Which of the following was a relatively common form of polygamy in the nineteenth century

This paper is the second in a pair documenting changes over the past century in the meaning and practice of kinship in the family system of Western societies with industrialized economies. The first paper reviewed the history of kinship studies in anthropology and especially sociology, where the study of kinship had at one time been a prominent context for understanding the workings of the Western family system (Furstenberg, 2020). This companion paper shifts the focus to the recent research explorations of kinship in alternative family forms, those that depart from the standard nuclear family structure that has been the prevailing model for the past several centuries (Goode, 1963) – defined as a heterosexual legally married couple with any co-residing children in the same household (Grady, 2016; Smith, 1993). Our research suggests that this model continues to have a considerable normative hold in Western societies despite significant diversification of family forms during the past half century. Kinship construction and kin practices have not received adequate attention by family scholars in either the standard nuclear family discussed in the previous paper or in the various new alternative family structures – the topic of this paper.

In the final third of the last century, scholars began to turn away from the study of kinship, previously a vibrant area of family sociology. There was, as discussed in greater detail by Furstenberg (2020), intellectual disenchantment by anthropologists in the wake of David M. Schneider’s 1984 powerful critique of kinship as a social construction rather than a structural feature of societies. Family sociologists were generally persuaded that extended kin beyond the nuclear household – parents and their biological or adopted children – play a relatively trivial role in the lives of people in Western societies (Parsons, 1954). Evidence presented in Furstenberg (2020), however, suggests otherwise.

Extended kin have a prominent role in family life beyond the nuclear household and its immediate lineal extensions – biological grandparents (upward) and grandchildren (downward) (Furstenberg, 2020). It appears that ties among collateral relatives – adult siblings and their children – are much more important than is commonly acknowledged by family sociologists (Furstenberg, 2020; Ganjour & Widmer, 2016). In part, this is because of the persistent neglect of the ceremonial role that families perform to mark important life-course transitions and holidays. On such occasions, families perform rituals that create and maintain bonds of diffuse solidarity. Extended kin are also called upon to provide material and emotional support in times of need and provide such assistance at times (Daw, Verdery, & Margolis, 2016). Beyond the examination of intergenerational exchange between biological parents and their children and grandchildren, relatively few studies have investigated how extended kin are involved in the lives of contemporary, two-biological-parent households (Furstenberg, 2020). A large void remains in our understanding of how kinship operates as a supportive and protective context for the householdbased nuclear family. As this paper demonstrates, this observation is even more fitting when it comes to the study of alternative family forms.

Furstenberg (2020) described what we know about kinship relations in the nuclear family in the West – or at least what many social scientists used to consider to be the normative form. In the middle of the last century, when many empirical studies on kinship were undertaken, the nuclear family was so prevalent and normatively hegemonic that alternative forms attracted relatively little interest from researchers. Even families formed after divorce and remarriage were portrayed as reverting back to the normative model of the family without much consideration of their distinctive features (Furstenberg, 1980). A more comprehensive approach to the study of kinship in Western families that includes the varied family forms that have emerged over the past several decades is needed.

In popular discourse on the family, commentators frequently fail to acknowledge that the Western family has continually been changing as economic, demographic, social, and cultural standards shift. For example, the cultural ideal of the nuclear family did not take hold in the West until the end of the 19th century when mortality rates began to plummet and it became less common for children to lose one or both of their parents by the time they reached adulthood (Lasch, 1977). Households were also more complex before the 20th century, frequently including extended kin, boarders, and multiple generations, alongside frequent marital abandonment (Modell, Hareven, & Modell, 1973). Over time, life expectancy of parents increased and what has been termed the “golden age” of the so-called traditional family emerged (Carter & Glick, 1976). By the final third of the 20th century, family forms were again changing with the rapid expansion of legal divorce and remarriage. Recently, the rise in consensual unions and nonmarital childbearing have become alternative family formation routes circumventing formal marriage, divorce, and remarriage among a large fraction of young couples in many Western nations (Seltzer, 2000).

Since the final decades of the last century, the prevailing nuclear model began to share the stage with alternative forms of the family, both in the United States and in most other Western nations with industrialized economies (Bengtson, 2001; Cherlin, 2012; Popenoe, 1993). Family scholars began extensively examining causes and consequences of changes in the institution of marriage (Amato et al., 2007; Manning, Longmore, & Giordano, 2007). There is little disagreement that the cultural ideal of the nuclear family has receded in the face of growing tolerance for an increasing variety of living arrangements that involve non-nuclear families. True, ideological battles continue to this day over the legitimacy (often framed as efficacy) of various family forms, but we should be past the time when politicians were advocating a restoration of the nuclear family based as it was on a heterosexual marriage, gender-based division of labor, and biological parenthood (Furstenberg, 2020).

We regard the changes over the past half century as a diversification of family types rather than a replacement of the nuclear form. Nuclear families continue to represent the preferred family form for many in the West, even though an ever-declining portion of the population resides in two-biological-parent households. Cultural acceptance of alternative structures such as same-sex marriage, intimate partnerships outside of marriage, and shared parenting across households has increased in most if not all nations with high-income economies and a growing number of low-and middle-income countries where the nuclear family had never been the ideal (Thornton et al., 2014; Thornton & Young-DeMarco, 2001). Alternative forms of the family have been gradually, sometimes reluctantly, accepted resulting in changing social practices, laws, and public policy that define and support the family system. Recognizing that family is, first and foremost a cultural construction, we do not limit our recognition of family to those with whom people have a blood or legal tie, instead embracing all the relationships that people consider to be kin including informal adoption and voluntary kin.

Many family forms discussed in this paper have existed for centuries and were probably even more common in the distant past than they are today. This is certainly the case for common-law or consensual unions and nonmarital childbearing, which may have been the standard practice prior to the popularization of marriage by the Catholic Church in the 15th Century (Castro-Martin & Dominguez-Rodriguez, 2016; Glendon, 1989). That said, some of the alternative family forms discussed in this paper, specifically legally and socially recognized same-sex marriages, and families created by assisted reproductive technology (ART), are truly novel and could not have been easily contemplated until the final decades of the 20th century. ART includes the set of assisted fertility treatments that handle both eggs and sperm. In this review, ART encompasses practices such as sperm donation from a known or unknown donor, traditional surrogacy (the surrogate uses her own eggs), and gestational surrogacy (the surrogate carries an embryo produced by in vitro fertilization, IVF).

This paper has three objectives. First, we aim to create a broad theoretical classification that encompasses the myriad family forms that emerged in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. Second, we provide a broad review of studies that addressed issues of kinship within new family forms, trying to tease out how kinship is constructed and practiced in non-nuclear families. Our review points to a large number of novel and unexamined dimensions that arise in novel family arrangements such as how kinship operates in a system that is not only defined by marriage and biological parenthood. Third, given the relative paucity of studies on many new family forms, this paper is intended to stimulate further research on a neglected topic in family sociology.

Our review of kinship in alternative family forms is limited to literature on industrialized nations and the timeframe spans the past half century. We identify three general processes – depicted in Figure 1 – by which alternative families are created, each of which represents a major or minor departure from the nuclear model. The first cluster of alternative family forms comes about through variations of formal marriage or its absence (P1), including sequential marriages, plural marriages, consensual unions, single parenthood, and same-sex marriages and partnerships. The second cluster of variant families is formed as a result of alterations in the reproduction process (P2), when a child is not the product of sexual intercourse between the parents. We include here families created through adoption and the recent innovation of children born through ART. Finally, the third cluster results from the formation of voluntary bonds (P3) that are deemed to be kinship-like, in which affiliation rests on neither biological nor legal basis. These three variations in family formation processes are not mutually exclusive; they can co-occur or overlap as we shall see in many forms that have emerged or become more prominent over the past several decades. Some of the variant forms represent only minor departures from the nuclear model and are presumed to have trivial implications for kinship arrangements and practices. Others create complex kinship structures that radically depart from the nuclear model of bilateral biological kinship (giving equal prominence to the paternal and maternal lines) that has prevailed through the West since its origins (Goody, 1996). Note that by using the descriptive terms simple and complex we do not imply any value judgement. By complex, we simply mean structures that are more elaborate in that they involve a larger array of different types of kinship ties, in a spirit similar to, for instance, Hornstra, Kalmijn, and Ivanova (2020).

Each of the three alternative mechanisms of family formation depicted in Figure 1 has expanded the possibilities for identifying potential kin, largely leaving it up to family members to decide whom to include or exclude as a relative. The Western kinship system offers a great amount of discretion to individuals to define their relatives beyond the nuclear household (Schneider, 1968). This observation becomes especially relevant as we examine the literature on alternative family forms. So too does our finding that family scripts and kinship terms often borrow from or even mirror the vocabulary and parenting practices typically observed in the standard family form in the West. Lacking empirical evidence, however, it is impossible to know a priori how kinship is constructed and enacted in alternative family forms, precisely because rules for constructing kinship are so discretionary. It is necessary, therefore, to turn to the empirical literature on kinship in alternative family forms to discover how individuals faced with defining parents, siblings, grandparents, in-laws, or collateral relatives are actually making decisions of inclusion or exclusion. In these behaviors or practices, it may be possible to derive some general findings about how kinship operates across alternative family forms. Although we will draw some tentative conclusions about similarities and differences in how kinship is being practiced in the concluding section, the literature is not yet sufficiently developed to do more than generate speculations to be examined in future studies.

We draw on empirical studies that explicitly discuss kinship in Western societies, thus confining our review to nations with high-income economies where alternative family forms have become prominent. We used Google Scholar and Web of Science to locate relevant studies. In the interest of inclusivity and exhaustivity, we did not set a required article timeframe but reviewed relevant, theoretical and, especially empirical articles regardless of publication date, though few relevant articles were published before the 1960s, with the majority published in the 1990s and early 2000s. The review primarily focused on family sociology and demography journals (~70 percent), yet also included closely related work published in anthropology (~15 percent), social work (~5 percent), gerontology (~5 percent), and psychology (~5 percent). Also, about 70 percent of studies focused on the United States, while the remaining 30 percent focused on other industrialized Western societies such as Belgium, Italy, Germany, the Netherlands, Norway, and Sweden. We conducted multiple searches on each platform directly targeting non-standard family forms, using such search terms as “cohabitation and kinship,” “same-sex family and kinship,” and “ART and kinship,” among others. These terms were informed by existing literature, such as the companion piece to this article (Furstenberg, 2020). This allowed us to locate articles that not only addressed kinship but also those that were targeted to the particular family form we were exploring. The approach then proceeded gradually and iteratively. Reviewing articles broadly focused on kinship provided the opportunity to search for additional types of non-standard family forms we may not have considered from the outset, such as trans kinship structures. By searching for combinations of kinship and a particular family form, we were able to review specific studies that illuminated the unique kinship structure for that type of family.

After assembling the articles produced by this search, we reviewed each for relevance. We included articles that focused on the formation of kinship ties, excluding those that examined exclusively the family form itself. As observed in Furstenberg (2020), research about family forms is only occasionally treated comparatively, with the single exception of assessing the consequences for children of living in different family forms, a topic that is tangential to our mission. Our aim was to identify studies – or at least discussions – of how kinship was defined and practiced across the array of alternative forms. In all, we were able to identify about 300 papers in which kinship processes were discussed in alternative family forms, though relatively few of these were explicitly devoted to the topic of kinship practices. Enough evidence was assembled to examine some but not all of the possible alternate family forms falling in the three general clusters in Figure 1.

There remain some limitations to our review. First, the proliferation of types of family arrangements exceeds our capacity to review them and therefore it is possible that we have missed some relevant family arrangements. Second, researchers have not invariably paid attention to kinship relations in ways that permit to draw an adequate picture of kinship norms and practices across alternative structures. Third, we have virtually no evidence of how kinship is understood and enacted over time, that is, a developmental lens for examining kinship practices. Indeed, this is largely true even for the standard form, where we found few studies examining kinship constructions and relationships over time. Fourth, despite a few relevant references, we largely leave aside the literature on kinship and aging, whose breadth makes its inclusion intractable in the current review. These issues notwithstanding – which we later address in our research agenda for the future – the challenge of this paper is to glean what we can from a scattering of studies on how members of different family types think about and practice kinship in everyday life.

1a. Sequential marriages

The most common alternative marriage form, sequential marriage (marriage-divorce-remarriage) has long existed in the West. By the end of the 19th century, divorce (and remarriage) had begun rising in the United States, but it was not until the 20th century that it became commonplace (Preston & McDonald, 1979). This was especially true for the United States, where divorce rates have been higher than in other nations for the past century, though the rise of divorce occurred universally in Western nations (Heuveline, Timberlake, & Furstenberg, 2003).

Divorce and remarriage began to attract the interest of family researchers in the 1950s and 1960s (Bernard, 1956; Goode, 1956; 1963), later leading researchers to consider the implications on kinship relations (Anspach, 1976). Anthropologist Paul Bohannan (1970) documented how the transition from one marriage to the next altered kinship bonds with former partners and families while creating ties in new and often complex relationships, what he called a “divorce chain.” Furstenberg (1981) relabeled Bohannon’s construct a “remarriage chain,” suggesting that under certain circumstances – when parents maintained strong connections to their children after divorce – the expanded kin network created through remarriage could benefit children by providing additional supportive relations (multiple grandparents, uncles and aunts, and so on). Later, anthropologist Colleen L. Johnson explored how children constructed family relationships, often creating a complex web of kin ties built upon the successive unions of one or both parents (Johnson, 1988; Johnson, Klee, & Schmidt, 1988). A basic insight is apparent from these early studies: divorce and remarriage do not restore the nuclear family to status quo ante. Though evidence suggests step-relations are generally more difficult to establish than those formed in the standard family form, the process of successive marriage creates not only a “blended” family inside the household, but an expanded kinship structure outside the household. Children may retain relationships with members of their parents’ first marriage as they acquire new relations through their parents’ second (or third) marriages. Old bonds are often severed and new ones may not form, but the complex mixture of kinship relations represents a genuine departure from the standard family form.

Much of the research conducted in the latter decades of the 20th century and the first decades of the 21st that has examined the kinship structures created by divorce and remarriage has delved into how, when, and why kinship bonds are established in so-called “reconstituted” families. Even when families do not fit a standard (nuclear) family form, this model continues to exert influence on family relations, and step-relations are not invariably considered to be relatives by either parents or children (Pew Research Center, 2011), as discussed below.

Constructing family in stepfamilies

As compared to nuclear forms, the process of constructing relations in stepfamilies is influenced by the history of a first relationship. Note that most existing literature on the topic is about heterosexual families. Stepfamilies bring together a multitude of histories that are not shared by parents and children. Particularly with the presence of children from a previous relationship, there is a different matrix of kin with respect to that of the first family configuration, because new ties are built upon the remnants of the former family; new affiliations are mediated by both the residential and non-residential parents, as well as the new partner(s) (Allan, Crow, & Hawker, 2011).

Creating the sense of family “we-ness” necessarily involves a different process than what typically occurs in the nuclear form. Depending on the circumstances, this process is accomplished differently both across and within stepfamilies. For cultural and psychological reasons, family members differ in their capacity to develop a sense of “we-ness,” required for socialization, supervision, and creating a sense of belonging. In a study of re-partnered Swiss mothers, Castrén and Widmer (2015) found that people are more exclusive of others in their concepts of kinship if they have a strong belief in nuclear families, implying that those who do not fill a standard family script, including former stepparents, would be more likely to not be considered as kin.

Forging a common identity among family members does not inevitably occur even in nuclear households, but defining and developing this sense in stepfamilies requires a greater level of effort by family members. Becoming a stepparent opens up the possibility of treating stepchildren like their own – much like in the case of adoption except that non-residential, biological parents may be part of the family system. Similarly, children experience the reverse process of having to develop an attachment to their stepparents that resembles feelings and obligations that they may have (or not) for a biological parent (Hornstra, Kalmijn, & Ivanova, 2020). The parent/child bond is not ascribed at birth; it must be achieved by actions and behaviors (Sanner & Coleman, 2017). This same “developmental” process of family building takes place as well with new grandparents and collateral relatives among children who enter a stepfamily after early childhood.

Stepfamily members are more likely to regard step-relatives as kin when they fill a standard family script. For example, stepmothers in particular may be less likely to view their stepchildren as their “children” or be viewed by them as “parents” or kin because they are less likely to live together, as compared to stepfathers (Whiteside, 1989). Similarly, when they reside with their stepchildren, stepmothers are more likely to regard them as kin (Church, 1999). This has implications for the formation of kinship networks created by divorce and remarriage. Extended family bonds with step-relations outside the household (grandparents and collateral relatives) may not be activated unless connections are actively pursued by a stepparent. As Furstenberg (1981) observed, stepparents and their relations have a stake in forging such bonds. In the absence of efforts to create relations on the stepparents’ side, the family system becomes increasingly unilinear rather than bilateral, especially in the event that bonds with the non-residential father – when present – are weak. When the father’s relationship with his offspring declines, it stands to reason that ties between his children and his parents, siblings, and other extended relations are likely to dissipate as well.

For many step-relations, performing a standard family role, such as providing direct caregiving, increases the likelihood of being seen as kin. When a biological father is uninvolved, a stepfather is more likely to fill that role and claim the stepchild as kin (Marsiglio, 2004). The involved stepfather has an interest in integrating his stepchild into his family system, especially when the biological father is absent. A stepparent’s parents are considered kin by stepgrandchildren when the step-grandparent fills a standard grandparent role (Allan et al., 2011; Chapman, Coleman, & Ganong, 2016). Parents of a stepparent have less of a kin relationship with step-grandchildren, particularly if they were not involved when the child was young, if they do not fill a grandparent-like role, if they do not fill a parental role for the stepparent, or if the children do not live with their stepparent (Allan et al., 2011). These caregiving dynamics are also important for the elderly, who are increasingly likely to have blended families, or remarry later in life after their childrearing years (Carr & Utz, 2020). Sherman, Webster, and Antonucci (2013) found that, for late-life remarriages, adult step-children were significantly more likely to be seen by their stepparents as poor caregivers compared to the caregiving provided by biological children.

The idea that places are fixed by the nuclear model and substitution only occurs with a parent or grandparent vacancy is not entirely accurate. Children occasionally report that they have more than two parents, though they typically draw a distinction between biological parents and stepparents. The distinction is more often dropped in the case of grandparents and other extended kin (Chapman et al., 2016). Children can completely disregard the “step” altogether, reporting that they have more than four grandparents. The empirical literature on how children and their parents balance the rewards and demands of having additional grandparents (not to mention uncles, aunts, and cousins) is under-developed to say the least. With growing tolerance for alternative family forms, there may be greater acceptance of the notion that children can have more than two parents or four grandparents. Similarly, children may come to disregard the “step” in step-relations (uncles, aunts, cousins, etc.).

Influence of the residential parent

Standard scripts for building a stepfamily are absent even with burgeoning how-to literature (Sweeney, 2010). In this family-building process, children are influenced by attitudes and behavior of both biological and stepparents. Among other factors, a mother’s encouragement is a substantial predictor for a stepfather claiming the child (Marsiglio, 2004). Children are much more likely to see a stepparent as kin after divorce if the residential biological parent supports and facilitates that relationship (Castrén & Widmer, 2015; Coleman et al., 2015). In addition, stepchildren are likely to maintain a kinship relationship with stepparents after a divorce (as measured by receiving resources and providing social contact) if they felt the stepparent behaved like a parent during the marriage (Coleman et al., 2015). In the case of step-grandparents, stepgrandchildren are more likely to see them as kin when their parents regard the stepparent as a parent (Chapman et al., 2016). This may be partially explained by children being unable to visit or stay in contact without a parent facilitating that relationship. When biological parents provide information that harms this relationship or does not foster a relationship between a minor child and former stepparent, the child less often considers the former stepparent as kin (Coleman et al., 2015).

Demographic Influences

Particular demographic characteristics, especially gender, appear to impact stepfamily kinship networks. Women more often include others in kinship networks, while men and children more often exclude. Women are gatekeepers to these relationships as they tend to have custody of children and fill traditional gender roles (Castrén & Widmer, 2015). Stepmothers are often expected to provide caregiving to stepchildren in ways not necessarily demanded of stepfathers, and stepfathers tend to be generally less involved in parenting (Allan et al., 2011).

The age of the child and the duration of the relationship with stepparents also matter, suggesting that the feeling of kinship within stepfamilies is a developmental process. Stepparents are more likely to regard a stepchild as kin if they became stepparents when the child was a minor (Suanet, Van Der Pas, & Van Tilburg, 2013). If the stepparent and biological parent divorce when the child is young, or if the relationship began when the child was older, the child less often includes the stepparent as kin (Coleman et al., 2015). Kalmijn (2013) and Becker et al. (2013) both found a significant gap in parental closeness when comparing the relationships biological parents have with biological children and stepparents with stepchildren, though some of this was simply a product of relationship length. Though stepparents may fill a particular role, a kinship connection does not necessarily mean the child considers the stepparent to be equivalent to a biological parent. Schmeeckle et al. (2006) assert that children may see a stepparent as “family” but not as a “parent,” per se. Stepparents were more often seen as “parents” when they were married to the child’s biological parent, they lived with the child, and had been in the child’s life since an early age.

Sibling relationships

While some research combines half- and step-siblings into one category, other research has found this to be problematic. Steinbach and Hank (2018) found that German full siblings interacted more than half- and step-siblings, but half-siblings were as emotionally close as full siblings and closer than step-siblings, illustrating that combining these groups may not capture the intricacies of relationships in complex families. Siblings themselves may not always see the distinction. Very young children had difficulty distinguishing the concept of half- and step-siblings (Beer, 1988). White and Riedmann (1992) discovered that children do consider half- and step-siblings to be kin, though they privilege relationships with full siblings, with whom they interact more. Those who only had half-siblings, as compared to those with both half- and step-siblings, made less of a distinction; half-siblings rarely marked siblings as “half” or “full” (Ahrons, 2006; Anderson, 1999; Ganong & Coleman, 1994). Summarizing the literature on step-sibling relationships, Ganong and Coleman (2017) conclude that step-siblings are not as close as full-siblings and would likely only view each other as siblings if they had lived together for a long period of time. Bernstein (1989) similarly found less time together made the differences between full- and half-siblings more meaningful and half-siblings were less likely to see each other simply as siblings.

1b. Cohabitation and parenthood in the absence of marriage

The recent growth of childbearing outside of marriage has created more variations of the marriage-divorce-remarriage sequence that has become increasingly prevalent over the past several decades in many Western nations. In some nations such as the United States, it is gradually becoming a more common form than sequential marriage because of declining rates of matrimony (Lundberg, Pollak, & Stearns, 2016). At the simplest level, cohabitation can assume a family structure that is only a slight variation of the nuclear family. Biological parents with children can live together in a nuclear-like structure without ever marrying or marrying at a later time. This pattern may create a variation in kinship practices from the standard form, but little kinship research compares these slightly different family forms or the effects of the absence or presence of formal marriage. We do not know, for example, whether marriage affects the acknowledgement of “kinship,” the use of family terms, or the patterns of interaction with extended kin.

When cohabiting unions that produce children do not survive and are followed by a new union by one or both parents, they produce a variation of a family form resembling stepfamilies in that they establish a complex web of kinship that may or may not be acknowledged by its members. In the demographic literature, this family form has come to be referred to as “multi-partnered fertility,” resulting from combinations of marital and non-marital childbearing across unions (Carlson & Furstenberg, 2006; Guzzo, 2014; Guzzo & Furstenberg, 2007).

We can only hypothesize that the timing and stability of partnerships will affect the extent to which kinship bonds develop both inside and outside of the household. When successive cohabitations with children form stable family units, kinship affiliations likely occur, resulting in parent-, sibling-, and extended family-like ties. The earlier this happens and the more stable the union is, the more likely it is to resemble a stepfamily (Sheff, 2010). Conversely, when parents transition in and out of unions rapidly, they probably do not greatly enlarge their own or their children’s kinship networks because there is relatively little time to establish meaningful, emotional connections leading to feelings of obligation and reciprocity. This family form could have a wide scope of potential kin but few of these relationships are likely to result in meaningful, lasting bonds. This form of the family has become common among disadvantaged racial and ethnic minorities who, with increasing frequency, have children across two or more partnerships (Lappegård & Rønsen, 2013; Monte, 2019).

When neither marriage nor cohabitation occurs before or after childbearing, another variant of the family occurs, referred to as parenthood without partnership. There is a robust literature on single parenthood among the highly disadvantaged (Damaske, Bratter, & Frech, 2017; Meier et al., 2016; Stack & Meredith, 2018), though not on the creation of kinship networks. Naming practices (both first names and surnames) were often used to signify and reinforce paternal obligations, if a father was present. Mothers who named their children after the biological father were more likely to retain relations with him through later marriage or through financial support arrangements (Furstenberg & Gordon Talvitie, 1980). How often “single mothers” (or their children) who never cohabit with their partners develop meaningful ties with paternal kin has not been examined. For some unpartnered women, single parenthood is indeed planned (Bock, 2000; Golombok et al., 2016; Mannis, 1999). This is not very common, but we would expect voluntary kin figures to be more prominent in the social networks of this group.

Not all cohabitations include children, of course; many couples cohabit before or without ever having children. These partners, however, are often not seen as kin. Seltzer, Lau, and Bianchi (2012) found that parents and adult children may have conflicting views about the family status of the adult child’s cohabiting partner. Parents often do not consider the cohabiting partner to be part of the family, possibly due to the high rate of cohabitation dissolution (Seltzer, 2019). Generally, Americans have seen a cohabiting couple with a child to be family (Powell et al., 2010), but this is less the case if no child is involved. Research on the degree to which a cohabiting partner is considered family is underdeveloped, particularly when the cohabitation does not include shared children, though as Sassler and Lichter (2020) assert, developing a valid and reliable measure of these relationships is vital to fully understanding the growing complexity of families.

This is, of course, in contrast to cohabitation by older adults, who are not creating kinship relationships through childbearing. Given the rise of divorce among baby boomers and extended life expectancy, a greater proportion of older adults are single, and many of these singles are choosing to cohabit with a romantic partner. This has grown so rapidly that the number of cohabiters over age 50 more than quadrupled between 2000 and 2016 (Brown & Wright, 2017). About 7% of older singles would prefer to “live apart together,” (LAT) (Carr & Utz, 2020) which could both signal and impact the likelihood of developing kin-like relationships. Still others are unable to, or choose not to, develop romantic relationships in later life, and for these individuals without other family, they are without family ties. These “elder orphans” are a necessary focus of future research to understand how these aging adults are cared for without kin (Carr & Utz, 2020).

1c. Kinship in polygamous marriages

Most research on polygamy and polyamory – families with more than two adult romantic partners – focused on kibbutzim, communes, and “swingers” (Klesse, 2018; Rubin, 2001; Sheff, 2011). These families were more like monogamous families than imagined (Ramey, 1972; Rubin, 2001), though they challenged the existing family norms by being sexually non-exclusionary (Rubin, 2001) and using collective identity more than individual or family identity (Beit-Hallahmi, 1981). Shared living arrangements impacted the collective family identity and created a more extended family structure (Shepher, 1969).

Some attention has been given to understanding the kinship and family networks of polygamous families. Non-parent adults may act and be perceived as aunts, uncles, or stepparents (Klesse, 2018) or even older siblings or friends (Sheff, 2010), but not as additional parents. Similar to stepfamilies, children were more likely to see an adult as a parent if that adult entered the child’s life when the child was very young, they shared a residence, and they maintained a strong relationship throughout the duration of knowing each other (Sheff, 2010). Overall, children in polygamous families expanded their concept of family to include chosen kin based on emotional and supportive connections, not just biology or legality (Sheff, 2010). Children sometimes used different terms, including “fairy oddmother” and “tribal aunt,” to distinguish non-parents from biological parents (Pallotta-Chiarolli, Haydon, & Hunter, 2013). This denoted family status different from a parent while establishing belonging in the kinship network.

In their study of fundamentalist Mormon polygamous families, Jankowiak and Diderich (2000) found that even an ideology of family equality may not be enough to elicit comparable ties to all extended family members. There was greater solidarity between full siblings as compared to half-siblings, measured by lending money to each other, babysitting for each other, having an emotionally closer relationship, and attending more events for each other. Half-siblings visited and maintained relationships as long as the shared father was alive but minimized or ended relationships after his death. Full siblings focused on relationships with their biological mother.

Compared to monogamous heterosexual families, there is greater flexibility as to who is considered part of the family and less emphasis on biological kinship (Anapol, 2010; Goldfeder & Klesse, 2015; Klesse, 2018). This allows more fluidity in creating and ending relationships while maintaining parenting roles. As observed in stepfamilies, the use of kin terms and interactions with extended family are built around functional relationships that are based less on ascription by birth and more on how relationships with kin develop over time.

1d. Families formed by same-sex couples

An alternative family form that has gained substantial attention over the past several decades is unions between same-sex individuals and their children arising from either a previous heterosexual relationship or through artificial reproductive methods. This family form, no doubt, existed in the shadows before it was recognized as legitimate through court actions and legal statutes.

The influential comparative account of different- and same-sex couples by Blumstein and Schwartz (1983) was among the earliest systematic studies conducted on gay and straight unions, though kinship was not an explicit topic of the study. Focusing on kinship, anthropologist Kath Weston (1997) conducted pioneering in-depth qualitative research of gay families in San Francisco. She defined chosen families as those based on friendship, love, and individual choice across a variety of sexual, social, and economic relationships. From one perspective, chosen families provide surrogate kin ties in that they entail the diffuse solidarity characteristic of kin relationships in general. Thus, they are modeled after the conventional meanings that surround kinship in American culture (Lewin, 1993). From another perspective, they provide a countervailing model to straight kinship and a critique of the privilege accorded to a biogenetically grounded mode of determining which relationships count as kin.

Different social constructions of affiliation that represent ways of “doing” kinship vary primarily based on individuals’ or couples’ willingness to preserve (versus downplay) biological (versus social) connectedness. For instance, a practice that is seen by one family as a good strategy to reinforce kinship ties may be purposively avoided by another family (Levine, 2008; Nordqvist, 2014). Also, the construction of kinship and the enactment of kinship practices differ widely depending on whether one takes the perspective of the parents or the children. While acknowledging that the two might diverge, far more research focuses on the former. Moreover, the conspicuous reliance on fictive or voluntary kin occurs before the cultural and legal transformation of same-sex unions toward the end of the 20th and the first decades of the new millennium. Whether voluntary kin are as equally involved in the families of same-sex partners now that marriage has become legal in the United States and many other nations is yet another open question.

Forming kinship ties in same-sex unions

The literature on the formation of kinship ties in same-sex unions converges towards the idea that kinship is a malleable construct with an exceptional capacity to encompass differences and deviations (Nordqvist, 2014). In a very real sense, this notion extends Schneider’s (1968) recognition of the discretionary quality of kinship in America – and more broadly in the West – based as it is on social constructions of family relationships. Oswald (2002) provides a comprehensive description of “resilience processes” enacted by gay and lesbian members of families to create, strengthen, and preserve their family and kinship networks: intentionality and redefinition. The process of intentionality involves choosing kin, managing disclosure, building community, ritualizing, and legalizing. As a way of choosing kin, gay and lesbian individuals often create families from close friendships whether by becoming parents through heterosexual intercourse or artificial insemination.

The process of redefinition refers to the enactment of meaning-making strategies that create linguistic and symbolic structures to affirm one’s network by strategies of politicizing, naming, and construing family. Politicization is a resilience process as it enables network members to make sense out of what is happening in their private lives by linking it to a larger societal context. Naming practices may promote family network resilience by attaching familial meanings to otherwise unspecified identities, events, and relationships. For instance, the visible nature of shared surnames enhances the kinship significance of the surname when families become increasingly complex and family members are confronted with how to constitute or deny family and kin identities (Davies, 2011). For instance, co-parents may change surnames so that all parents and children have the same name, which reduces confusion when interacting with institutions such as schools and doctors (Reimann, 1997). Alternatively, children may be given the last name of the non-birth parent to strengthen the relationship between the child and that same parent.

Individuals and couples enact specific practices to construct kinship that differ based on the extent to which the biological versus the social factors are stressed. Those who believe more strongly in the biological kinship component may enact practices such as having – in a gay couple – the sister of the child’s non-biological father make a gift of her eggs, to place kinship bonds between the gay couple, their respective lineages, and the child on a biological, plausibly irrefutable, basis (Gartrell et al., 1996). Similarly, lesbian women might choose to expand their children’s kin networks with members of the sperm donor’s family or with other lesbian co-parent families who have used the same donor (Sullivan, 2004). A woman willing to have many children may also (i) use the same donor so all her children will be related; (ii) choose her partner’s brother to be the donor to give both women a genetic link to the child; (iii) choose a donor whose physical characteristics resemble those of the co-mother of the child; or (iv) have her partner actively participate in the process of donor insemination (Levine, 2008). For instance, Nordqvist (2014) describes the situation of two women who had a child with the help of a donor, and at some point decided to have another child, again with his help. However, things had changed for him since the previous daughter was born and he refused to have another child. The couple found the idea of having a second child with someone else unimaginable, suggesting that not being able to put similarity and “sameness” in place was extraordinarily unsettling and anxiety-provoking.

The idea that sameness produces bonds and that kinship is constructed through the reproduction of identity/similarity is widespread in this literature. Murphy (2013) exemplifies this pattern in his study of gay men choosing to become parents through surrogacy in the United States and Australia. He finds that biogenetic kinship was a concern for gay male couples because it privileges the connections between the child and the biological parent. Men sought to resolve this potential problem by creatively playing with some of the symbols of kinship to negotiate and obscure which partner was biogenetically related to their children. The strategies that were engaged in were turn-taking with biological parenthood (when planning to have multiple children), intentional unknowing, or silence with other family members or the general public. In addition, men sought out resemblance with children to confirm kinship links, and in particular to confirm the notion of equal contribution from both partners where biogenetic links were uncertain. Similar strategies are documented in Nebeling Petersen’s (2018) study of Danish gay couples becoming parents through transnational commercial surrogacy. Biogenetic relatedness enables one father to become the legal parent of the child and thus have the child naturalized to Danish citizenship, but blood ties also serve as a symbol of full and valid kinship within heteronormativity. At the same time, the couple may obstruct and negotiate the meaning of biogenetic relatedness to enable the other father full and valid parenthood. In other words, the idea of kinship as biogenetic relatedness is supplemented by notions of kinship as devotion, individual will and determination, and reproductive desire in order to strengthen men’s affinities to children.

Other practices, targeted more towards stressing the social, rather than biological, component of kinship might entail for lesbian mothers-to-be, for instance, canvassing their own social networks to find suitable male role models for children who can become chosen family members (Gartrell et al., 1996). Ex-partners may also serve as surrogate parents to the children of lesbian co-mothers (Patterson, Hurt, & Mason, 1998). Cantu’ (2001) describes the situation of social solidarity among Mexican gay men immigrating to the USA, who utilize their relationships with other Latino gay men to create a chain of migration resources based more upon chosen kin than biological relatives. Gay men and lesbians who form families straddle prevailing biogenetic notions of relatedness with countervailing ideas about the voluntary nature of family bonds. They reach out to existing family while broadening their kinship networks with friends who are willing to assume the obligations of family membership.

Friendship is a key element of kinship for lesbians and gay men (Herdt & Boxer, 1993; Weston, 1997). Friendship as a basis for reproductive choices appears in both innovative and conventional guises (Dempsey, 2010). Sometimes biological fatherhood is transformed into friendship. This constitutes an interesting reconfiguration of the friendship-as-kinship idea, in which the paternal biological connection is envisaged as a friend-like relationship, until such time as the child invokes a ‘right to know’ who the biological father is. The status of the connection is shifted to reflect a potentially meaningful relationship in children’s lives, yet one that can be separated from legal, social and emotional commitments of daily care or financial entailments.

Research has also found that gay male kin formation is among the most complex and often unsettles stereotypes about gay male sexuality (Stacey, 2004; 2006). For instance, the practice of gay “cruising” – i.e., seeking out sexual partners in public places – opened up new possibilities for kinship ties and arrangements, despite disrupting conventional family norms and practices (Biblarz & Savci, 2010). Stacey (2004) documents both conventional heteronormative-like families as well as families comprising several gay men living in the same household, most of whom had met through cruising. Yet she also observes that even in the most heteronormative arrangements, couples did not set up the usual hierarchy that values, for instance, paid work over housework. To the contrary, paid work was perceived as a compromise that took working partners away from their children. Also, cruising resulted in ties that crossed class, racial, and national boundaries much more than in heterosexual family arrangements (Stacey, 2004).

Another stream of literature on gay families suggests that children deconstruct the normative centrality of biogenetic connections. An Italian study shows that kinship for children of same-sex parents is mostly constructed through the act of parents “doing” caretaking (Bosisio & Ronfani, 2016). Children living with two mothers demonstrated an inclusive and flexible representation of the family that goes far beyond biological and genetic aspects. Also, children often separate the private and peer spheres while operationalizing or designating kinship relations, suggesting that their construction of kinship varies as a function of social context – children have a clear sense of the reactions they might get from peers, and adjust their operationalization of kinship to fit the public sphere. This is another mechanism for integrating notions of kinship in alternative family forms into the broader fabric of shared cultural norms about the family.

Despite popular assumptions about same-sex parent families, children are committed to presenting their family and parents as “normal.” Evidence suggests that children carefully select the peers to whom they explain their family configurations and tend to be more open about having two mothers rather than having two fathers, as peers’ reactions are more challenging when men are involved and a mother figure is absent (Bosisio & Ronfani, 2016; Davies, 2011). Research on lesbian couples that had children through donor conception also suggests that children engage in kinship practices by creating a sense of lineage and line of descent that extend long into the past by borrowing “relational biographies” (Nordqvist, 2014), i.e. by retrospectively applying their parents’ past relationship to make it part of their own family history.

Resource-exchange patterns

Literature on the exchange of resources within and across households is far more focused on downward – rather than upward or lateral – transfers of resources, money, time, and care. Evidence suggests that resource exchange with children is likely to differ by the specific family constellation. For instance, there are differences between families in which children were born (or adopted) within heterosexual marriages that were later dissolved when one or both parents came out as gay/lesbian, and those in which children were born or adopted after parents had affirmed lesbian or gay identities (Patterson, 2000). As a general trend, there seems to be no differences in the amount of downward transfers to children for homosexual versus heterosexual parents (Bos, Kuyper, & Gartrell, 2018; Patterson, 2000; Prickett, Martin-Storey, & Crosnoe, 2015). That only about one half of both heterosexual and lesbian mothers in the sample received financial support from the fathers of their children (Patterson, 2000) provides evidence of few differences in the likelihood of paternal financial support for lesbian and heterosexual families with children.

The literature on lateral transfers is instead largely focused on resource exchanges with friends. Some research suggests that friends play a key role in gay/lesbian families and often gay and lesbian adults receive more social support from their friends than from their families of origin (Grossman, D’Augelli, & Hershberger, 2000). However, there are few if any systematic surveys that can document differences in intergenerational exchange or the provision of assistance by kin to same-sex families.

Legality, institutions, and structural constraints

Kinship construction in same-sex families also varies widely as a function of laws, social beliefs, and societal constraints. In general, kinship construction in these family arrangements takes more flexible, inclusive, and open forms where legal recognition exists. Legalization promotes resilience by bolstering relationships with economic supports and cultural recognition. Nonetheless, despite legal and social obstacles, gay and lesbian individuals create and sustain meaningful family relationships and kinship structures (Oswald, 2002; Patterson, 2000). For instance, prior to the legalization of same-sex marriage, gay and lesbian parents who lived in states that allowed both second-parent adoptions and unknown donors used these practices to legally strengthen the relationship between children and co-parents and increase the legitimacy of the coparents’ status in the eyes of their families of origin (Oswald, 2002; Reimann, 1997).

In general, discriminatory measures push the LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender) community to find “creative” ways to get around legal restrictions. With reference to this, Gash and Raiskin (2018) defined the concept of “legal status ambiguity,” which compels same-sex parents to accord significance to the possibility of discrimination when making parenting decisions. In some instances, parents take pain to assert their co-parenting status, indicating their roles in birth plans or birth announcements, and using marriage licenses or adoption decrees to signal their family ties. In other instances, parents might recognize the need for subterfuge. Gash and Raiskin (2018) also claim that gay men and lesbians are often forced to view their parenting status as legally distinct from their relationship status, hence they are pushed to consider family structures that are child-centered rather than relationship-centered or relationship and child-centered jointly.

The literature suggests that gay marriage and gay kinship are often conflated in general discussions. Instead, the construction of kinship is increasingly separated from the idea of marriage, given that same-sex marriage legislation often excludes the rights to adopt or to use ART. The underlying idea is that the construction of kinship in these family constellations would not require any marriage form to be sustainable (Butler, 2002). Conversely, another strand of the literature stresses the role of legality and recognizes that being legally recognized as married remains one of the main strategies to construct solid kinship ties among same-sex partners (Ocobock, 2013).

Focusing on the Belgian and Dutch cases – two countries at the forefront of European legal recognition of sexual minorities – Swennen and Croce (2016) offer a critical analysis of how legal systems are attempting to address new kinship formations for lesbian parents through the production of new legal terminology such as “co-motherhood” and “duo-motherhood.” They claim that legal labels are rarely merely descriptive, as they exert contradictory effects of recognition, regulation, normalization and exclusion. When based on conventional family categories, legal kinship terminology runs the risk of imposing preexisting narratives upon emerging kinship formation by exerting influence that could run counter to practices that emerge without the benefit of legal prescription. Almost by definition, the force of legal labels actively contributes to social construction as a byproduct of legal and policy innovations (Swennen & Croce, 2016)

Ceremonial aspects of kinship

Marriage/union legalization is perhaps the most important “step” in forming or strengthening kinship ties. Nordqvist (2015) also discusses the announcement of pregnancies as a “ceremonial” step that enables kinship to be reconstructed and reconsidered, especially concerning relationships between biological and non-biological grandparents. A pregnancy can bring “clarity” to the often-blurry boundaries of kinship configurations. Pregnancies operate as “pegs” onto which to hang ambiguous kinship relationships, making those relationships more intelligible to the wider family. Pregnancies often allow families of origin to overlay a daughter’s lesbian life with a conventional kinship structure, rending it interpretable by other family members. As such, pregnancies carry powerful multidimensional conceptual and relational meaning that link in with biographies, memories, cultures, and gender in families. With the legalization of marriage and the availability of ART, we suspect gay parents and their offspring are increasingly forming families that resemble families formed by heterosexual partners. As far as we know, there are no cohort studies of gay families that would allow us to test this hypothesis.

1e. Families of gender minorities

Academic research on the kin relations of gender minority individuals, defined as those whose gender identity does not align with normative gender expectations, including transgender, queer, and gender nonconforming persons, is in its infancy, still incompletely incorporated into broader studies of kinship (Reczek, 2020). Transgender people undergo gender identification changes within a context of systemic discrimination and marginalization (Downing, 2013), hence their families have to adjust to having a relative of another gender – a vastly different process from that of a family member coming out as gay (Biblarz & Savci, 2010). Trans men and women find themselves in situations where they ask family members to call them by a new name, refer to them by a new pronoun, treat them as a daughter instead of a son (or vice versa), and introduce them accordingly. These circumstances have the potential to drastically reshape and redefine kinship structures and practices, especially given that kinship relationships are often highly gendered. Moreover, rejection of the gender identity of a gender minority family-member can lead to a restructuring of the kinship network and efforts to compensate for gaps in support through bolstering other relationships, such as those with friends (McGuire et al., 2016).

Whitley (2013) suggests that significant others, family members, and friends of a transgender person experience relational-identity challenge when a loved one changes gender. Significant others report sexual orientation as the main relational-identity concern. Regardless of how significant others choose to identify, their relationship with a transgender partner dictates how others perceive their sexual orientation. Significant others often discuss this problem as being “forced to come out” while being unsure of what this coming out means or looks like. Overall, the process these individuals take to come to terms with the transgender status of a loved one, mediated by reflected appraisals and social stigma, has far-reaching consequences for how they are able to negotiate their own identities and make decisions regarding their kinship ties with a gender minority individual. This is well exemplified in Pfeffer’s (2016) Queering Families, examining the dynamics of 50 cisgender women’s relationships with transmen in terms of identity shifts, household labor negotiations, sexuality, socio-legal family formations, and community support. When it comes to kinship construction, Pfeffer found that some of the cis women she interviewed actually described their chosen family is their “real kinship system,” prioritizing healthy social support over (sometimes detrimental) biological ties.

2a. Adoptive families

The practice of adoption is a longstanding custom in the West for including children into an existing union or family. In times of high mortality, family members often took in the children of deceased relations (Modell, 1989). Adoption can be regarded as a form of fictive or voluntary kinship that permits parents to have a child through means other than sexual reproduction. About four percent of the US population is adopted with half of those adopted by non-kin (Fisher, 2003). The sociological literature has often focused on the social stigma of adoption, and how families attempt to overcome it and assert the “realness” of their family (March, 1995; Miall, 1987).

Interviews with adoptive parents highlight the importance of establishing and legitimizing their relationship with their adoptive child through shared family practices, family experiences, and creation of a family history (Jones & Hackett, 2011). As open adoption becomes increasingly more common, adoptive families must navigate the creation of complex new kinship forms within the adoptive triad – birth parents, adoptive parents, and adoptees. Most studies report positive outcomes in open adoptions, but this may be mediated by the level of contact and satisfaction of all parties with the contact. A large study of open adoption in Minnesota and Texas found that adoptive families with contact with the birth mother or other blood relatives had high levels of satisfaction with their openness arrangement (Grotevant et al., 2008). One challenge that families in open adoptions must overcome is regulating emotional distance to establish a level of closeness that is comfortable for all involved. Birth mothers report that they perceive their adopted child to be psychologically present regardless of the openness of the adoption, but in open adoptions there may be heightened problems of role ambiguity (Fravel, Mcroy, & Grotevant, 2000).

Literature suggests adoptive families have familial bonds as strong or stronger than those in non-adoptive families. Emotional closeness, but not behavioral closeness, between adoptive siblings was found to be equivalent (Samek & Rueter, 2011). Some evidence suggests adoptive sibling closeness may be partially mediated through family communication patterns. Another study found adoptive parents (in a two parent household) allocated more economic, cultural, social, and interactional resources to their children than parents in any other family type (Hamilton, Cheng, & Powell, 2007). Most but not all of this advantage could be explained by adoptive families’ higher sociodemographic characteristics. This suggests that adoptive parents may work to overcome the obstacles and potential social stigma associated with adoption. Research on adoptive families has shown the full integration of the adoptee by the extended family network is important in creating a sense of belonging and normalcy in the adoptive family (March, 1995; Modell, 1994). How this adoption is managed by extended kin has not been fully examined yet.

2b. Foster Care

Like adoption, foster care can be seen as a form of voluntary kinship. However, foster arrangements are less stable than adoption, creating greater heterogeneity and ambiguity in foster family relations. The foster system has received little attention from sociologists despite the fact that an estimated 5 percent of American children will be placed in foster care (Wildeman & Waldfogel, 2014). Research shows that the strength of the relationship that foster children have with their foster parents is very important in their probability of showing signs of depression and anxiety (Perry, 2006). The strength of the foster family network was more important than the strength of the biological family and peer network in the mental health of the foster child (Perry, 2006). Biehal (2014) explains that some foster children, especially those who had spent a long time with the foster family and had few previous placements, felt a strong sense of commitment to their foster parents and described their relationship “as if” they were family. Others, especially those with a continuing relationship with their biological parents, saw the foster parents as “just like” family but not a replacement for their biological parents. A third category struggled with conflicted loyalty to their biological family and expressed more ambivalence to the foster family and a sense of “qualified belongingness” (Biehal, 2014). How this extension of family-like relations operates for extended kin has not, as far as we were able to ascertain, been the topic of much research.

2c. Families formed by assisted reproductive technology

The development of technologies to enable reproduction among individuals who experience infecundity has introduced new possibilities for forming families that now undergird the growth of alternate family forms discussed above. This technology has become a commonplace reality among individuals and couples (different- and same-sex) and is often a route to having children among single women.

There are two varying lines of research on the implications of ART on kinship. Some scholars argue that ART has completely changed our understanding of relatedness, whereas others show how their utilization is strongly shaped by traditional kinship conceptions that attempt to preserve traditional kinship practices. Among the pioneers of ART research, Modell (1989) notes how women undergoing IVF emphasize their “normal” and “natural” pregnancies, childbirth, and conventional parenthood and how individuals using their own sperm and eggs stress the importance of bilateral blood ties. Other accounts show that users rationalize the procedures they have initiated by naturalizing them (Teman, 2003). Women who use egg donation highlight maternity achieved through gestation and downplay the role of genetics, whereas those who use a surrogate for gestation highlight the importance of their genetic contribution. Men in heterosexual couples – or female partners in homosexual couples – where women use donor insemination tend to stress, instead, social over biological parenthood (Levine, 2008).

Under some circumstances, ART can have little or no implications for the web of kinship formed by parents and children. Other circumstances can produce a larger constellation of potential kin. When, for example, a married couple uses ART to overcome infertility, it may result in a nuclear-family type of arrangement. With the use of a surrogate to bear the child or a sperm donor to enable conception, the transaction can be ephemeral and largely irrelevant to subsequent dealings. But cases of “contested” or collective parenthood can and do occasionally arise where the surrogate wants some relationship with the child she gave birth to. For instance, Van Parys et al. (2017) looked at how kinship is unpacked, enacted, and reconstructed in specific settings of sister-to-sister egg donation in Belgium. The study documents the ambiguity of valuing the genetic link as underlying family relationships, while also fearing too strong a sense of connectedness between the donor and the child. Intra-familial egg donation brought closeness between mother and child, but did not offer exclusivity, which was constructed instead by emphasizing the gestational, social, and emotional bonds between mother and child.

Nordqvist (2014) observes that in most cases the donor or surrogate plays some role in the definition of kinship. Some believe that identifying the donor is a key step in creating kinship; others hold the opposite belief (yet the same aim), i.e., that not identifying the donor is key to creating kinship. This is typically the case when the donor is fully anonymous (Konrad, 2005). In the former case, couples might instead seek to create “relational biographies” by involving the donor. Specific practices might include creating books for their child about the process through which he/she had been born, arranging to meet up with the donor after birth, or just simply taking family pictures as a kinship-building process that connects the child to their kin worlds. In the previously mentioned study on sister-to-sister egg donation, the strategy was to maintain the right distance while allowing the donor a special position in the family (Van Parys et al., 2017). Parents in this instance created a position for the donor, such as godmother, that both simultaneously acknowledged but limited the significance of the donation. This practice reveals the range and diversity of bonds that are possible between donors, receiving parents, and their offspring.

Another interesting kinship configuration occurs when different women conceive children using the same sperm-donor, potentially creating “linked families” or “donor sibling networks” (Hertz, Nelson, & Kramer, 2017). Drawing on interviews with 36 female-partnered mothers in the US who used donor insemination, Goldberg and Scheib (2016) found that genetic ties among children in linked families sometimes served to earn these families “kinship points,” in that the relationship was described as important on the basis of shared genetics, especially from the children’s perspectives. In other cases, parents emphasized that the shared biological connection was insufficient to qualify family as kin. Overall, responses were varied, going beyond a kin/nonkin dichotomy, and family terms were sometimes seen as undermining ties to siblings and genetically unrelated mothers. Relatedly, Hertz and Mattes (2011) focused on donor sibling networks formed through the use of social media among mothers who had used the same sperm donor, and found that for some participants, donor siblings were a “latent affiliation,” while for others the newly-found donor siblings and their parents developed into a more active bond that became face-to-face. An update to that study found that offspring are usually more likely than parents to view donor siblings as members of their extended family (Hertz et al., 2017).

3a. Voluntary kinship

A body of literature explores “family-like” relationships between those who are unrelated by traditional definitions of kinship (through blood or legal ties). These relationships occur when persons who have no blood or legal bond “conduct their social relations within the idiom of kinship” (Stack, 1974:40). There is significant debate in the literature regarding both the terminology used to describe such relations and which types of relationships should be included in this category. A number of competing terms exist, including “fictive kinship” (Chatters, Taylor, & Jayakody, 1994), voluntary kin (Braithwaite et al., 2010), intentional families (Muraco, 2006), and “family we choose” (Weston, 1997). Authors have criticized the “fictive kinship” tag as being racialized since this term is often applied to non-Whites whereas similar relationships are described using more agentic language such as “voluntary kin” when describing White communities (Nelson, 2014). Further, those who view family from a more constructionist lens critique the deficit framing used to “fictive” kin, arguing that it “adds to the stigmatization, suggesting that these are not ‘real’ relationships” (Braithwaite et al., 2010). In this text, we will primarily use the term “voluntary kin” to refer to such relationships.

Despite these debates, the voluntary kinship literature primarily aims to shed light on the diversity of family forms and the ways in which individuals have meaningful and tangible relationships outside of traditional notions of kinship. Perhaps because it challenges traditional models of family structure, most of this literature has been built outside of the main family studies journals. Most research is qualitative and often focused on specific subpopulations like African Americans, the LGBT community, immigrants, and the elderly. Furthermore, the focus on subpopulations like African Americans has contributed to the notion that voluntary kinship is more common among marginalized and minority groups, though there is little evidence to back up the idea that this practice is less common among Whites and other dominant groups (Nelson, 2013).

The “fictive/voluntary kin” tag has been applied to a wide variety of relationships that vary in the degree to which they mimic kin relations. Authors frame voluntary kinship as falling somewhere between friendship and family, but note that these ties are easier to break than those with blood or legal kinship ties (Aschenbrenner, 1973; Chatters et al., 1994). The fact that many voluntary kinship bonds look similar to friendship has led to ambiguity in the literature as each scholar may use a different boundary to separate family and friendship in their framework. Nelson (2013) suggests a useful typology of voluntary kinship which includes situational kin, ritual kin, and intentional kin. Situational kinship emerges from discrete situations and may be temporary or context-specific. These include kinship-like relations formed in marginalized settings like on the streets (Liebow, 1967), total institutional settings like prisons, schools, or group homes; organization settings like workplaces (Kim, 2009), and caregiving arrangements such as home healthcare work (Karner, 1998). Ritual kinship, the most normative and institutionalized form of voluntary kinship, includes the system of godparents or compadrazgo for Hispanic populations. Finally, intentional kinship emerges in a variety of different settings where individuals form bonds outside of a social institutional framework. This is the least normative and individuals often report a need to validate their relationship to outsiders since it does not fit within a standard family form (Braithwaite et al., 2010).

Demographics of voluntary kin

One study that examines voluntary kinship from a population-level perspective uses the Netherlands Kinship Panel Study. Despite the country’s strong welfare state which was expected to reduce the need for voluntary kin, 22% of Dutch families in the nationally representative sample reported having voluntary kin (Voorpostel, 2013). Voluntary kin were more commonly reported by individuals who were divorced, childless, without siblings, widowed, and older (Voorpostel, 2013). This finding supports the idea that voluntary kin may serve as a substitute for blood/legal kinship ties (Braithwaite et al., 2010; Johnson, 1999; White-Means, 1993). Following the results of other studies (Chatters et al., 1994), Dutch women were more likely to report that they had voluntary kin than men.

Taylor et al. (2013) found that African Americans and Black Caribbeans were more likely to have and reported more voluntary kin than non-Hispanic Whites. Despite the fact that Whites were less likely to report having voluntary kin, they were more likely to report that they received support from voluntary kin that Blacks (Taylor et al., 2013). In addition, voluntary kinship has been documented to be more common in the American South than in other regions (Chatters et al., 1994). Those who have voluntary kin ties also have lower levels of subjective well-being, which some speculate could be due to the burden of asking for help from non-kin (Taylor et al., 2001).

Debate exists about whether low- or high-resource individuals are more likely to form voluntary kin bonds. In the Netherlands, voluntary kinship was more common among the less educated (Voorpostel, 2013). In surveys of African American populations, voluntary kinship has been more common among the more educated and those with higher income (Chatters et al., 1994). This is despite the large body of ethnographic evidence from low-income Black neighborhoods where initial descriptions of fictive kinship originate (Aschenbrenner, 1973; Liebow, 1967; Stack, 1974). The early ethnographic evidence presented a unique system of voluntary kinship in low-income Black communities where it was used as a strategy to deal with poverty and may have its origins in West African culture brought by slaves to the US (Chatters et al., 1994; Stewart, 2007). These studies document the use of terms like “play mother” and “play sister” to denote the upgrading of a friendship to a kin-like relationship with similar expectations of exchange and moral obligation found in families (Stack, 1974).

Immigrants, who receive significant attention in the voluntary kin literature, are believed to activate voluntary kinship in specific ways as a strategy to cope with the immigrant experience. Some literature emphasizes that immigrants bring unique family forms to the US from their society where voluntary kinship may already be institutionalized, including the system of compadrazgo (co-parenting or god parenthood) for Latino immigrants, family Yoruba culture, “kouzins” for Caribbean immigrants, and systems of respect for elders present in Asian culture (Ebaugh & Curry, 2000; Fjellman & Gladwin, 1985; Kim, 2009). Despite the focus on US minorities and immigrants, similar systems of voluntary kin have also been documented in White non-immigrant communities including predominantly white suburbs where neighbors act as a form of kin (Bould, 2003) and among elderly white Canadians who report having deep lifelong voluntary kin bonds (Mac Rae, 1992).

Voluntary kin relations

Kinship practices vary widely across types of voluntary relationships partly because of the heterogeneity of circumstances that lead individuals to establish such bonds. Voluntary kin may provide emotional and financial support. In some cases, the emotional bonds and financial ties may be as strong or stronger than ties with biologically related kin. For example, studies on voluntary kinship in the African American community have documented exchange and sharing between voluntary kin (Aschenbrenner, 1973; Liebow, 1967; Stack, 1974). This may include things like sharing food, giving rides, loaning money, and celebrating holidays together. Often voluntary kin play a role similar to an aunt or uncle, helping to police children’s behavior and contributing to their general upbringing (Bould, 2003; Ebaugh & Curry, 2000). Voluntary kin may also be an important source of social capital and provide emotional encouragement and concrete assistance to individuals looking to improve their lot in life (Tierney & Venegas, 2006). Some voluntary kin bonds may fade without close contact (Braithwaite et al., 2010) while others may be more resilient to fluctuations in the regularity of contact (Stewart, 2007).

Voluntary kin may play caregiving roles, which is especially important to youth and the elderly. Many studies have documented how professional elder caregivers often become accepted as kin by their clients (Karner, 1998; Piercy, 2000), how unpaid elder care may be done similarly by voluntary kin as by blood or legal kin (Barker, 2002; Johnson, 1999; White-Means, 1993) and how some elderly are in voluntary kinship relationships that are quasi-parental with no expectation of caregiving (Rubinstein et al., 1991). Nannies, au pairs, and domestic care workers may also be incorporated into the family, often as a “shadow mother” (Macdonald, 2010; Souralova, 2015).

Ritual kinship, most commonly through the system of compadrazgo or co-parenthood, is a form of institutionalized voluntary kinship. Ritual kin, such as godparents, serve important ritual functions in the community. In Catholic and Orthodox communities, godparents play a large role in baptism ceremonies which symbolize re-birth (as a Christian) with new “spiritual” parents (Bloch & Guggenheim, 1981). Godparents are expected to play a role in the religious and moral upbringing of children, though in practice, the extent of contact and degree of transfers between godparents and their godchildren appears to vary widely (Chock, 1974; Ebaugh & Curry, 2000). While the role of compadrazgo has been especially emphasized in the literature on Latino immigrants in the US (Ebaugh & Curry, 2000), Keefe (1980) found that about half of Mexican-Americans described the relationship with godparents as more like friends than relatives.

Processes of voluntary kin formation and integration

An important question in the literature is how voluntary kin relate to the rest of one’s kinship network. Often voluntary kin are incorporated into the whole kinship system (in the spirit of the extended family type discussed in Braithwaite et al. (2010)), identifying as kin with multiple family members. This form of voluntary kinship most closely mimics blood/legal kinship. Examples can be found in Stewart (2007), Barker (2002), White-Means (1993), and Stack (1974). In fact, a common route to voluntary kinship is through a proxy for shared biography with someone’s parents (Mason & Tipper, 2008). One common form of voluntary kinship is when young people refer to their parents’ friends as “aunt” and “uncle” (Ibsen & Klobus, 1972).

In some forms of voluntary kinship, the relationship is dyadic – only between two people who feel a special bond and the relationship does not extend to either of the individuals’ wider family network. Examples of this can be found in Johnson (1999), Liebow (1967), Kim (2009), and Tierney and Venegas (2006). Braithwaite et al. (2016) explain that the relationship between voluntary kin and the individual’s blood or legal family is mediated through the individual. The relationship between voluntary kin and the other relations may fall somewhere between full integration and hostility (Braithwaite et al., 2016).

Since most studies of voluntary kinship are qualitative and not longitudinal, we have limited evidence about how voluntary kin ties change over time. Elderly populations who have been interviewed regarding voluntary kin ties have often reported ties lasting since their own childhood, suggesting that voluntary kin ties can endure a lifetime (Mac Rae, 1992). As noted above, voluntary kinship bonds often form within institutional or work contexts such as a church (Johnson, 1999) or workplace (Karner, 1998; Kim, 2009; Piercy, 2000; Tierney & Venegas, 2006) or in response to a lack of support from legal or blood kin (or the non-existence of such kin) (Braithwaite et al., 2010; Rubinstein et al., 1991). Voluntary kinship bonds have been documented to form as a response to loneliness or due to the lack of other kin (Rubinstein et al., 1991; Stewart, 2007). With delays in marriage, young people in urban areas may form kin-like relationships with their like-minded friends as a substitute for traditional family ties (Watters, 2003). We know little about how long voluntary kin ties last and how likely they are to extend beyond the institution or workplace where they were formed. Involvement of voluntary kin in the upbringing of children, such as whether they offer sponsorship and material assistance, as far as we could discover, has not been the topic of systematic research.

3b. Kin promotion and kin-care

Another form of kinship involves upgrading and extending obligations between individuals who are already kin. This occurs when people activate new kinship terms to express how their relationship is closer than their blood or legal ties would suggest in a normative context. For example, someone may refer to her niece as “like a daughter” or her sister as “like my mother” to express that their relationship was filling a role dissimilar to their blood or legal relationship. This type of upgraded relationship may be especially common in contexts where individuals are raised by a kin member other than their biological parent, even if that parental role is unrecognized by the state (Stack, 1974). Documented cases of kin “promotion” are described in Allen, Blieszner, and Roberto (2011), Johnson (1999), and Mac Rae (1992). Other literature has documented how low income single mothers may engage in “kinscription” by calling upon their male family members or paternal kin to play paternal roles in their child’s life (Roy & Burton, 2007).

A form of kin promotion is especially evident in the case of kinship adoption, a legal procedure available in many nations. Since the 1970s, a number of nations have begun to prioritize placing foster children with their kin such as a biological grandparent, over a non-relative foster parent. In 2017, 32% of foster children in the United States, for example, were residing with a foster family that included a relative (Children’s Bureau, 2019). Kin-care, the term used when children are taken care of by kin aside from their biological or legal parents, can be both formal (through the adoption or foster system) or informal, with informal kin-care believed to be widespread (Coupet, 2010). Much of kin-care is done by grandparents and is believed to be more common among minority groups such as African Americans (Coupet, 2010; Schwartz, 2008). Foster parents who are kin may be less likely to adopt the child because they do not wish for their relative to terminate their parental rights or because they already have a kin relationship with the child (Berrick, 1998). Despite this, around 25% of children adopted through the foster system entered relative adoptions in 2005 and survey data suggests that this type of placement has more positive outcomes for children (Ryan et al., 2010). The relationship between foster children, their biological/legal parent and kin foster/adoptive parents depends highly on whether their biological parents seek participation and whether the foster/adoptive parents facilitate an open rather than closed understanding of family (Holtan, 2008).

Research on alternative family forms in Western nations is still in its infancy even as varied and novel arrangements have grown in number and cultural significance. This paper made an attempt to classify the forms and explore how kinship relations have been adapted in family groupings that depart from the standard nuclear form. Issues surrounding the formation and maintenance of kinship bonds in these variant family types have not been adequately researched, though much the same criticism can be mounted about the lack of research on kinship practices in families where children live with both of their biological parents. There is a substantial neglect of studies on the wider protective and ceremonial functions of kinship in Western societies.

We identified three different processes involved in the creation of alternative family forms: variations of union formation such as marriage, divorce and remarriage, cohabitation, same-sex marriage, planned and unplanned single parenthood, and plural unions (P1); variations in the reproductive process such as adoption, surrogate parenthood, and new methods of artificial reproduction (P2); and voluntary kin that are unrelated by law or marriage and kin upgrading (P3). The different processes that produce alternative families, as we noted, can co-exist, increasing diversity in the structure and composition of the families and the functioning of kinship processes.

In our review of the extant literature relating to the construction and practice of kinship, we found consistency across types of alternative family forms. Notably, both parents and children tend to borrow from the existing model of the standard family form, adopting, rather than inventing, family roles and relationships both inside and outside of the household. This finding confirms an observation made by David M. Schneider (1968) that American kinship allows for great discretion in defining and enacting bonds among potential kin. There is broad cultural acceptance of an inclusive approach to incorporating potential kin in “family relationships,” although, as the research we review shows, Americans and Europeans embrace a biogenetic formula of cultural beliefs that gives great importance to ties created by sexual intercourse and legal marriage. Based on the literature, it has been surprisingly easy to integrate the prevailing system of Western kinship with the introduction of “new” practices such as same-sex marriages and reproductive technological innovations which have redefined the boundaries of how families are formed and children raised. Children appear to have little or no problem having more than two parents so long as relations are harmonious and the parents can collaborate, a condition not always easy to satisfy when sequential unions with children occur. By extension, the number of grandparents can be easily expanded, with potential benefit to children in the form of wider kinship networks. Potentially, this may redound to the benefit of children in the form of greater social capital. Whether, in fact, these refashioned kin networks operate as protective systems when needs arise – and whether they persist after children grow up – are understudied topics, hampered by the absence of longitudinal research.

At the same time, we see little evidence of the waning of the cultural importance of biology. Some advances in reproductive technology have perhaps promoted the significance of the “social reality” of blood ties. Instead, the biogenetic conception of family and kinship has been expanded to fit with the changing circumstances of family formation. Both parents and children continue to rely on the biogenetic conceptions to convert non-biological kin into family roles that imply biological connections as they do in the practice of voluntary kinship or as kin keepers who become de facto parents. This process of reforming the circle of kin tells us much about how societies can alter kinship constructions when it appears to be appropriate and desirable. Whether or not, for example, a sperm donor is defined as a “parent,” or even a “real parent,” depends on the circumstances of the birth, especially whether the process of adoption or ART is open or closed – a decision typically made by a parent/parents assuming it is permitted in their country or state.

Acknowledgment of surrogate parents that may be involved in ART has acceded to demands for greater transparency of parentage. This transparency provides parents and children with the possibilities of forging bonds with biological and non-biological parents, their respective children, and extended kin, creating a model of the family that resembles families created by multiple unions. Potential relationships proliferate, but we still lack systematic information about how frequently they evolve into meaningful bonds under conditions of open vs. closed adoption, kinship care vs. non-kinship foster care, or when reproductive technology permits the identification of donors compared to when it does not. Assuming these policies are made at the state (or national) level, comparative studies of kinship practices across different contexts offer an attractive research design to assess the impact of different policy regimes on the formation of kinship in families formed by adoption or employing ART.

We have not given much attention to the consequences of kinship involvement for parents’ or children’s well-being, nor explored in detail the relationship between aging and kinship. These are complex and underdeveloped areas of research since we lack systematic data on kinship structures, relationships, and resources. Moreover, to be more than suggestive, data on kinship bonds must be longitudinal to be truly valuable. We know of few, if any, attempts to assemble this sort of longitudinal data in a survey format or even in qualitative studies of how a sense of kinship is formed and maintained. Lastly, despite our attempt to deliver an objective and comprehensive picture of kinship practices among alternative family forms, we acknowledge that studies of this kind can always reflect the preferences and assumptions of the researchers themselves.

In its broad scope, this review is well suited to suggesting an ambitious and exciting research agenda for the future. Applying to all forms depicted in Figure 1 (P1-P2-P3), virtually no studies have a longitudinal design, a shortcoming that makes it difficult to examine the persistence and durability of kinship bonds, much less their significance for the functioning of families and consequences for the well-being of children growing up in either standard or non-standard forms. We note that the neglect of a developmental perspective on kinship severely limits our understanding of the conditions that foster and sustain kinship in non-standard family forms. For instance, many issues surrounding the development of kinship ties in stepfamilies and quasi stepfamilies cannot be resolved without longitudinal research that examines the formation and retention of extended kinship relations that occur as couples with children move in and out of unions.

Regarding families created by variations in marriage formation and its absence (P1), we hope to see more kinship studies of sexual minority families that take children’s rather than parents’ perspectives, alongside a better understanding of the mechanisms that children enact to make sense of kinship. Also, more research is needed to systematically explore how kinship might be reshaped in families of transgender individuals. Not least, as older adults continue to divorce at growing rates, research is needed to understand remarriage and cohabitation processes and development of kinship ties in later life. As for families created by alterations in the reproduction process (P2), there is a lack of attention to how open and closed adoptions affect the incorporation of the child in the broader network of extended kin. Specifically, more research is needed on whether adopted children enjoy the same level of support and assistance by grandparents and other extended kin that is afforded to children born to two biological parents. We also observe a paucity of research on the effect, if any, of ART on the creation of wider networks of kin. Lastly, regarding families created by choice (P3), we need a better understanding of the processes involved in the formation and retention of new voluntary kin relationships (e.g., living with roommates/peers) and on how kin-care alters kinship relationships, especially those between the fostered/adopted children, their caregivers, and the children’s other kin.

All in all, as Furstenberg (2020) pointed out, it will be necessary to build a demography of kinship. As yet, with a few exceptions in Europe, this approach to the study of kinship does not exist. If we ever hope to explore the questions raised in this paper, family researchers must begin to develop local, national, and international studies based on representative samples that examine how kinship practices differ across sociological categories such as class, age, race/ethnicity, place of residence, and so on. The possibility of conducting such population-level research has been greatly enhanced by the availability of web surveys. We have no doubt that such an approach could be implemented by collecting data through internet surveys specifically designed to identify the composition of kinship networks, examine norms and behaviors, and investigate the consequences of these practices for different family members with a longitudinal design.

Frank F. Furstenberg, Department of Sociology and Population Studies Center, University of Pennsylvania.

Lauren E. Harris, Department of Sociology, University of Pennsylvania.

Luca Maria Pesando, Department of Sociology and Centre on Population Dynamics, McGill University.

Megan N. Reed, Department of Sociology and Population Studies Center, University of Pennsylvania.

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