Our families are becoming smaller, which means we're heading into the "great cousin decline." Here's what it means for the next generation.
When I was growing up, holidays and celebrations were always happily jam-packed with my big Italian family: kids running around, adults telling stories and laughing, and everyone gobbling up way too much food. Now that I’m grown and have my own family, our holidays are a bit more subdued, with fewer people. Why? The reason has been dubbed “the great cousin decline.”
My dad had 25 first cousins; my mom, 19. I have nine. My kids have six (thankfully, my sister-in-law had four kids, otherwise that number would be even smaller). I admit I’m nostalgic for the cousin-filled family life of my childhood. “I’m also thinking about all the amazing lasagna you must have had,” Pamela J. Smock, PhD, a demographer and sociologist at the University of Michigan, said when I told her about my experience. “Cousins hold a place in our cultural imagination, just like big families do.”
But on a larger scale, what implications does having fewer cousins mean for society—and the world at large? Smock suggests trying this calculation out on your own family tree: If your grandparents had one fewer child, how would that reduce the number of cousins you’d have? For some people, that would mean halving their number of first cousins … or erasing it entirely.
I asked Smock more about the role cousins play in our lives and what it will be like with the dwindling number of extended family members in the great cousin decline.
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Just how many fewer cousins do we have today than in the past?
There isn’t one simple number for how many fewer cousins we have today, Smock says. “Comparing birth cohorts of people born in 1950, 1960 [and] 2000, there are many fewer cousins, and there’s a growth in people with only one cousin,” she says. “This is a global phenomenon.”
One recent study projected that a 65-year-old woman in 2095 will have 25 living relatives, whereas a 65-year-old woman in 1950 would have had 41 living kin, a 38% global decline.
Another effect of losing cousins is that although we have fewer relatives “horizontally” within our generation), we have more “vertically” (multiple generations) because people are living longer. “The population as a whole will age, so we have more and more people in the older age groups,” Smock says. “We’re extending lives, but there will be more of a care burden on people in the working age group, which is getting smaller.”
To test how the cousin decline works, Smock imagined that each set of her grandparents had one less child. “As it is, I only have eight cousins, and if each side had one fewer child, I would only have four cousins,” she says.
What’s behind the great cousin decline?
This question has an easier explanation. “Why is this happening? It’s just a very simple reason—because of declining birth rates,” Smock says. “As we have fewer children, that will translate directly into having fewer cousins.”
And what’s behind the slowing birth rate? Well, a bunch of factors influence those stats, but some of the biggest drivers include the four below.
People are getting married and having children later
During the post–World War II baby boom, the common age of marriage was low, at 19 or 20 years old, so people had more children, Smock says. Now, it’s over 30 for men and almost 29 for women. “The age of marriage has increased dramatically, and it’s higher than it’s ever been,” she says.
Smock points out that a common time to have kids is after you’re married. So delaying marriage often goes hand in hand with delaying pregnancy.
Having fewer children—or none at all—is destigmatized
It’s not as big a deal in today’s society to have fewer children or to decide to live child-free. “We have decreased the stigma of childlessness and the one-child family—there was the thinking that, ‘Oh, we can’t just have one child, right?'” Smock says. “That’s becoming less of an issue.”
Children are expensive
In the current economy, having children and raising a family is unaffordable for many Americans. Are both parents working? Child care is increasingly expensive. Do you need a bigger place for your growing brood? Housing prices are through the roof. Even basic groceries cost more than they have in years past.
And as Smock points out, that’s only the half of it. “The other issue is that students now have a lot of debt,” she says. “In [research] interviews, they said they don’t feel ready to get married until they get rid of all their student debt, and sometimes that stacks up to be a lot of money.”
More women are working outside the home
“We have the expansion of education and occupations and career-orientation among women,” Smock says. “Women now outpace men in terms of college degrees.” This means that women often want to become established in their careers before they have children.
“Demographers have known for a long time that childbearing delayed can translate into childbearing foregone,” Smock says. “You may end up not having the number of children that you desired.”
But let’s not make this women’s fault. It’s really on society as a whole. “Women want their jobs and careers, but most of them are remaining the primary child caregiver, so then have to do the entire ‘second shift’ of all the domestic labor at home—men have not stepped up to do those things typically, on average,” Smock says. “Women are overloaded, so how many kids can you have in that kind of situation?”
How do our cousins shape our childhood and who we become?
It’s clear how siblings can shape our lives and the way we grow up, but it’s more difficult to define the role cousins play, both when we’re kids and when we’re adults.
“We know more what to expect from a sibling in terms of help or social support, especially as we get older, but with cousins, on the other hand, there’s a lot of flexibility,” Smock says. “There’s a lot of variation in how strong the bond is.”
This is partly because extended families are much more spread out geographically than they used to be. “I teach sociology in the family, and I ask my students to write down who they consider to be in their family, and they always include the cousins they see,” she says. “It’s really the interaction that provides the basis for that kind of friendship and actual family relationship to continue into the future.” Cousins you don’t see have less of a role to play in your life.
Cousins also become more important as we get older and become the eldest generation, even if we do have to make more of an effort to keep the relationship going. “It might be the cousins who hold the family traditions together,” Smock says.
What makes the cousin relationship so significant?
We often hear that “cousins are our first friends,” and that is certainly true for some families who live near one another. Even though my kids have only six cousins, they see them fairly frequently, and so they’re close.
There’s something special about the bond, a sense of closeness and shared family history, minus the headbutting that can happen with a sibling you see every day. Together, you and your cousins are the keepers of family memories and traditions. And while they may not know you the way a sibling does, they often understand you in a way friends can’t—and they’re part of your clan for life.
The cousin relationship is so unique that the thought of it can bring about a sentimental remembrance for a time that might not have even existed for you personally: big family vacations, summers at the lake or beach, Christmas dinners, New Year’s Eve sleepovers. “For me, it’s sort of a fantasy,” Smock says. “I wish I had a ton of cousins whose names I couldn’t even remember.”
Has the role of cousins changed throughout history?
Throughout history, cousins may have played a slightly different part in the family structure. “Given how high mortality rates were in the past, say in the 1700s or 1800s, my supposition is that cousins would have played an important role because you could not expect all your children to live to adulthood,” Smock says. “You had a lot of kids because you’re making up for the fact that some of them are going to die; so in that case, I do believe that cousins would have played a more important role in those family systems.”
Our ancestors didn’t just have more cousins. They were likely closer to them too—literally. People didn’t move to the far reaches of the Earth (or from Louisville to Los Angeles or London), which meant they were in closer proximity to their cousins.
In general, today’s families aren’t as big or as localized as in times past. “I think there’s more of a sense of being in a silo than there used to be,” Smock says. As the role of the extended family has declined and the nuclear family has taken over, cousins, aunts and uncles don’t always hold as much importance in our social structure.
What does the future hold for cousins?
The future of cousins isn’t all bleak. Even though families are smaller, a 2022 Pew Research survey found that just over half (55%) of Americans live within an hour’s drive of at least some extended family members, and an overwhelming majority of people polled say living near family is important to them. So if you want to have a stronger relationship with your cousins, and they with you, you can make it happen. “You have to opt in,” Smock says.
For those who don’t live close to family, cherished relationships or “found family” don’t have to be defined by shared DNA. “Some people are making efforts to name their friends as part of their family—my niece had a Friendsgiving,” she says.
Part of a response to the great cousin decline may be to bring in people we’re not related to and actively form family-like relationships. “In some cultures, and I’m sure this has been true historically, I can say to somebody I’m not related to, ‘You are my cousin,’ and they will say, ‘You are my cousin,’ and then we will believe that and behave as cousins,” Smock says. “There’s no reason that can’t happen.”
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Sources:
- Pamela J. Smock, demographer and sociologist at the University of Michigan; phone interview, Nov. 11, 2025
- PNAS: “Projections of human kinship for all countries”
- Adolescents: “Close but Not Too Close? A Qualitative Study of How U.S. Emerging Adults Describe Their Cousin Relationships”
- Demography: “The Swedish Kinship Universe: A Demographic Account of the Number of Children, Parents, Siblings, Grandchildren, Grandparents, Aunts/Uncles, Nieces/Nephews, and Cousins Using National Population Registers”
- Pew Research Center: “More than half of Americans live within an hour of extended family”
- Mathematical Population Studies: “Beyond household walls: the spatial structure of American extended kinship networks”
- Social Forces: “Social Support in America: Stratification and Trends in Access over Two Decades”
- Socius: Sociological Research for a Dynamic World: “Communication with Kin in the Wake of the COVID-19 Pandemic”
