A falling birth rate means fewer cousins, and I find that sad

The bonus of having cousins was always having someone to socialise with at family gatherings. But for future generations it may be different, writes Sarah Catherall.

My favourite cousin was a year older than me and I wanted so desperately to be like her. Rose, or Cousy as I called her and still do, is one of my earliest memories. We were the second and third cousins out of 23 cousins on Mum’s side, and whenever there was a family event, Cousy was there. She called me Cousy too, and to this day, it’s the nickname we use for each other.

As young girls, we sat in her sweltering Hawkes Bay bedroom and played with our paper dolls. Her mother, my aunt, tried to lure us outside but we refused, pulling the curtains closed as we created imaginary worlds.

We got older and sang and danced Abba hits in my living room, turning salt and pepper shakers into microphones. Even though I was the blonde one and she was brunette, she was older than me so she got to choose which Abba star she would be, and she naturally chose to be Agnetha, while I mimicked the darker Frida.

Our boyfriends, later, were the Chips stars, and she got to choose the more handsome Ponch and I fell in love with geeky Jon.

My closest sibling was five years younger than me, which as a child felt like a generation, and I had another even younger sister.

I looked up to Cousy, who was funny and defiant, breaking rules and always speaking up for herself in ways I couldn’t because I was shy and compliant. In my teens, she stayed for the weekend and invited her boyfriend and his punk friends over to our Napier house to hang out when my parents were absent. I tasted gin for the first time when Cousy poured it into a glass and insisted I try it.

Cousy is one of my 18 living cousins on my maternal side (two have sadly passed away), and I also have seven living cousins on my paternal side. Sprinkled in our family tree were the second cousins we occasionally saw too, and the second and third cousins once removed.

I thought everyone had plenty of first cousins like I did, but that’s not the case, and our declining birth rate – 1.6 births per Pākehā woman – means there is now what is being called the great cousin decline. Add to this 45% of families currently have only one child, according to Statistics New Zealand. So today’s Kiwi kids born into Pākehā and Asian families are more likely to spend time with a great-grandparent than play in the backyard with lots of cousins.

The bonus of having cousins was that there was always someone to socialise with at every family gathering. My mother, aunts and uncles got us all together for Christmases, birthdays, and other family events and we each had a cousin or two around our age.

Now we’re in our fifties, Cousy and I might only catch up a couple of times a year, but she is the one I ring if I need advice – in my twenties about health dramas, and more recently about my ageing father, her uncle. When we get together, it’s like soaking in a warm bath: she’s funny and wise, and being with her feels safe and easy.

Just as I thought everyone had lots of cousins, I also expected they were special like Cousy and some of my other cousins. But Professor Paul Spoonley, a Massey University demographer, tells me that cousins can be besties and they can be strangers. They can live around the corner and you don’t know them, or they can live far away and you regularly gather for fun and festive times you never forget.

Older cousins guide younger ones; city cousins swoop in and share their worlds with rural cousins. What they share are family members, and possibly values. “If cousins are geographically close and accessible, there’s a very different dynamic. Not quite siblings, not quite friends. They occupy a very interesting role.’’

Cousin data is lax in New Zealand, but he thinks we’re similar to Canada, where a study looked at family structures during the 1950s baby boom, when a typical 35-year-old woman had 20 living cousins. By 2095, the same study predicts a 35-year-old Canadian woman will only have five cousins. The fertility decline and the fact women often only have one child mean the cousin pool is shrinking, he tells me.

In Pākehā and Asian families, our family trees will increasingly change shape over the next decades. Some children will have few cousins, aunts and uncles – and possibly none at all - but they’ll grow up with grandparents and probably great-grandparents.

Māori (1.97 children per woman) and Pasifika (2.03) birth rates aren’t dropping at the same rate, and they’re more likely to have traditional family structures peppered with cousins, aunts and uncles. In Māori families, children often grow up with their cousins, like Taika Waititi who once said fellow filmmaker Tweedie Waititi was more like a sibling than a cousin.

In my world, I had more cousins than most of my friends but Clare Bowden, the owner of Mandatory Clothing, was also born in 1969, and the poor thing grew up without a single cousin. Her parents were born in the late 1920s and they were both only children which was rare at the time. When they married, they resolved to have a big family, and she is the youngest of six, born when her mother was 40.

Her family lived rurally, in Tutukaka, near Whangārei, and one of Clare’s memories is of the summer holidays when her school friends and rural neighbours had cousins visiting from the city. She felt like she was missing out. She also missed out having aunts and uncles – another joy in my life, as I love mine.

“The houses we loved to visit filled up with people who knew them well. We were on our own with mum and dad and grandparents, in our tiered age range. Cousins of similar ages looked a lot of fun,’’ she says.

Cousins are fun, and I’m a huge fan of big family events, where the only thing that really matters is the company: who cares what food and drink is served, or whether someone’s living room has been vacuumed.

I’m a bit sad that over the decades, cousins – along with aunts and uncles - might become a rare species.

Sarah Catherall lives in Wellington and is the author of How to Break Up Well: Surviving and Thriving After Separation.