The Great Cousin Decline
Perhaps you’ve heard: Americans are having fewer children, on average, than they used to, and that has some people concerned. In the future, the elderly could outnumber the young, leaving not enough workers to pay taxes and fill jobs. Kids already have fewer siblings to grow up with, and parents have fewer kids to care for them as they age.
Oh, and people also have fewer cousins. But who’s talking about that?
Within many families—and I’m sorry to have to say this—cousins occupy a weird place. Some people are deeply close to theirs, but others see them as strangers. Some cousins live on the same block; some live on opposite sides of the world. That can all be true about any family relationship, but when it comes to this one, the spectrum stretches especially far. Despite being related by blood and commonly in the same generation, cousins can end up with completely different upbringings, class backgrounds, values, and interests. And yet, they share something rare and invaluable: They know what it’s like to be part of the same particular family.
Going forward, not as many people will be in that peculiar position. The average number of cousins is declining in the U.S. and much of Europe, and the same trend is predicted to hit other parts of the world in the coming decades. American families are shrinking in general, but with cousins, that drop happens at a dramatic scale. Sha Jiang, a UC Berkeley demographer, put it to me this way: If everyone hypothetically went from having five kids to having four kids, that would mean one less sibling for each child. But it would yield a much bigger decrease in first cousins: Instead of a child having four aunts or uncles who each have five kids—20 cousins—they would have three aunts or uncles who each have four kids, for a total of 12.
Maybe you don’t find this alarming, given how oddly indeterminate the cousin role can feel. But cousin connections can be lovely because they exist in that strange gray area between closeness and distance—because they don’t follow a strict playbook. That tenuousness means you often need to opt in to cousin relationships, especially as an adult. And the bond that forms when you do might not be easy to replace.
Cousins have historically had a vital family role. For centuries, extended kin depended on one another—for example, to run a farm or a business, or, as Jiang told me, to relay information. But the typical family experience is changing. Some researchers say that American family trees are turning into beanstalks—tall and narrow. People are more likely to have multiple generations of relatives alive at the same time (because of longer life expectancy) but fewer “lateral” relationships, like cousins and siblings (because of a decreased fertility rate). Although the average number of lateral relatives varies across race and class groups in the U.S., the cousin decline is either imminent or already happening across all of them.
Your “vertical,” intergenerational bonds can be tight and tremendously meaningful, but they also tend to come with care duties, and a clear hierarchy: Think of a grandparent babysitting their child’s toddler, or an adult tending to their aging parent. At the same time, siblings can easily develop fraught dynamics because of their intense familiarity: Perhaps in childhood you fight over toys, and in adulthood, you argue over an inheritance or your parents’ eldercare.
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The classic cousin relationship, relative to that, is amazingly uncomplicated. Cousins tend to have more distance in age than siblings, even if they’re in the same generation. They also typically have more geographic space between them; less affluent families are more likely than wealthier ones to live in close proximity, but even so, sharing a house with a cousin isn’t the norm. Neither is giving the kind of material support, such as financial assistance, you’d be likelier to give to nuclear-family members, Megan N. Reed, an Emory University sociologist, told me. And there’s not much societal expectation for what the dynamic has to look like. Pop culture is full of sibling antics: bickering, pranking, sticking up for one another in school. Fewer models demonstrate how cousins are supposed to interact.
Without a clear answer, some cousins just … don’t interact often. Only about 6 percent of adult cousins live in the same census tract (typically about the size of a neighborhood); the rest live an average of 237 miles apart. Jonathan Daw, a Penn State sociologist, told me that the rate at which adults donate a kidney to a cousin is quite low: While siblings make up 25 percent of living kidney-donor relationships, cousins constitute less than 4 percent. That’s likely not because they’d decline to give up a kidney, but because many people wouldn’t ask a cousin for something that significant in the first place. Organ donations, he told me, raise the question “What do we owe to each other?” For cousins, the answer might be “Not much.”
Still, a bond that’s light on responsibility doesn’t need to be weak. Researchers told me that cousins can be deeply important—perhaps because of the potential distance in the relationship, not in spite of it.
Compared with siblings, cousins tend to have larger gaps in socioeconomic status, and might grow up in different home environments. In childhood, that can make them good role models—more likely to differ from you and your siblings in ways that could be eye-opening. And in adulthood, given that many people find friends who are similar to them, extended family can provide a rare opportunity to have your opinions challenged, Diego Alburez-Gutierrez, who studies kinship dynamics at the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research, in Germany, told me. Cousins are essentially peers who can stretch your assumptions—without as much fear of the relationship ending if debates get heated.
They might also play a specific role in your larger support network (even if you wouldn’t ask them for a kidney). In one study, Reed and her colleagues found that in the fall of 2020, in the midst of pandemic isolation, about 14 percent of participants reported increasing communication with at least one cousin. The relationship, she said, seemed to be “activated in this time of crisis.” She thinks the fact that cousins are less likely to depend on one another for material help might actually make them well suited to give emotional solace. That can be especially relevant when family difficulties come up; a cousin might be one of the few people who understand your relatives’ eccentricities, virtues, and role within the clan. When a parent dies, Verdery told me, many people bond with their cousins, who just get it in a way others don’t.
That’s the funny thing about cousins: In all other areas of your life, you might not be alike at all. But knowing the nuances of your family ties through decades of exposure—however sporadic—is a form of closeness in itself. The low stakes of your own relationship can make you perfect allies—but the potential for detachment also means you have to work for it. You can intentionally insert yourselves into each other’s lives, or you can slowly fade out of them.
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The latter scenario can be understandable. A lot of people, when they’re kids, might run around with their cousins on special occasions—and then go months without seeing them. Perhaps they start to realize that their bonds are somewhat arbitrary; they grow less and less relevant, and ever more awkward. Consider this, though: In middle age and older, the cohesion of a whole family can begin to depend on the bonds between cousins. Along with siblings, cousins become the ones organizing the reunions and the Thanksgiving meals. The slightly random houseguests in your younger years become the stewards of the family in your older ones—as do you.
A cousin-sparse future, then, could be a greater loss than people might recognize. It might also make the relationship that much more important: With fewer of them around, cousins may need to depend on one another even more. Families are shrinking—but that doesn’t mean they need to come apart.