ABSTRACT
Despite the tremendous proliferation in family forms, the popular image associated with “the family” is still overwhelmingly a heterosexual nuclear family with a husband, wife, and children (Garey & Hansen, 1998). Many family communication researchers, par-5 ticularly feminists, are committed to honoring a plurality of family forms and relationships, for both ideological and pragmatic reasons because families that deviate from the idealized nuclear norm outnumber supposedly normative families (Coontz, 2000). Kinship resources10 are important to many families, yet these resources have been understudied by family researchers (Johnson, 2000). Anecdotal evidence of the significance of kin exists, but modern studies demonstrate a decline both in families’ involvement with, and scholarly inter-15 est in, kinship ties (Johnson, 2000). We know little about the relationship between aunts and their nieces/nephews. Aunts are not nuclear family members, but neither are they obscure, distant relations. They are typically a sibling from a parent’s immediate20 family of origin. Traeder and Bennett (1998), in their popular tribute, claim that aunts are a crucial resource for maintaining and enriching family and community life, and provide anecdotal evidence of the importance of aunts in family relations in family stories and every-25 day conversation.
