As a generation of Americans and Europeans with fewer siblings than their predecessors in turn has fewer children than previous generations, the result is that today’s children often have no cousins, or very few. Timothy Carney comments on the results:

Historically, in the West and elsewhere, cousins, along with aunts and uncles, have played crucial roles in family life. . . . “It takes a village,” as a wise woman once said, “to raise a child.” That’s an old African proverb. Historically, the “village” was extended family, capacious both vertically (spanning generations) and horizontally. In other words, the village is largely cousins.

Ask a modern parent which days involve the least supervision of his or her children, and it’s those holidays when little Bobby and Sue are too busy playing with their cousins to ask for anything. If we want happier children and less anxious parents, we need to save the cousin.

The decline of the cousin connects to another phenomenon Carney remarked upon a few weeks earlier: “a rising tide” of claims in advice columns, magazine articles, and so forth that “being expected to care for other people is traumatic or even harmful.” In particular, the argument has been made that it’s “vaguely sexist” to ask an older daughter to care for a younger sibling.

Reacting to the White House’s proposal for Gaza, John Podhoretz asks the question on everyone’s mind:

Is this all a fantasy? Maybe. But are any of the other ludicrous and cockamamie ideas being floated for the future of the area any less fantastical?

A Palestinian state in the wake of October 7—and in the wake of the scenes of Gazans mobbing the Jewish hostages with bloodlust in their eyes as they were being led to the vehicles to take them back into the bosom of their people? Biden foreign-policy domos Jake Sullivan and Tony Blinken were still talking about this in the wake of their defeat in ludicrous lunchtime discussions with the Financial Times, thus reminding the world of what it means when fundamentally silly, unserious, and embarrassingly incompetent people are given the levers of power for a while. For they should know what I know and what I suspect you know too: there will be no Palestinian state if these residents of Gaza are the people who will form the political nucleus of such a state.

Some form of UN management/leadership in the wake of the hostilities? Well, that might sound good to people who have been paying no attention to the fact that United Nations officials have been, at the very best, complicit in hostage-taking and torture in facilities run by UNRWA, the agency responsible for administering Gaza.

And blubber not to me about the displacement of Gazans from their home. We’ve been told not that Gaza is their home but that it is a prison. Trump is offering Gazans a way out of prison; do they really want to stay in prison? Or does this mean it never really was a prison in the first place?