Kin: The Future of Family

Readers can find refuge from today’s world of “near-constant tragedy and disaster” in a fortifying network of close relationships, according to this thought-provoking study from cartoonist Lucido Johnson (Many Love). Contending that the nuclear family is no longer sufficient to meet the demands of the modern world, she proposes a more expansive notion of “kinships,” relationships that “blur the line between friend and family” and “benefit the lives of all people from all backgrounds.” Examples include neighbors gathering to make a community meal and unrelated adults sharing in childcare. Lucido Johnson offers strategies for forming kinships, as well as for setting boundaries and dealing with rejection when a friend refuses to help. She backs up her argument with studies that point to loneliness as a possible cause for declines in mental and physical health. But in framing kinship as the way of the future, she overlooks a number of similar past experiments—such as hippie communes in North America and Europe in the 1960s and the communal childcare and housing reforms in the USSR starting in the 1920s—the results of which now seem less than ideal. Still, it’s an intriguing perspective on what makes a family. Illus. (Nov.)