• @davehtaylor@beehaw.org
    5•5 months ago

    The writing here is so strange.

    “Canadian children nowadays have fewer cousins than previous generations,” said Rania Tfaily, an associate professor in sociology at Carleton University in Ottawa who studies social demography and contemporary changes in marriage and family formation.

    Well yeah, because we already established that people are having fewer children in general. Fewer children = fewer relatives those children might have.

    “However, what is striking nowadays is not just that the number of cousins is declining but also that an increasing number of children are growing up with no or very few cousins.”

    This sentence is so ridiculously circular. “There’s fewer cousins, so more children have fewer cousins.” Yeah, no shit.

    I stg the whole thing is so redundant and circular it feels like it’s AI generated.

    But just to touch on the ostensible meat of this article: it sounds like an echo of panics about population decline overall. No, the world isn’t ending because people are having fewer children and smaller families.

    Issues of socialization are not due to family size, they’re due to an extremely Individualistic and isolated society that has destroyed any sense of community, has destroyed nearly all third spaces, and made getting to know neighbors and being part of a community nearly impossible.

  • AutoTL;DRBEnglish
    1•5 months ago

    🤖 I’m a bot that provides automatic summaries for articles:

    Click here to see the summary

    They were a range of ages and had what seemed like a world of experiences, always ready to teach her to skateboard or swim, help carry heavy boxes, play with her on camping trips or have her back in school in North Delta, B.C.

    The composition of family networks is also expected to change, with grandparents and great-grandparents living longer, but the number of cousins, nieces and nephews declining, the authors noted.

    “Canadian children nowadays have fewer cousins than previous generations,” said Rania Tfaily, an associate professor in sociology at Carleton University in Ottawa who studies social demography and contemporary changes in marriage and family formation.

    This is a key factor in the cousin decline, said Prof. Yue Qian, an associate professor of sociology at the University of British Columbia whose research focuses on social demography.

    For example, she said, research shows that Black single mothers often rely on their extended kin for various types of support; gender and sexual minority adults face much higher levels of parental rejection.

    “If our society and culture celebrate and value developing close friendships and communities and building family we choose to a greater extent, we may not need to worry about a cousin decline so much.”

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