Book Review: Just Like Family: How Companion Animals Joined the Household by Andrea Laurent-Simpson

Abstract

In the present day, more people are choosing to be childfree, or have children later in life, and marrying at older ages. The concept and definition of family are changing and reflecting these demographics. The nuclear heteronormative couple with two children is no longer the first image that comes to mind when a person thinks of the word family. Andrea Laurent-Simpson, a Research Assistant Professor and Senior Lecturer in the Department of Sociology at Southern Methodist University, offers an insightful approach to the “multispecies” family in America in her book Just Like Family: How Companion Animals Joined the Household. Her educational background includes a PhD in Sociology from Texas Woman’s University, and her research focus is based on family and fertility, non-human animal interaction, and identity theory. Laurent-Simpson’s main purpose and goal of this book is to “explain why the presence of the multispecies family is an important domain of research, particularly for family scholars. . . and to demonstrate how the multispecies family has developed in the context of increasing diversification of familial structures within the United States” (2021:23). She offers a sociological lens of the development of this new family form by analyzing her original data. This data includes 35 in-depth interviews with people who own dogs, cats, or both, from different types of family structures in the US, including families with children and families without (by choice or by circumstance), veterinary visit observations, pet advertisement analysis, and the author’s personal narratives.