Why Cousins Matter — And More Than Ever For Modern Families

HAMBURG — There’s the cousin with whom you jumped on your father’s 40-year-old trampoline, and the one with whom you smoked your first cigarette at grandpa’s funeral. There are the twin daughters of your aunt from Dresden, the ones you were glued to during summer vacations, or the cousin from a small town far away, who works as an insurance consultant and with whom your only connection is a shared love for crude jokes.

People have fewer cousins than in past generations. Families are shrinking almost everywhere in the world, in industrialized and developing countries alike. A research group from the Max Planck Society has calculated that, in 1950, the average 65-year-old woman in Europe had around 25 living relatives, but by 2095 there she will only have 16. There are fewer children, which means there are fewer siblings and fewer cousins.

The number of cousins is shrinking even faster than the number of siblings. In the early 1950s, the average 35-year-old German woman had 1.8 siblings. Today, it’s 1.6 — not a huge drop. But the average number of cousins has fallen from 6.6 to 5.2. Millennials, on average, have about one and a half fewer relatives than their great-grandparents did.

These are the same relatives who make family reunions lively or offer you a couch and a hot meal when a delayed train leaves you stranded in Dresden. Or is something even bigger being lost?

Lifetime clan members

“Cousins are more important than many people assume,” says family researcher Karsten Hank from the University of Cologne. Alongside siblings, cousins are the relatives with whom we can connect more easily.

“The relationships with them are usually less close, but also less conflict-ridden,” says Hank. You don’t have to argue with your cousin about who gets the bigger room or who borrowed the bike again without asking. And there’s no heated debate about who’s going to take care of mom.

“At the same time, cousins remain a member of the clan for life,” says Hank. “You can always pick up where you left off with a cousin, even after years of no contact.” A friend you haven’t spoken to in 20 years is no longer a friend. A cousin is still a cousin.

Not calling your cousin for a is as normal as choosing him to be your best man at your wedding.

This balance of connection without pressure or obligation is what makes cousins special, Hank points out. There are very few social expectations around what defines a “good” cousin relationship. If someone says they don’t speak to their sibling anymore, you assume something big happened. But not calling your cousin for a decade is as normal as choosing him to be your best man at your wedding.

“Sibling relationships are often a community of fate,” says Hank. “You love each other, you hate each other, but you’re stuck with one another.” Yet from the time you reach your teenage years, you get to decide for yourself how close your contact with a cousin is.

Elective relatives

When literature is not dealing with amorous relationships between cousins (Ashley and Melanie in Gone with the Wind, Paul and Phillis in Cousin Phillis), novels portray them as relatives who are both close and far away.

They share a certain intimacy — even if they otherwise belong to completely different worlds: Think of Fanny Price in Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park, for example, who is born into poverty-stricken chaos and then compares herself to the children of her rich aunt. The cousins Sonya and Natasha Rostova in War and Peace share all their happiness and love-related worries with each other — at least at the beginning of the novel.

The term “elective relatives” usually refers to people bonded by emotional closeness not genetics. But you could argue that it’s an apt description of cousins.

You get to choose which ones you keep in touch with, yet you’ll always share 12.5% of your genes and a family history. You know each other’s parents’ quirks, you know how grandma’s apple pancakes taste, and you know that grandpa was an alcoholic.

But is that shared family history enough to keep you close?

Strength in numbers

A team of researchers led by social psychologist Thomas Leopold from the University of Cologne has investigated which family members people consider to be particularly important. Their project is currently being reviewed and is expected to be published early next year, but excerpts are already available to ZEIT ONLINE. Over 12,000 respondents between the ages of 25 and 35 from nine European countries and the USA created a kind of genealogical tree of their extended family.

They first entered the names of their closest relatives: siblings, parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins. In a second step, they answered how emotionally connected they feel to these people, who they would call in an emergency and how important they consider the people to be for their lives so far.

In Germany, respondents rated their mothers as the most important family members, followed by fathers, sisters and brothers. Then came grandparents, aunts and uncles. Individual cousins came last. But when you calculated how important all cousins were to a respondent, the value was even higher than the values for all brothers or all sisters.

If the numerical strength of cousins collapses, then we also feel the loss.

“The strength of cousins lies in their numbers,” Leopold says. Because people have many more cousins on average than siblings, their importance as a group is not that small. In other words, a single cousin may not make a big difference in one’s life. A group of cousins does.

In addition, “because most people have more cousins than siblings, the likelihood of finding someone among them with whom they get on well increases,” Leopold says. So someone who is not on the same wavelength as their sister (or is an only child) can still hope that there is someone among their cousins who understands their dream of becoming an ethnomusicologist.

That is precisely why Leopold does not find the decline in the number of cousins trivial: “If the numerical strength of cousins collapses, then we also feel the loss.” Leopold even describes the decline in the number of cousins as “dramatic.” In his study, people even reported fewer relatives than the Max Planck Society had calculated: respondents from Germany had an average of 1.2 biological siblings and 4.2 cousins.

Early bonds

The relationships with cousins on the mother’s side were closer than with those on the father’s side. A study from the United States confirms this finding. The reason for that is that mothers are probably better at maintaining family ties than fathers.

It is therefore worthwhile for parents to organize get-togethers with their siblings’ children from a young age — more often than at annual family celebrations.

“At a young age, contact between cousins is mediated by their mothers and fathers,” says family researcher Hank. “The more often the children run around in the garden together, the higher the likelihood that they will develop a bond with one another.”

Regular contact from an early age can lead to deeper relationships in adulthood, regardless of the degree of kinship. That is what Hank found in his research on step-siblings: the earlier children became part of one another’s lives, the more often they stayed in contact as adults.

Cousins to count on

Maybe you don’t call your cousins every week, but perhaps you catch up once a month, as a 2009 Finnish study found. Maybe they aren’t the first people you contact if you’ve been robbed on vacation.

“And yet cousins expand the net that catches you when you need support,” says Hank. You can ask your cousin who works in insurance for help if you have problems with a claim — even if you don’t have a close emotional relationship — or call your cousin from Dresden if you’re feeling a bit lonely during your exchange semester.

In a study from New York, one in four respondents said they had spoken to their cousins, uncles and aunts more often during the pandemic.

For only children, cousins can be even more crucial as they age.

The fewer cousins we have, the fewer people we can count on in life, and the smaller our buffer against loneliness becomes — especially in old age, when grandparents, parents, aunts and uncles are gone.

For only children, cousins can be even more crucial as they age. The Finnish study found that boomer-generation women without siblings had more contact with their cousins than those with brothers and sisters. Yet that wasn’t the case for younger generations, likely because the average age of the group was 36 — prime family-raising years, when there’s little time to keep up with extended family.

But at some point, the children move out. Many marriages end in divorce. Friends are lost in the rush hour of life. When that happens, you might just find yourself reaching for your phone and dialing your cousin’s number.