My kids are growing up 400 miles from their cousins. It's shown me that family can be whatever you want it to be.

• When my family moved in 2017, we moved away from my kids' only cousins.
• Their childhood looks different from mine, and they're growing up without a built-in peer group.
• However, we're making sure they still stay connected, and they're building strong friendships here.

When my wife and I moved over 600 kilometers (nearly 400 miles) away from our family and friends in 2017, that choice put a lot of distance between our new life and the life we'd built up until that point.

What I hadn't fully considered was what that distance would mean for our kids — now 9 and 11 — and their relationships with their cousins.

My brother and his family now live far away, and instead of being part of each other's daily lives, my kids and their cousins now see each other only a few times a year. Although we only lived near my brother during the first two years of my daughter's life, she and my brother's son, who is just one year older than she is, were joined at the hip. My brother also has a daughter who is my son's age; they were both just under a year old when we moved. These relationships are especially meaningful to my kids as these are the only two cousins they have.

Now, there are no impromptu sleepovers or family dinners on Sundays, and this absence has shaped how my kids understand family, belonging, and connection.

Growing up without a built-in peer group

When my wife and I grew up in the 90s, cousins were just a part of life — at least, they were for both of us. At our holidays and family gatherings, they were our default playmates — we didn't have to try to build relationships with them or tell our family history, because those things were already understood.

My kids don't have that. They know their cousins, but those relationships are episodic. They pick up where they left off during visits, then go months without seeing each other. We see each other twice a year, usually in the summer and again in the fall. It's a long drive, and driving conditions in the winter make it hard to spend time together during the holiday season. It's no one's fault, it's just geography, but it's different from my childhood.

Sometimes, my kids experience sadness and a sense that they're missing something they can't quite name. My kids don't always say it directly, but they'll ask why we can't see their cousins more often, or comment on how fast the visit went by. Occasionally, they'll ask if they can FaceTime them or send a message, as a way of holding on to the connection a little longer.

But there's also an adaptability I admire in how my kids accept this as normal and have started defining family in their own terms.

How friendship filled the gap

Because their cousins aren't around, friendships have taken on a different weight in my kids' lives.

Though they're young, I already see them investing deeply in their friendships; from my vantage point, it doesn't feel as though they treat their friends as interchangeable or temporary. My daughter spends hours making jewelry or macramé projects for her friends, and my son plays with the same group of kids on our street almost every day.

I've watched them build relationships that look a lot like what their bonds with their cousins might have been like had we lived closer; these are friends they spend entire afternoons with, friends they feel comfortable disagreeing with, and friends who clearly belong to their inner circle.

Living in a small town has helped. Our town is the kind of place where kids run into the same people over and over, whether it's at school, the beach, the skate park, the grocery store, or on the ski hill. Familiarity builds quickly here, and friendships don't stay superficial for long.

Redefining family in real time

Raising kids without cousins nearby has forced me to rethink what family truly means.I used to think of family as something fixed: a network defined by blood and proximity. But watching my kids grow up this way has shown me that family can also be something you actively build through consistency, trust, and shared time rather than through genetics alone.

That said, the absence still stings sometimes. There are times (holidays especially) when I feel the gap. When I imagine how loud and chaotic things might be if cousins were nearby, and how full the house would feel. And I'm not sure whether my kids will wish they had the type of childhood I'd had when they're older, or whether they'll barely think about it at all.

However, there's something grounding about the version of family my kids are learning. They're coming to understand that relationships take effort, that closeness with others isn't automatic, and that people become important through consistency and care — not just because you share a last name.