The only thing that I think matters from the article is this:
This building of extended family by choice shouldn’t be diminished, said Qian of UBC, noting that “voluntary kin” is common in many 2SLGBTQ+ communities, and we don’t have to define family based on blood ties.
If you think that having cousins should be a vital part of your child’s life, just have friends that have children around the same age as your children.
Do you have cousins? I don’t have any friends from my childhood, but I have every cousin who is still alive still in my life more or less. Including cousins who are 15-40 years older than me. It’s not the same thing as “my friends have kids near the same age”. I wouldn’t let my kids hang out with my friend’s kids if they were 15 years older than my kids…
More than I can count. Both of my parents had 10+ siblings, and most of those siblings got married and had 4+ children.
I wouldn’t let my kids hang out with my friend’s kids if they were 15 years older than my kids
I wouldn’t either, but I also wouldn’t let my (hypothetical) children hang out unsupervised with most family members who are 15 years older than they are.
That’s your choice, I guess. I remember cousins who babysat me, took me to the zoo a hundred times, introduced me to classic musicals, because they were family and trusted and not a friend’s kid… It’s just different is all.
I only have one family member closely related enough to call a cousin, and I’ve met her maybe 5 or 6 times. My mom was an only child, and my dad’s brother didn’t get married until he was like 60. It didn’t really matter though, because my parents had close friends with kids. Family can be basically anything. Blood relations aren’t important
I have a weird relationship with that. I have older cousins (late 40s, I’m in my 30s), and younger cousins (younger than my youngest sibling). Can’t say it ever felt like what this article describes haha. I was also quite solitary and liked playing alone. Even preferred it, many times. So yeah, hard to relate with that one…
It’s a matter of education and wealth … the more education a population has, the more likely they will have a bit of wealth and once they have a little bit of both, they tend to want fewer children.
I should know because I am full blooded Indigenous in northern Ontario born in the 70s from parents who were traditional, born in the wilderness and had a terrible education in residential schools and they ended up having seven children. Out of all of us everyone had five or six kids except me and my wife and now there is an army of cousins in my family. In my own generation, dad had six siblings, mom had seven and they all had children … which meant I had a giant community of cousins, we used to roam around our community like a little gang and we all knew each other, our parents knew us and we all knew them … the adults all treated us like their children and we looked up to them like our parents or older siblings. There were good and bad things about all that.
What I do notice is the number of children dwindling as the generations grow. My parents generation averaged about seven or eight children, my generation averaged about five or six and the generation after me is averaging about three or four. And that all falls in line with how much education and wealth people have. The more educated a couple becomes, they tend to leave the community to live somewhere else, get a job, make a bit of money, get more schooling and have fewer children. Those that didn’t do well in school ended up staying in the community, have less wealth and tended to have more children.
Native Canada is on average about 20 to 30 years behind the average demographics of the rest of Canada.
Yeah, I grew up in a small American town and my cousins were more like my siblings than my actual sister because they were the same age as me. We all fled that small town, so the next generation are all growing up not surrounded by extended family.
I think there are good and bad sides to it. It was nice to grow up surrounded by family with a strong sense of belonging. But my cousins’ children are growing up knowing people from far more diverse backgrounds than I ever had access to, which is good for them in a different way.
My brother isn’t going to have kids, and my wife is an only child. My son won’t have any cousins.
That said, I’m really close with my cousins, and if they have kids (which they plan to), I think we will basically just move that cousin relationship on generation over
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