Cousin shrinkage

[blythely]

Cousins are disappearing. Is this reshaping the experience of childhood?
Families are narrowing worldwide, according to a new study, and cousins are dwindling.

I have so many professional anthropological thoughts about this, but the one that weighs most on my mind is that this demographic shift has the potential to hasten the end of existing interesting variety in kinship terminology. And thus one of the most intriguingly-variable phenomena in human culture--one of the things whose diversity sparked the entire field of anthropology--may flatten and homogenise and shrink in the next few generations.