When someone says, “that’s what family does,” check the fine print

 

"Because that’s what family does.” I hear the phrase every few weeks, usually moments before emotional, physical or logistical work is (re-)assigned. Last Saturday I was halfway out the door, market bag in hand, when my cousin swept in. Fresh from a 10-day holiday trip to the beach, she serves as the self‑appointed project manager of our centenarian grandmother’s care.

“Quick update?” she asked in her clipboard voice.

“Two ongoing issues,” I said. “The nurses’ schedule and Grandma’s meals.”

Her forehead scrunched. “Why do you people make mountains out of molehills? She’s almost a hundred—let her eat what she wants, when she wants. The system will never be perfect, at least not for people like you. And anyway”—here it came—“the rest is what family is for.” In three seconds flat, my logistical critique became a moral failure.

A Word Built on Work 

We inherit family from the Latin familia: the household of servants and slaves. Love joins the concept centuries later.¹ Modern dictionaries still strain to track its elasticity, listing everything from a nuclear trio to “any group of things connected by common features.”² That sprawl is strategic: a speaker chooses whichever sense best fits the demand at hand. In this case it's - trying to guilt me into doing more, adapting to her priorities. 

Why should it matter if a woman with digestive issues eats breakfast at ten and suffes herself with a 3 course lunch at eleven? Why fret when the nurses arrive an hour late or the door is left ajar? And why, if she volunteered to run the show, am I the one asking? Because, of course, “that’s what family is for.” And I am obliged right?

The Functional Myth 

Mid‑century sociologists George Murdock and Talcott Parsons cast the nuclear family as a miniature factory of social order—reproduction plus what Parsons called “personality stabilisation,” the daily shaping of pliable citizens.³ Contemporary conservatives still wield that model when lamenting social drift.  Even though Cousin would certainly not call herself a conservative, she espouses this model and expects other people to do that as well, "because that's what family does". 

And sure cousin’s résumé of burdens sounds heroic: a month of unpaid leave for another grandmother, three kids, an eleven‑hour‑a‑week kindergarden job, weekend shifts at her partner’s restaurant and six basketfuls of laundry every Saturday. She also stops by our grandmother’s flat for thirty minutes each morning—watches the nurses, swaps gossip over toast—and calls that being “responsible.”

Yet historian Stephanie Coontz shows the supposedly timeless unit was a post‑war blip, subsidised by a once‑in‑a‑lifetime wage and welfare moment.⁴ When my cousin insists things have “always” worked this way, she leans on that mythic snapshot.

The Moral Credit Card 

Jacques Derrida reminds us that names can be performative: they do not merely describe; they prescribe. Family is one such lable. Spoken in the right cadence, it unlocks entire repertoires of obligation—care work, secrecy, forgiveness—without any negotiation.

Philip Larkin’s bleak quatrain captures the compulsory aspect: “They fuck you up, your mum and dad.” Debt is inherited like coastal erosion; love cannot be disentangled from hurt.⁵

The invocation usually runs in three steps:

1. Authority – Because it’s family.

2. Sanctity – To resist is sacrilege.

3. Task assignment – Unpaid labour flows to whoever is nearest, female or youngest.

My own ledger over the past six months: a 40‑hour job, part‑time university and a rota of meal prep, laundry and medical logistics for an elders my cousin wanted to be responsible for. In reality, the cousin, vacation‑fresh, claims supervisory competence but none of the grunt work.  

A Personal Reckoning Back in Grandma’s hallway?

I said: "I need the systm to work, we've already talked about this at length. I can't be expected to cover every missing shift just because I already take care of her shopping and her laundry with a full time job and my class load.”

Cousin frowned, keys jingling. 

“But Grandma took care of you back in the day, so your mother could work,” she replied. "Listening to you complain all the time, it's sounds like you don't need family at all."

And here it is again: Family is an obligation, an automatic generational contract - but one that only selectively applies in term of labour and expectatiosn. It's a  tit for a tat - only Cousin doesn't expect the rest of the band of cousins to march in and do their bit - even though grandmother took care of them as toddlers. 

The clash is not about nurse timetables or food; is about the definition of family and, by extension, whose time is "billable". It's about Cousin wanting to be right, invoking the authority and the sactitiy of family, while trying to shame me into doing her bidding and rearrange my life around hers demands. 

That's not family that's a labour contract - one that needs renegotiation and should have explicit clauses:

1. Scope of labour – Name the tasks, set the hours, note the opportunity costs.

2. Voluntary consent – No moral shaming for negotiating limits.

3. Reciprocity statement – Care flows across generations, not just downward.

Without such terms, the invocation stays a magic trick: an empty signifier into which any demand can be poured.

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Next essay: how those demands harden into daily routines—the “workhouse of love.” For now, remember: when someone says, “that’s what family does,” ask to see the contract (and take a look at the fine print).

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Notes

1. Etymonline, “family” (accessed June 2025).

2. OED, “family,” senses 1–30.

3. George P. Murdock, Social Structure (1949); Talcott Parsons, “The Social Structure of the Family” (1959).

4. Stephanie Coontz, The Way We Never Were (1992).

5. Philip Larkin, “This Be the Verse,” High Windows (1974).