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If you’re a millennial, chances are a core memory is getting together with all the cousins to prepare a living room concert for the grown ups.
A large cousin circle was for many of us a huge childhood influence.
However, could that all be disappearing and more people make the choice to not become parents? In a TikTok, Kelsey Meyers, threw the question out, and blew the topic wide open.
“So different to how I grew up”
“Do you guys ever think about how us millennials are really the last generation of growing up with a ton of cousins?” Kelsey asks.
“For the most part our kids, they’re not growing up with the amount of cousins that we did.”
She says she has plenty of cousins on both sides of her family; so many she’s lost count. It’s a stark difference to the dynamic her children have with their small group of cousins.
My kids have two cousins on one side and three cousins on the other side. That’s really probably all they’re going to get. That is just so different to how I grew up.”
Kelsey explains how she’d often spend her weekends at different aunts and uncles houses, playing with her cousins.
“We were just always running around together. There was always somebody to hang out with. Always somebody to play with.”
She also thinks there was a lot more trust placed among the kids, specifically the older ones.
“It was just expected that the older kids kind of had an eye on the other younger kids. Which would really be instead of keeping an eye out for each other, we were just really getting into s**t we weren’t supposed to,” she laughed.
Kelsey adds it’s just not the same for children being raised by millennials; “It’s just so much smaller than what it was when we were kids.”
“My kids have ZERO cousins”
Kelsey says she notices it even more around the holiday periods. “It was just so chaotic. Now the whole family can just eat around one table,” she revealed.
“A great example of what it was like would be the movie Home Alone. Nowadays you couldn’t even imagine missing one of your children, but back then there were so many f***ing kids running around and the parents were really not paying attention. Not realizing that you’re missing a kid was a lot easier to do back in the 80s and 90s.”
Kelsey’s comments section was in agreement with her observations.
“My kids have ZERO cousins. ZERO!” one viewer wrote.
“We had like 60 people at a Christmas party. Now? 15 would be generous,” another agreed.
“My daughter has no first cousins! Her only cousins are like my cousins’ kids,” a third added.
We asked the Kidspot team, and one of them revealed her children have no first cousins, as one of her siblings is holding out for the right person to have kids with, and the other doesn’t want children.
But two other team members reported their kids have multiple first cousins – attributing that to being of ethnic origin, where “larger families are the norm.”
Read the full article here
