friends who all had kids within a 4-year window. Many of these adults helped raise me in all sorts of ways, and I grew up with their kids much like many people do with blood relatives. One of the members of the adult generation died a few years ago, who was like an uncle. At some point his son let me know that my email/phone call with him after his dad's death really meant a lot to him - we're not that close anymore, yet we have these deep rooted shared history - we're in half of each other's baby photos - and that is a valuable connection to have I think, even if you're not close in adulthood.

But, even putting aside the fact that you don't need bio cousins to have cousin-like relationships, I imagine even the sort of scenario I grew up with is getting less common. In my case, there were nine kids all roughly the same age. How many people have friend groups where there are nine births in a short time window? I imagine that's less common than it was back in the 80s when we were all born.
posted by coffeecat at 8:02 AM on February 15 [6 favorites]

I have dozens of cousins; big Irish Catholic families on both sides. My relationships with them are pretty lopsided, though, because of family history. When my parents died (I was seven, and have three brothers and three sisters), my dad's side of the family (or at least the uncles) got together, decided which kids would go with which families, got the custody transfers from the local judge, and then told my mom's side of the family what they'd done, which is how my sibs and I ended up on the really dysfunctional side of the family. I have very little contact with my dad's side of the family now. My mom's side of the family, while not without their own problems (both sides have a high incidence of alcoholism, which I inherited), get along much better; they still have a family reunion every year. (I don't know how often my dad's side of the family does that, and basically don't care. They're not all bad, but still.)
posted by Halloween Jack at 8:24 AM on February 15 [3 favorites]

One reason I like the broad accepting definition of "cousin" above is that it avoids a lot of really picky "you thought too hard, which means you haven't thought it through" racial stuff as well.

Yeah, that cousin is white, like me, but that doesn't mean he's from my side of the family: my ancestors left this island centuries ago. Also no, that cousin is from a completely different nation that's merely on the same continent as the one where Mrs. Hobo's parents were born, so you're drawing some hasty conclusions based on appearance there, Mr. Nth Cousin M-times-removed Pedant.
posted by rum-soaked space hobo at 8:45 AM on February 15

I know only one kid who has the lots-of-cousins experience going on. He's a teenager now, about to graduate high school, and there are lots of cross country trips to visit and get to know the other kids, and many on line gatherings - the kids are often in the same Discord and talk a lot. The ones that live in the same cities do sleep overs. One of the slightly older kids from BC wanted to go to Uni in Toronto and almost ended up living with the family of the kid that I know, but after getting help finding her feet opted to live in a UofT student residence instead.

Last counting there are over thirty of them. Every year they connect to a small handful more. But they are not cousins, even though the relationships between them are turning out very much like cousin relationships. Thanks to 23andMe, as one kid after another gets old enough to ask their parents to help them or to do some research on their own, all these half siblings who share a sperm donor are managing to connect.

The sperm donor isn't going to know what hit him. He has probably considered the possibility of one day having a kid turn up on his doorstep doing a reverse Darth Vadar - Luke Skywalker revelation. The kids have narrowed down his identity to a community in the Canadian Maritimes, and they know for certain who the sperm donor's grandfather is. If the group keeps growing the way it has been, it's not going to be one kid that turns up on the guy's doorstep, it's going to be forty.
posted by Jane the Brown at 9:02 AM on February 15 [5 favorites]

I just did the inventory and I have 43 cousins, including two who are deceased. I also have 10 other people who are technically cousins but treated more as "friends of the family" because they are more distant. This is all from one side since my mom is a single mom. I surely have many cousins on my father's side, but I don't know them. My son is an only child and I am a single mom so he will have no genetic cousins, though he has three fictive kin aunts/uncle and through them will have one fictive kin cousin (who has bio cousins and thus will probably not relate to HIM as a cousin even though he thinks of her as a cousin).

Yeah, I am sad for him for that. I do feel like it's a loss. I used to beg my mom to have a big sister. If she'd done that maybe he would have cousins.
posted by If only I had a penguin... at 9:28 AM on February 15 [1 favorite]

Cousins disappearing?

What a crazy pair!
But they're cousins,
Invisible cousins all the way.
posted by dances_with_sneetches at 9:41 AM on February 15 [1 favorite]

They don't look alike
Or act alike
They don't even exist alike!
What a crazy pair!
posted by dances_with_sneetches at 9:43 AM on February 15

Since my dad died, I don't see the cousins from his side, and then after my mom died, the same thing happened on hers. I had lots of cousins, but in general we were all very different people and not close (in fact I fought constantly with my two girl cousins closest in age; we did NOT get along).

Besides the reasons of economics and uncertain climate impacts, I think there's not much "there" to this other than an observation. Some kids will end up with lots of cousins, some won't, a lot of us are going to feel closest to our found families regardless.

Honestly, the ways I've seen blood ties get abused (in terms of expecting unearned support/money/allowance for hateful views) makes it a less-appealing way of building a community. My brother is still baffled that I wouldn't enter into a terrible business deal with him, that would definitely entail tons of work/almost no money for me, because we're "family." If one of my cousins popped up and asked for something, I wouldn't feel obligated to help them (though I might) just because they were blood relations.
posted by emjaybee at 9:44 AM on February 15

Our family has a lot of first cousins, lots of aunts and uncles on my mom's side but only three on dad's side with lots of kids. When we were younger all the kids on mom's side grew up together, swapping babysitting and sharing birthdays, but we rarely saw anyone from my dad's side. As we've grow older and started our own families thing got busy and we see those cousins less.

But then a few years ago one of the cousins on dad's side died (lots of smoking, emphysema, covid denial, death) and a bunch of us started hanging out a few times a year. It turns out most are not libertarian loons, and the few that are genuinely anti-social just don't show up. It's been a lot of fun to meet this new group of 50-70 year olds just as we enter a time when our kids are leaving home. It's been kind of nice to have someone new to help fill the void. One of my dad's brothers died this year and having the larger group to help his out-of-state daughter close the house has been a real blessing.

Cousins are a lot like any other group of people except that they are assembled involuntarily, and they often share childhood experiences. But so did many of the kids from my grade school, and honestly I get along with them at about the same rate as my relatives. YMMV, but I honestly think having more relationships in real life is good because it offers more opportunities sift through people to find those special ones you can be really close to.
posted by Cris E at 9:54 AM on February 15 [1 favorite]

I did spend time with my cousins when I was a kid, but as I said before, they are hardcore Christians in the scary sense--I mean, my paternal grandparents were religious--and I am sure the person I turned into would anger them so much.
posted by Kitteh at 10:00 AM on February 15

The end of the article points out that you can find your own family, but that's really not the same at all, because you don't find your cousins--they're just there, when you're little, and you grow up with and around and in relation to them.

This is exactly what we have, and what our kids have. My husband and I have a friend group here in our city; the core is those of us who went to college together (in an altogether different city but we all followed each other here) and then people we've brought into the fold. There are 10 kids from the parents in the core group and at least a dozen more from the later-comers. They were all born within five years of each other and they truly feel like they are each others' cousins. My two adult children now live in Chicago and one of the other core group kids also lives there and they regularly hang out and do stuff together. When they're all home at the same time, they get together and hang out, no matter what. They all know that any one of the adults (the honorary aunts and uncles) would do anything for them.

They are our "framily" (friends who are family) and I am closer to all of them than I am to my own half-siblings. It's amazing to have this stable, supportive group of people who have known me since I was 18 and have been there for every event in my life in ways that my bio family have not. I love them deeply.
posted by cooker girl at 10:03 AM on February 15 [6 favorites]

Honestly, the ways I've seen blood ties get abused (in terms of expecting unearned support/money/allowance for hateful views) makes it a less-appealing way of building a community.

In the U.S. of today, cousins are basically weak social ties, and you can never have too many weak social ties. (I'm not good at cultivating them, but they're very useful, so having cousins helps.)

I did spend time with my cousins when I was a kid, but as I said before, they are hardcore Christians in the scary sense--I mean, my paternal grandparents were religious--and I am sure the person I turned into would anger them so much.

Do you know them now? Some of my cousins are just death cultists who I doubt would even try to have civil small talk with me at someone's funeral. But then there's my (religious) cousin's spouse, who I haven't interacted with much but has informed me I'm her favorite atheist.
posted by praemunire at 10:07 AM on February 15 [3 favorites]

My dad's father died when my dad was 17 leaving behind my grandma and 3 brothers and 3 sisters ranging from 14-1 years. He kept the family together (God knows how), and we all ended up living in the same house (different floors) or nearby houses when uncles and aunts got married. So I grew up with the feeling all my cousins were essentially like brothers and sisters to me. Now that we are all scattered, my sisters took it upon themselves to pass along that togetherness to the next generation by having regular get-togethers; making the nieces and nephews keep in contact etc. But it is not the same.

When I got into real trouble about 10 years ago; I actually went for help to my cousin sister rather than my brother due to how close we are. The previous generation is dwindling and I don't see how that togetherness is going to continue with the next generation. Especially since there is a vast distance between them all between here in the US (east coast-west coast) and back in India (scattered in different cities).
posted by indianbadger1 at 10:27 AM on February 15 [1 favorite]

I have a couple of cousins. They are 20+ years younger than me and live on the other side of the planet.

My parents both have/had a lot of cousins, and I'm not close to any of them but describe them/their children as cousins and they are definitely very weak social ties.

As a kid, my mum had two best friends, and their children were the closest thing I had to a cousin experience growing up, particularly as none of the children were my friends as such. I liked them a lot. I don't have any connection with them as adults but I think of my childhood very fondly.

Only one of my siblings has children. They already have two cousins who they are pretty close to, but they're exceedingly unlikely to have any more.
posted by plonkee at 10:29 AM on February 15

Do you know them now? Some of my cousins are just death cultists who I doubt would even try to have civil small talk with me at someone's funeral.

Nope, I don't keep in touch with them, but my younger sister does through Facebook. The last time I visited that side of the family was in 2011 or thereabouts*; now that my beloved paternal grandparents are gone, I see no reason to keep in touch with them. On the maternal side, I keep in sporadic touch with two of my cousins because they are delightfully weird too. One is a roadie, the other is a film major.

*that trip involved berating Obama, disbelief I don't go to church, and why I'm living in "socialist" Canada
posted by Kitteh at 10:33 AM on February 15

Irish Catholic family here... I was the last of 45 on my dad's side (last of 6 siblings) and youngest by 10 years so really I was much closer to a bunch of second cousins that were my age. Last I heard there were something like 150 of those and no idea how many in the next generation (13 nieces and nephews, 1 grand niece even)

I don't really keep up with many of them but not cause they aren't good people. The immediate family is simply big enough. I've never dated anyone that had more family than could sit around a good sized table so bringing girlfriends home to my family has always been... fun... a strange form of torture?
posted by cirhosis at 10:34 AM on February 15

The cousins on my mom's side were an enormous part of my childhood and continue to be a huge part of my adulthood -- I talk to my one cousin literally every day of my life, way more than I talk to anyone else. (Even my partner! We don't live together and aren't constant texters.) My mom was the only one of her siblings to have multiple kids, so the other cousins essentially grew up as siblings, especially since my grandparents were providing a lot of the childcare.

In our generation 3 out of the 7 cousins have had kids; they are making a concerted effort to create the same close cousin bonds we grew up with, including in one case moving across the country to live closer to the cousins. They vacation together, throw birthday parties, all the stuff we did as kids. Us childless cousins are all in the role of our one childless uncle, showing up with birthday cards full of cash and inviting the kidlets out to our city apartments for various Cultural Expansions.

I totally get that most people hate their families and shudder at the thought of more of them, but man. My family is the best part of me by far, and even as the numerical dwindling makes perfect sense (I'm one of the cousins who refuses to have kids, after all!), it's still kind of sad.
posted by We put our faith in Blast Hardcheese at 10:44 AM on February 15 [10 favorites]

Kids don’t need biological cousins. What they need is a stable community that includes other kids. Getting mighty tired of explicit or implicit pressure for other people (almost always women) to make more babies.

those other kids in the stable community gotta come from somewhere....?
posted by We put our faith in Blast Hardcheese at 10:49 AM on February 15 [5 favorites]

In 1950, when my mother was introduced to her fiance's Uncle H, the patriarchal head of the family, the old buffer informed her "Y'know, our family are shy breeders". True dat: I have zero first cousins. But in Nov 2022, there was a family re-union of all the descendants of my father's grandfather: 7/8 second cousins turned up and 11/14 from the next generation. The previous generation have now all moved on, so I guess we'll be meeting again at (diminishing returns) funerals. We all live in NW Europe, but I'm actually closer to a third cousin from New Zealand who appeared in my life about 25 years ago
posted by BobTheScientist at 10:52 AM on February 15 [1 favorite]

I totally get that most people hate their families and shudder at the thought of more of them, but man. My family is the best part of me by far, and even as the numerical dwindling makes perfect sense (I'm one of the cousins who refuses to have kids, after all!), it's still kind of sad.

Yup, I'd second this take. I'm definitely not here to invalidate people's experiences but it is sad how many report strained or nonexistent relationships with family. It's a sensitive topic but I find my extended family (which includes 7-8 first cousins) to be a source of joy and friendship, and if I'm being transparent, it is comforting knowing I am part of a larger whole with shared traditions and heritage. Now, we are a fairly reserved bunch who tend to keep our political and religious beliefs private, and all make an effort to prioritize family relationships instead of confrontations over hot button issues. I can't think of anyone in my larger extended family is not on speaking terms with the others, or who has been ostracized or cut off contact. These functional families do exist and sometimes in places like Metafilter it's good to emphasize that.

The same shrinking of families and greater churn in where people end up has affected us, too; there are far fewer of us in my generation and especially our children's generation.

I do think that the societal impact of weakening family ties as a whole will manifest in ways none of us are prepared for. There may be an element of "be careful what you wish for" at work here. Individual people are far more at the mercy of larger forces like the market or government without a family to fall back on. As well, chosen families can certainly be as unstable as blood ones.

To reiterate, I'm not trying to invalidate anyone's lived experience with their own family but felt like an alternative viewpoint would be appreciated.
posted by fortitude25 at 11:04 AM on February 15 [15 favorites]

I do think that the societal impact of weakening family ties as a whole will manifest in ways none of us are prepared for. There may be an element of "be careful what you wish for" at work here. Individual people are far more at the mercy of larger forces like the market or government without a family to fall back on. As well, chosen families can certainly be as unstable as blood ones.

This is all true. Certain online spaces like to romanticize the heck out of "found families" but in fact it is very hard to sustain a social grouping like that long-term without some common affiliation to a structure that offers some stability and has some social norms to support it. (Note how much harder it gets for most people to make new friends once they're no longer in school, where everyone shows up in more or less the same place at more or less the same time over extended periods.) Obviously we have seen some alternative social structures that can help support such social groupings flourish over the past century, but we've also seen a lot of them wither and die recently in the face of online "connectivity." And the social norms in support have always been a bit shaky. (E.g., I can't take sick leave to look after the friend who's probably the closest person to me in the world.) It's a mistake to think extended social groupings and weak ties aren't important or can easily be "found."

Again, saying all this as someone who has extended family members who are truly some of the worst people you could hope to know in ordinary life, someone who had very little to do with even her immediate family for several years post-college, and someone who is much closer to 2 or 3 of her good friends than she is to her siblings or cousins. Those of you who have enjoyed actual stable "found families" for a couple of decades, congratulations, you're lucky people. Those of you who have no choice in whether your family includes you, deepest sympathies, and I hope you get to be in the first group soon if you aren't already (it's different to be bounced for being an atheist/leftist/unmarried adult woman than for being queer or trans, I know). But extended family serves useful functions in society, and I don't think people can reliably grow replacements on their own, especially if they're not involved in some other fairly traditional institutions (like real churches).
posted by praemunire at 11:28 AM on February 15 [14 favorites]

I think I have two first cousins on my father's side and one on my mother's side, but I have never met the one on my mother's side, even online (his mom was my mom's half-sister, whom I had only ever heard about in passing before she died). On my father's side, his brother's son was old enough to have kids when I was young; I was a late life child. That branch of the family hasn't been in touch since 1987. And his sister wasn't close to us either, to the point where I'm not sure I've met her son. I know my uncle on that side has been deceased for years; I assume my aunt is; I have no idea how to find those folks and I'd be afraid they were all MAGA types if I did.

This discussion is making me feel something about how I am alone in the world now with both my parents gone.
posted by gentlyepigrams at 12:16 PM on February 15 [3 favorites]

this is hitting me hard for a number of reasons

Tuesday a series of events led me to the door of a friend and colleague, yelling and banging on the doors and windows, calling the cops, another friend showed up, we forced entry through a back door, to find our friend had died abruptly some hours ago, likely the early morning hours, and it all started with a work chat "have you spoken to (Person), they haven't shown up at work"

the shrinking of our support networks, whether it's blood kin or otherwise, leaves us very vulnerable
posted by elkevelvet at 12:24 PM on February 15 [16 favorites]

I've got a lot of cousins. My mom had eight other siblings and my father had 2 other siblings and they pretty much all had at least 4 kids. When I was growing up they were almost all in Pakistan so whenever we would go back to visit it would be like cousins overload. I'm the 4th youngest out of all these cousins so during the visits they'd take me out for ice cream or to go swimming and it was great. For the cousins that lived in Pakistan it seemed like they saw each other a lot and really were like siblings or best friends to each other.

When I was 15 I travelled to the UK by myself and spent the summer with cousins and family friends I had there. It was great to be away from home but still with family. So I got some independence but with a huge safety net right there.

Many of my cousins have over time moved to the US and they've got families of their own so I've got so many "nephews" and "neices" (actually 1st cousins once removed) and my kids have a whole bunch of older cousins (2nd cousins really) that they'll meet when we go to Dallas, lots of cousins in Dallas now, or if there's a wedding. Last year one of my "nephews" got married and they had the wedding in Chicago. His dad is kind of the head of our generation of cousins and he booked the whole meeting room floor of the hotel just for us during the wedding so for the 3 days of it there would just be cousins hanging around at all hours hanging out with each other. It really reminded all of us of the big parties we used to have in Pakistan but now with even more of us.

My kids only have a handful of first cousins, my sibling's family here in Toronto and my spouse's sibling's family in Japan. They probably see their Toronto cousins once or twice a month and their Japanese ones every couple of years, although they do video calls and play video games with them as well. But they've met their more distant cousins many times as well so they know they've got a larger family out there that they'll be seeing at the next wedding and when they're a bit older they'll have people they know in a lot of different places.
posted by any portmanteau in a storm at 12:32 PM on February 15 [1 favorite]

My wife and I have such vastly different experiences with family and cousins. I grew up 4 hours away from where all the extended family was. I had lots of cousins who all lived in the same city, a number of them exactly my age. We'd go and visit twice a year or so and I'd be dropped off with these sort-of strangers and expected to play with them like I knew them. It was awkward. I loved my extended family but I never really knew them.

My wife grew up with her cousins like they were both siblings and friends. Her family was a big clan that occupied three big plots of land next to each other in rural Michigan. While I sort of envied the closeness, I don't envy how much she has been breaking down emotionally over watching the family grow apart over the decades as members moved or passed away. For me that's just what happens - family grows apart as they go off and do their own things. I sympathize but can't empathize. It feels bad.
posted by charred husk at 12:52 PM on February 15

When you live in a society that actively disincentivizes any kind of care-giving structures outside the context of the patriarchal family, it's not surprising that people believe the shrinking of said "family" will lead to a world completely devoid of care and complete societal breakdown. Of course this then means that those "responsible" for the breakdown of the idealized heterosexual, patriarchal "family" are then given the blame for society falling into ruin.

vim876 is completely correct in identifying that concerns about "the family" are often (if not always) explicit threats to women. The large extended families being romanticized in this discussion cannot function without extracting unpaid labor out of women — who do the vast majority of the childcare, eldercare, relational management, housework, and other forms of reproductive labor required to keep these organizations running. Yes, the patriarchal family can be a site of care in an atomized society. But just as often, it's a site of violence, abuse, and coercion.

And when women as a class make the rational decision to shrink family sizes in response to economic pressures, that's when we start to see all this demographic concern-trolling about the supposed decline of the family — which goes hand-in-hand with all of the astroturfed tradwife content being plastered all over social media. Want more babies? Either make it so that reproductive labor is more rewarded by society, or encourage men to step up and perform more carework themselves.
posted by cultanthropologist at 2:53 PM on February 15 [3 favorites]

My paternal side (large, my dad has 7 siblings who gave me 18 cousins) has a very different sense of humor and all strong personalities. So it's really nice to come together with a bunch of people like me, when maybe our personalities aren't the most understood in the real world. I do count myself so lucky that our family is one where we can be more ourselves when we get together then maybe any other place in the world.

One thing that me and all my cousins think is pretty funny is meeting all the "other cousins" when one of us gets married. You know, the cousins of your cousins that aren't your cousins.
posted by LizBoBiz at 3:19 PM on February 15 [2 favorites]

I will also say that because growing up all my cousins were in Pakistan we basically treated our Pakistani family friends in Toronto as if they were cousins. So all the adults/parents were Aunties and Uncles and their kids were pretty much our own siblings. They were all in similar boats where there relatives were in Pakistan or maybe they had some other relatives in the States or UK, but no one else right there. We'd be at each others houses every weekend and have sleepovers and the like. As we've grown up and got our own families we don't see each other as much but they are absolutely the closest people to me. Closer than my actual cousins for sure.
posted by any portmanteau in a storm at 5:34 PM on February 15 [2 favorites]

because you don't find your cousins--they're just there, when you're little, and you grow up with and around and in relation to them.

Ehhhhhhhhhhh.

I come from a culture where everyone a generation above you that aren't immediate family are aunts/uncles, in your generation cousins, a generation below you nieces/nephews. No "second cousin once removed" business.

Even so, even if you just take the children of my parents' siblings, I have about a zillion cousins on my dad's side. Feels like a new one pops out every few years - not because there's a new kid, they're usually older than me. I'm the youngest "girl" in my line - after me are 3 brothers. I'm also the first and only one wholly born AND raised outside Bangladesh. My sister (11 years older so there are some cousins between us) was born in Bangladesh but moved to Malaysia when she was 6 months old; the 3 brothers split their time between Canada and Bangladesh.

This made me the "interesting cousin", but also the most obvious foreigner. I'd see my cousins once a year or so (less often now as an adult) and we'd get along, but my command of Bengali was subpar and I just could not gel with the culture. Diasporic folk keep going on and on about how going back to their ancestral homelands makes them feel like home or whatever - I can't relate. There's some affection, but no real closeness.

My dad's very sick and he's been regretting moving away from family to a place that was apparently so toxic for both my sister and I that WE left (true, but also my parents are a significant factor in why we moved). I'm kinda grateful he didn't stay in Bangladesh though - Malaysia was rough for many reasons, but Bangladesh would have been way tougher.

I only have 2 cousins on my mum's side. One died in 2011 and one got sucked into QAnon antivax nonsense so I don't talk to him anymore.
posted by creatrixtiara at 6:02 PM on February 15 [1 favorite]

My mother was the eldest of eight kids and my father was the seventh of nine, so I had a lot of cousins. Unfortunately for me I was born when my mother was 40 and my father was 46 so all the cousins were so much older than I was it was more like having a couple dozen uncles and aunts.

My son has six cousins, only two of which he’ll ever meet since I went no contact with my siblings after our parents died. I could probably get in touch with a couple of them but I’m not willing to put them into potential conflict with their parents.

The local birth rate seems to be pretty high for my new neighborhood. Out of about twenty houses on this street I know the house two doors down has two girls and at the end of the street there’s a family with four boys across the street from another family with four boys who live next to a family with two boys. If and when Tiny Monster becomes interested in interacting with other children he should have some opportunities.
posted by The Monster at the End of this Thread at 7:46 PM on February 15 [1 favorite]

When you live in a society that actively disincentivizes any kind of care-giving structures outside the context of the patriarchal family, it's not surprising that people believe the shrinking of said "family" will lead to a world completely devoid of care and complete societal breakdown.

(a) Nobody here or even in the article said that.

(b) This sounds like oh so daring and radical theorizing until you wake up one morning and realize we live in a world where structures of care and support actually do have to come from somewhere and you can't simply theorize new ones into existence on a large scale. There is no particular reason why families, as opposed to other forms of organization, have to have the kinds of social functions discussed in the article and in the comments here, but they still do and it is worth considering whether their contraction, in conjunction with cultures actively hostile to most forms of collective organizing that might allow the widespread growth of alternatives, is leaving some people vulnerable.

The large extended families being romanticized in this discussion cannot function without extracting unpaid labor out of women

Also, I don't believe this is true, at least not if we're in the discursive space that allows us to handwave into existence strong and flexible alternative structure of extended social support. You'll believe in the possibility of granfalloons, but not in the possibility of inducing men to pull their weight in family structures?
posted by praemunire at 10:18 PM on February 15 [4 favorites]

Kitteh I hear you, my dad said our marriage was meaningless if we weren't going to have kids (we'd agreed just after starting dating neither of us wanted kids - it was a mutual condition we set). My dad wound it in when I said I'd never see him again if he continued to interfere. I'd already told him when I was 15 I'd never have kids, but the message didn't get through.
posted by unearthed at 2:08 AM on February 16 [1 favorite]

I've been incredibly lucky in that none of my immediate family ever pressured me about children, even my mom told Shepherd when we were dating, "Kitteh has never wanted kids. She made that decision when she was young and I support it." My sister also defends my decision when her friends ask her why her kids don't have first cousins.
posted by Kitteh at 3:55 AM on February 16 [1 favorite]

> The large extended families being romanticized in this discussion cannot function without extracting unpaid labor out of women

You'll believe in the possibility of granfalloons, but not in the possibility of inducing men to pull their weight in family structures?

I think that the "unpaid labor out of women" comment was an effort to argue that we do need to induce men to pull their weight in family structures - a notion that runs up against the "men as sole breadwinner" model that patriarchal societies advocate, which was indeed the point being made in the comment you were responding to, I believe.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 5:00 AM on February 16

Interestingly, my parents' generation was the bottleneck in my family, rather than my own generation. My grandparents on one side were one of four and one of seven, and on the other side they were one of four and one of five siblings. My mother had at least 11 first cousins and my father had more than that (his mother was the one with six sisters, and she was the youngest, so many of my dad's cousins were closer in age to her than to him; I genuinely lose count of everyone). My mother and her only sibling both married only children and had two kids each, so there are four first cousins in my generation.

We're accelerating the decline, I guess, because none of us are having kids (one of us has severe medical issues, two prefer to be dog-parents rather than person-parents, I find being alive too depressing to want to inflict the experience on anyone else). Everyone went from "four kids is a normal amount of kids" to "one or two kids is a normal amount of kids" to "no kids is a normal amount of kids" in the space of two generations, and in retrospect that feels like quite a rapid shrink.

(Fascinatingly, the side that had seven daughters somehow weren't the Catholics.)
posted by terretu at 5:05 AM on February 16

I had a weird thought about the whole title of this article just now, actually:

"Cousins are disappearing. Is this reshaping the experience of childhood?"

This struck me because the notion of "childhood" as a distinct state of being only came along in like the 1600s. Before then, children were just sort of immature adults, and in-house unpaid interns. You were small enough to crawl under the table and retrieve the things your mom dropped, and maybe you weren't strong enough to swing an axe like dad but you could carry some of his lighter tools, and by hanging around watching him you could learn the ropes. The philosophers who introduced the idea of "childhood" as being a distinct state were considered kind of radical - "wait, so if you took my kid and stuck him in the home of the baker, he'd grow up to be a baker instead of a blacksmith? Whaaaaaaaaaaa?" And the whole notion of childhood being a time of innocence that deserved special protection didn't come along until the Romantic poets in like the 1700s. The "experience of childhood" the way that this article is thinking of it, and the way we're thinking of it today, only came along during the Victorian era,and even the Victorians had a sort of pick-and-choose attitude about it (the rich kids got to be the precious protected innocents, while the poor kids still got stuck with the "they're short, they can go to work in the coal mines" attitude).

Granted, there is now a lot of scholarship in early childhood psychology, growth, education, and development which supports what the Enlightenment Philosophers and Romantic Poets were trying to say. But in terms of the general societal opinion on "the experience of childhood", that's already changed around a whole lot anyway.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 5:15 AM on February 16 [3 favorites]

Yeah, it's interesting. I always find these discussions weird, because my family doesn't really correspond to this narrative. All but one of my father's first cousins died in the Holocaust, and he doesn't really have a relationship with his one surviving cousin, for all sorts of complicated trauma-related reasons. I have no models for extended family on that side except shit we don't talk about because it's distressing.

My mom had a lot of similarly-aged relatives with whom she was close, but a lot of them were actually her mother's first cousins. The generations got really blurred, because my great-grandmother was the oldest of a big family, and her youngest sibling was the same age as her oldest child. There were also immigration dynamics on that side of the family: on some level it mattered more whether people were born in the US than who their parents were. My great-grandmother's youngest siblings were born in the US, spoke English from an early age, went to school and were literate, and had a childhood experience much more like my grandmother's than like my great-grandmother's, and therefore their kids had a lot more in common with my mom than with their much-older first cousins. My mom used the word "cousin" to describe anyone who was around her age and with whom she felt a strong kinship tie. Also, one of the people with whom she was closest was her childhood next-door neighbor, whom I always assumed was a cousin, but who actually wasn't a blood relative at all.

I don't have any first cousins. In the context of my family, this doesn't feel that weird, because there isn't a single narrative in my family about how this all works. And I guess I wonder if these articles assume a normative experience of family that has never really been true for everyone.
posted by ArbitraryAndCapricious at 6:52 AM on February 16

I think this kind of references the urban/rural divide in the US:

I haven't studied this that much, but this site says:
- in 1910, for instance, there were 782 children per 1000 women of childbearing age in the rural United States, but only 469 in urban areas -- the percentage of the urban population counted as children remained high.

This paragraph is even more eye opening:
"In 1860, nearly 42 percent of Milwaukee residents were under the age of fifteen; more than half were under the age of twenty. That percentage dropped over the next several decades, but almost a third of urban residents were under eighteen or younger in 1930, a number that held fairly steady into the 1950s. (The percentage of youngsters in Milwaukee County's population reflected national trends.)"

So you can see that they basically had no choice but to put children to work, if 40% of the city's population of over 50k are under age 15. As the US has gotten older, (ie: had less children) the median age has risen dramatically, currently over 30 for Milwaukee. So what does this mean for cousins? Fewer siblings, fewer cousins, and the urban rural cousin divide has probably gotten even sharper.
posted by The_Vegetables at 7:57 AM on February 16

This struck me because the notion of "childhood" as a distinct state of being only came along in like the 1600s.

I had no idea Philippe Ariès was a mefite.
posted by mittens at 9:53 AM on February 16 [1 favorite]

I really thought it would be relatively uncontroversial to say that the idealized family dynamics being mourned here run on women's unpaid domestic labor, given:
- Women perform three quarters of the world's unpaid labor, 11B hours per day,
- Globally, women's unpaid domestic labor is valued at $10.9T/yr (assuming minimum wage),
- In heterosexual marriages in the US, wives spend significantly more time on domestic labor and less time on leisure than their husbands, even when said wives are the primary earners for the household,
- On average, daughters provide more than twice as many hours of care to their aging parents than sons, and sons actually will reduce their caregiving efforts depending on how many sisters they have.

You might then say, "Well, even if women do more unpaid work, that doesn't necessarily mean it's bad for them."
- Men's lower contributions to household labor explain why women are more prone to depression than men, with inequity having a greater impact on distress than the absolute amount of household labor,
- A longitudinal study in Korea found that middle-aged full-time homemakers had five times the risk of cognitive impairments compared with women in other occupations,
- Providing long term or high intensity care for a sick or elderly relative is linked to greater amounts of depression and anxiety, as well as lower life satisfaction, and as mentioned before women are more likely to be doing this kind of unpaid work.

I am in no way saying that carework is bad! It's critical, but it's also really fucking hard! That's why our society creates an underclass of people whose job it to perform reproductive care work without commensurate compensation — so that the people not in that underclass can reap the benefits of that extracted labor.

The point I am trying to make is that this old structure is built on a rotten foundation and continues to be a raw deal for women, so it's pretty unsurprising that women are going to continue to opt out of it when they have the opportunities to do so. Something has to give. There are no "good old days" to go back to.

I am being accused of magical thinking, or overlooking the people who might be made "vulnerable" by the shrinking of the family. Meanwhile, the ongoing vulnerability of women in the context of the patriarchal family — to worse physical and mental health outcomes, and to domestic violence — is naturalized and not worthy of similar concern, apparently.
posted by cultanthropologist at 1:24 PM on February 16 [4 favorites]

"the experience of childhood"

That seems to be a rather author-centric view of things.

I'm 49, hardly a spring chicken. And while I do indeed technically have five cousins, I was never close to them or spent much time around them. They lived in Illinois, I lived in Texas, I saw one set of cousins perhaps three times between the ages of 0 and 18, and the other set once.

The idea that somehow in the past it was universal for all children to grow up surrounded by hordes of relations was never true. Perhaps it is less common today, though given the way nostalgia twists people's memories I'd want to see some actual hard evidence for that claim before I accepted it. But it was never universal.
posted by sotonohito at 7:59 PM on February 16

This struck me because the notion of "childhood" as a distinct state of being only came along in like the 1600s. Before then, children were just sort of immature adults, and in-house unpaid interns.

This was the standard argument for about thirty years but, while I'm no longer on top of the scholarship in detail, my understanding is that it's taken a lot of chipping away in the 21st century. I'm probably not the best person to go into this in depth, but just consider how our timing of the "rise of childhood" coincides with the abrupt increase of survival of ephemeral documents, which happens to include many documents of family life.

I really thought it would be relatively uncontroversial to say that the idealized family dynamics being mourned here run on women's unpaid domestic labor,

Of course I know this, this is obvious (and, speaking personally, one of the reasons I didn't have kids; even if I wanted them more than I did [about zero], I wouldn't want to have to shoulder 80% of the burden or spend the rest of the time fighting with my supposed equal life partner to bring that percentage down a bit). That's why I said "at least not if we're in the discursive space that allows us to handwave into existence strong and flexible alternative structure of extended social support." That is, if you're happy to imagine that it's fine that extended family ties continue to shrink away because some other institution (like granfalloons, a whimsical reference but one that I figured would be recognizable to Mefite audiences) is going to appear or expand to fill in those gaps, you should also be okay with imagining that someday men in a family structure might decide collectively to act right. I don't think either is the most likely, but I think we're closer to the latter than to the former. Admittedly, that's a matter of judgment and I could be wrong, but it seems to me that we're getting more atomized overall, rather than less, while average male behavior in regard to caregiving has improved somewhat over the last fifty years. If you compare the way my brothers act with respect to caregiving to the way my father or my grandfather did, it's honestly a bit startling.
posted by praemunire at 11:53 AM on February 17 [1 favorite]

cultanthropologist:
vim876 is completely correct in identifying that concerns about "the family" are often (if not always) explicit threats to women.

And when women as a class make the rational decision to shrink family sizes in response to economic pressures, that's when we start to see all this demographic concern-trolling about the supposed decline of the family

I really thought it would be relatively uncontroversial to say that the idealized family dynamics being mourned here run on women's unpaid domestic labor

The point I am trying to make is that this old structure is built on a rotten foundation and continues to be a raw deal for women, so it's pretty unsurprising that are going to continue to opt out of it when they have the opportunities to do so.

I can at least articulate to you what my problem was with your assumptions, which I read as: it is women opting out of care-work that is causing shrinking families.

Family sizes are not getting smaller only because women are opting out of the unpaid labor. It is not only women's choice to have less children. Almost all people, in almost all cultures, will choose to have less children if given the choice. When children are not needed for labor, and when the survival rate for infants increases, people have less children. If it was only labor and economics, then you would think that the higher economic class, the more children people would have but really the opposite is true. And the ideal people are choosing seems to max out around 2 children. Even in societies where child rearing by both parents is supported (I'm thinking the Nordics) the birth rate is still very low because people just don't want to have that many kids.

Additionally, there was more than just women's unpaid labor that made these family sizes more possible than they are today:

- the lack of choice to prevent pregnancy - birth control and abortion being mostly illegal or unattainable for most women, even married women

- the ability to raise a family on a single income, which is possible when reducing the workforce by disallowing women and minorities, including minority men, positions of earning power vs today where two incomes may not be enough to support even one child

By focusing so much on women opting out of doing the caring, I feel like it is blaming women.
posted by LizBoBiz at 3:52 PM on February 18 [1 favorite]

elkevelvet, I'm really sorry to hear about this sudden and tragic loss.

I can't find a reference to this any longer, but my father was a Classicist, and he always had good references for "there's nothing new under the sun" based on antiquity. When the book Bowling Alone came out, he'd recite from memory a passage from a letter in NT Greek. It was a short paragraph, bemoaning the dangers of The City (Alexandria).

The author had a relative who went to Alexandria, and apparently this relative arranged lodgings in the city. But then he broke his leg falling down the stairwell, and he died alone in a city of tens of thousands of people: no one found him until the landlord came to collect rent.

My father would then point out that the author himself had been dead for thousands of years by now, and we have no idea how. But we remember his lament for the preventable loss of a loved one, those millennia ago.
posted by rum-soaked space hobo at 3:23 AM on February 21 [2 favorites]