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Personal Perspectives
Kissing Cousins of the Childless and Childfree
Personal Perspective: Parents and non-parents can form family trees of affinity.
Posted March 4, 2025 Reviewed by Margaret Foley
Key points
- Kissing cousins are people outside our immediate family structure we can learn from.
- Parents often share stories that bear striking resemblance to both childless and childfree experiences.
- Sharing similar-enough experiences offers potential for powerful connection.
Whenever I see a genealogy chart—the kind with names, dates, and lines connecting the generations—my eye always moves to the names that form the end of their branch on the family tree. The ones who didn’t have children.
What’s their backstory? How did they craft their lives and integrate their circumstances? In my own family branch, I’m the only one who doesn’t have children. If I go back to my grandparents’ generation, many branches on the Kaufmann family tree end with no names below, just like mine. I even knew some of these great-aunts and uncles, though I was a small child at the time.
Our language is lacking when referencing those who don’t have children. Current terms relate to our relationship to the children we don’t have, not to one another. Childless implies a loss, the desire for kids unfulfilled. Childfree suggests a liberation, a chosen circumstance. Rarely in life is the distinction this stark, with many of us shifting between the polarities over the course of our lifetimes.
I’m more interested in our shared circumstances and how we might expand our networks of relatedness. But there isn't a word that describes who we are relationally distinct from progeny or the lack thereof.
Then the term “kissing cousins” popped into my head. A kissing cousin is defined as “one that is closely related in kind to something else.” Bingo. That’s just what I was looking for. In terms of life experiences, others like me could be considered my kissing cousins. I like that. It feels downright familial.
How far does the kissing cousin branch extend? What about parents whose adult kids will never have kids? Or their only child died, and with that loss, their branch on the family tree ends. Some have adult children they rarely or never see due to physical or emotional distance. The kissing cousin clan might offer an affinity group of sorts for those of us living outside the mainstream of traditional family status.
While we may not share a biological lineage with our kissing cousins, we can exchange insights about crafting lives of meaning and purpose, whatever the circumstances surrounding our not having kids or grandkids. In a culture that's high on family, a parallel lineage of kissing cousins could offer connection and familiarity.
As I’ve become an advocate for increased understanding of the childfree/less demographic, I’ve experienced both the surprise and the privilege of being approached by all kinds of kissing cousins. They want to know how life might unfold for them in the wake of their differing circumstances that yield overlapping life challenges and opportunities.
They tell me about a son in prison, the only way they know he’s safe. A mother shares her piercing grief after her only daughter’s funeral, when a neighbor said they should have had more than just the one. These parents didn’t choose their fates, and they may find common ground with the childless, who likewise didn’t choose theirs. They can become kissing cousins.
The childless understand that grieving must be endured. Acceptance takes time to grapple with. Countless forms of hurtful comments will be launched in their direction, and the childless can offer responses that deflect or reframe. They can tell them it’s OK not to go to baby showers, or they can sit at their side, holding their hand till an opportune time to leave arises. They can share comforting rituals for the emptiness of loss and joy at breakthroughs.
Other mothers and fathers confess they weren’t suited to parenthood. Time management and the incessant nature of caring for children brought to light realities for which they were ill-prepared and unreconciled. These parents wholeheartedly support their now-grown sons and daughters’ decisions not to have kids themselves. Bridges can be built between generations of kissing cousins because of their truncated lineages.
The childfree understand this perspective, too. They have practice dismissing unsolicited judgments from enthusiastic parents. They can offer creative approaches to designing futures that don’t involve progeny. They forge cross-generational connections. And if their own parents are pestering them to make grandbabies, these parents-once-removed can become allies and translators for their childfree kissing cousins.
When we welcome others with similar-enough experiences into our lineage of kissing cousins, we open the potential for powerful connection. It doesn’t matter much who reaches out to whom. All we need to do is recognize that we’re related to one another through our different life circumstances.
