The Forgotten Kin: Aunts and Uncles - by Robert M. Milardo

Abstract

The Forgotten Kin: Aunts and Uncles. Robert M. Milardo. New York: Cambridge University Press. 2009. 246 pp. ISBN 0521516761. $85.00 cloth. During the World War II era, Parsons (1943) published a seminal paper portraying a constrained view of family, limited to marital couples raising children. Family science took hold of the perspective and has found it difficult to move beyond it. Indeed, more than 80% of studies published in family science journals in the late 1990s focused on romantic ties and/or young children and parents (Fingerman & Hay, 2002). Yet the lay public widely recognizes the role of other kin in their lives. Indeed, people list aunts and uncles and nieces and nephews as among their most important social partners (Fingerman, Hay, & Birditt, 2004). Robert Milardo has begun to fill this gaping hole in family science with his intriguing volume, 7Ae Forgotten Kin: Aunts and Uncles. The book provides an in-depth analysis of relationships between aunts and uncles and their nieces and nephews. Milardo conducted extensive interviews with 104 volunteers from Maine and New Zealand. Although his sample spans two continents, Milardo did not make cross-cultural comparisons; rather, his objective was to recruit a wide array of examples of ties. The aunts and uncles reported on nieces and nephews across die life course and provided a rich and heterogeneous examination of kinship ties. For the sake of simplifying the design to allow for an in-depth analysis, the book focused specifically on gender-similar dyads, aunts and nieces as well as uncles and nephews. Notably, English has no gender-neutral terms for kinship ties involving a sibling's children. Milardo did not explicitly make this point in the book, but his selection of dyads responds to these linguistic contingencies. The book includes nine chapters covering functions that aunts and uncles serve. The first chapter situates the importance of aunts and uncles in the family science literature; this is not an easy task when a topic has been all but ignored. Milardo accomplishes his goal by taking theories addressing other family relationships and contexts - such as solidarity theory and generativity - and applying them to aunts and uncles. Chapters 2 and 3 introduce the study. Chapter 2 includes tables describing the participants who varied in age, marital status, parental status, and sexual orientation. Chapter 3 provides more details regarding the nature of the relationships, contact, and parameters of the relationships. Despite the purported mobility of American adults, most adults live within 50 miles of where they grew up and have sisters or brothers who do the same (Lin & Rogerson, 1995). This trend is even more apparent in New Zealand. Thus, Milardo is able to report on nearly two thirds of his sample who have frequent contact with their aunt, uncle, niece, or nephew. The remaining six chapters present a comprehensive analysis that more accurately conveys the full terrain of family relationships than me constrained views of spouses, parents, and children pervasive in family science. In these chapters, Milardo presents compelling stories to illustrate key themes that arose in the interviews. Chapter 4 explores the roles of aunts and uncles in substituting or supplementing the role of parents. The vivid examples include instances in which an adult is childless or has lost a parent as a result of divorce or absence. These situations call to mind the flexibility of the individual in forging ties that meet basic needs for emotional connection in the family, both in crises and in everyday life. We can see examples of making otherwise invisible family ties visible in our own lives. For example, a graduate student in sociology at Purdue University uses a photograph of her nieces and nephews as a screen saver. When she is not actively engaged in scholarly work, they pop up and remind her of kin who are otherwise forgotten, according to Milardo. …