In this chapter, I detail the relationships of aunts and nieces, uncles and nephews, describing their essential qualities, including how often they visit and, just as important, how new mediums such as cell phones and e-mail influence their relationships. We explore how families negotiate geographic distances that separate them and continue to engage one another, stay informed of one another's circumstances, and sometimes maintain distinctly close ties. In attempting to cast light on the factors that influence closeness, we explore in greater depth the all-important relationships between adult family members and especially siblings, or the parents of nieces and nephews. We examine the impact of divorce on extended family members and the importance of aunts and uncles in helping children come to understand their parents' marital struggles. Other key features of families can encourage contact and the development of close relationships, including careers and family obligations, personal features such as childlessness, highly valued qualities like being fun, and family values that encourage contact, or fail to do so. Each of these broad features of families and their members illuminate when aunts and uncles are apt to develop extended relationships with their nieces and nephews.

TOGETHER NEAR AND FAR

Aunts, uncles, nieces, and nephews varied widely in their frequency of interaction, from the occasional family gatherings to weekly or even daily contact, and they vary in the purpose of their visits (see Table 3.1).

Families are often defined in rather prosaic terms, with more than a hint of ideology. A family comprising parents and children in one nuclear household becomes the standard-bearer, and of course many families are organized in this way; but many are not. In defining families simply in terms of the physical location of parents and young children, we properly underscore the importance of parent–child relationships, but at the same time overlook other ways in which families evolve, including households headed by single parents, blended families, and adults who reside together without children (e.g., because their children are living independently or because they are childless). We neglect asking the all-important question of where the grandparents and adult siblings are living and how often they communicate and become active in supporting each other, including sharing in child care. Standard definitions of families as singular households are in part a simple description of how people live and organize some of their relationships, however inaccurate, and in part implicit prescriptions for how lives should be lived. In one insightful view, feminist scholar Dorothy Smith defines the Standard North American Family (SNAF) as an ideological code representing a legally married heterosexual couple sharing a household with children. As an ideology, it is pernicious:

The roles of aunts and uncles are likely flexible in their expression and in the accompanying expectations held by family members. As we have learned throughout the earlier chapters, aunts and uncles vary in their enactment of relationships with siblings and their children. As with many social positions, there is a certain amount of personal discretion involved; to a certain extent, individuals freely elect to develop and maintain personal relationships, or they elect not to do so. Further, like many social positions, there is a certain degree of flexibility in the expectations family members have of each other, expectations that define patterns of obligation and rules of engagement. And then, too, relationships and the social positions that comprise them are negotiated enterprises. Personal preferences must be negotiated with relational partners, and there are many. Developing and sustaining a relationship with a niece depends in part on the niece's preferences, her parents, grandparents, and quite possibly other family members. The expression of aunting and uncling and the expectations that pair with those expressions are continually being created and recreated in the ordinary discourse of family life. Earlier we referred to elements of this discourse as marriage or relationship work in which spouses talk with friends and relatives about their primary relationships, sometimes seeking advice and just as often seeking a sympathetic listener.

The 104 volunteers for this study included aunts, uncles, nieces, and nephews who were interviewed in their homes, offices, or occasionally in a public café. The interviews ranged widely from under a half hour to nearly two hours. Often the volunteers had much to say in response to my questions about their experience being an uncle or aunt, niece or nephew. In all, I recorded more than 83 hours of material, which was later transcribed verbatim into text files. Here I describe the volunteers in some detail, the kinds of questions I asked, and the method I used to come to some understanding of what they shared. Some readers may be more interested in the actual findings and less in the details of the inquiry's design. Feel free to move right along to the findings presented in the chapters that follow.

THE DESIGN OF THE STUDY

Because we know so little about what aunts and uncles do, or how nieces and nephews experience uncling or aunting, the most direct approach seemed the most appropriate. I simply asked them to describe their relationships in their own words. In this way, the data of the study are the voiced experiences of participants. Experiences include descriptions of how often they visited, chatted by phone, or e-mailed. Some were in frequent contact, some were not. Some were exceptionally close and described relationships like that between a parent and son or daughter, or between intimate friends.

Aunts and uncles viewed their roles in a variety of ways, some quite distinct, often seeing themselves as adjuncts to parents, as third parties with unique perspectives, or, in a surprising number of cases, as surrogate parents. Each of these roles is illustrated throughout the interviews. Aunts and uncles freely discussed how they viewed themselves and their relationships with favored nieces and nephews, and they just as importantly talked about their siblings. In turn, nieces and nephews shared their views of a favored aunt or uncle and the ways in which they were influential and, in many cases, continue to be so. The three primary roles of adjunct, third-party, and surrogate parent are not necessarily mutually exclusive. Relationships change over time, and perhaps one of the more important attributes of the ties linking family members is their resiliency, their long histories, and the expectation that relationships will continue well into the future. This expectation of continuity is consistent in many of the interviews and represents an important context for the relationships that develop. I consider each of these issues in the pages that follow, considering first how aunts and uncles viewed the importance of their relationships in general terms and how such relationships change over time. I then consider how aunts and uncles supplement parents, acting as objective third parties or surrogate parents, often when biological parents are unavailable or entirely absent.

A STORY FOUND

I was raised in a typical Italian-American family. It was large and sociable. Family gatherings were frequent, offered occasions to visit and for children to play, and always centered on food and talk. Our home was near town, and within a short drive were the homes of my mother's six sisters and two brothers and my father's sister and three brothers. The sisters talked daily; the brothers played cards every week. Nearly all of my aunts and uncles, as well as my father, worked in what Eisenhower called the nation's “military industrial complex,” although I'm not sure my family thought of it in this way, and they looked at me kind of oddly when I brought it up one Christmas. I don't think I was an especially difficult child, certainly not any more difficult than my brothers or cousins, but I did at the time think my parents were occasionally, and without justification or provocation, entirely unreasonable. At these times, I visited Aunt Bea with my list of complaints. Bea is my mother's youngest sister. She had five daughters, one son, and a husband who played the clarinet.

INTERVIEW CODING PROTOCOL

All interviews were digitally recorded and transcribed verbatim into text. The transcripts were then parsed into meaning units, typically a sentence or paragraph on a common subject, and coded into one of the themes detailed here. A meaning unit was usually assigned exclusively to one code, but on occasion the comments of participants included multiple meanings and were assigned multiple codes as appropriate. For example, in speaking of her 23-year-old niece, Aunt Rebecca shared the following: “[My niece] is bright and she seems to have great aptitude with math, and she wanted to be a math teacher for a long time. … I've tried to really encourage her … and I think it's nice for women to be in math and science fields, because there's not many of them, and her mom sort of discourages her.” In this example, Aunt Rebecca is clearly being supportive of her niece (Code 3.1: General support), but at the same time she is mentoring a nontraditional gender identity on the part of her niece (Code 3.5: Mentoring gender) and supplementing the likely position of her niece's mother, as Rebecca implies in the last sentence (Code 2.2: Supplemental parenting).

The coding scheme allows us to describe the dramatis personae and identify common themes that appear in their relationships. Most of the themes were anticipated, and specific interview questions were purposefully designed to explore particular issues (e.g., mentoring and family work). Some themes were entirely unanticipated and developed in the course of the study.

Oddly enough, aunting and uncling have little clear representation in the public discourse about families. The relationships of aunts and uncles with nieces and nephews are rarely discussed or examined in any comprehensive way. Yet relationships among siblings are among the more resilient, long lasting, and intimate of family ties, and with the introduction of children, the roles of aunt and uncle are added to the mix of bonds linking siblings and their partners or spouses.

Even the terms aunting and uncling are relatively new; they appeared only recently in the popular and academic literatures on families, and then amid some controversy. Among the early appearances of the terms was an article I wrote and submitted for review to a leading academic journal. The article was published in due time, but not without some spirited exchanges. One of the reviewers questioned the terms aunting and uncling and lamented over their inclusion in the family lexicon, perhaps thinking they were unnecessary, unusual, or simply dreadful. The story illustrates the invisibility of the family work of aunts and uncles because specific terms to describe what they do are not in common usage. We have heretofore no common terms by which to describe our expectations of aunts and uncles or their typical activities and to differentiate them from the expectations and activities of other family members such as parents or grandparents.

In this and the next two chapters, I explore the appearance of generativity in the relationships of aunts and uncles with nieces and nephews. Mentoring and intergenerational buffering are two primary requirements of generative cultures, and in this chapter, I examine how and when they emerge in families. Although generativity is often viewed as an individual attribute appearing in the midlife development of adults, as we shall see, it is enacted in a relational context involving parents, their children, and extended kin. Viewed in this way, mentoring and intergenerational buffering are akin to active thoroughfares with a good deal of bus traffic passing within and across generations, rather than individual conveyances passing along one-way avenues. To be sure, aunts and uncles actively mentor their nieces and nephews. In addition, they actively mentor parents and in this way further secure their importance in building generative family cultures. Then again, relationships are negotiated enterprises, even those involving older adults and younger children. Just as offspring can influence the development of their parents, nieces and nephews influence the development of their kinfolk, and they do so by actively mentoring their aunts and uncles. These generative thoroughfares have been largely unexplored to date, although they are clearly central and active.

Aunts and uncles actively mentor nieces and nephews in a variety of ways. They are valued for their support, counsel, and occasional criticism in matters of school and career, spirituality and moral values, and relations with parents, siblings, and other family members.

In the mix of generative roles, whether aunts and uncles are acting as mentors or family historians, engaging in partisan support or intergenerational mediation, there are many instances in which their relationships with nieces and nephews take on the character of a friendship. Aunts and nieces, uncles and nephews share common interests and spend time together engaged in those interests. They offer each other advice, often about family members, and at other times plainly enjoy one another's company. A similarity of interests and reciprocal provisions of support are common themes in friendship, but the longevity of their shared family relationships is perhaps not as common. It is the distinguishing feature that casts friendships among kin apart from those with nonkin, and it is one central feature from which generativity emerges. Aunts and uncles are unique among family members in that they share a long history with the parents of nieces and nephews as siblings, a history and role relationship that sets them apart from grandparents and frames their relationships with nieces and nephews, at times accelerating such relationships and at times discouraging them from developing.

INTIMACY AND COMMITMENT

Aunts and uncles may develop relationships with nieces and nephews that begin at birth and may include nearly all significant developmental milestones in infancy, childhood, adolescence, and early adulthood. This shared co-biography represents a depth and longevity of acquaintance that appears only rarely among nonkin.

The family work of aunts and uncles takes on a variety of forms but shares some common characteristics as aunts and uncles, as well as nieces and nephews, exchange knowledge about family members, mediate occasional family disputes, or act as partisan supporters or critics. Aunts and uncles talk with nieces and nephews about their parents, siblings, grandparents, and other kinfolk. They tell and retell stories of family members. They share significant events, developmental milestones, and news of current activities. In so doing, they create a family's unique biography and secure the place of each individual within a continuity of generations and relationships. In this chapter, we consider each of the realms of family work as they illustrate how uncles and aunts enact generativity throughout their relationships with family members, particularly nephews and nieces. At the same time, the conduct of family work further illustrates how families are composed of interdependent relationships organized across multiple households. Of course families vary in their permeability, in the knowledge members have of one another, the frequency with which they communicate, and the unique family norms that govern their conversations or the lack of them. Some aunts and uncles have little contact with their siblings or other kin; others have considerable contact. Our task in these pages is to illustrate this diversity and in particular to illustrate how aunts, uncles, parents, and their children often rely on one another in a variety of significant ways.