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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.