Family Obligations

Family obligations are the duties of care, financial support, loyalty, and mutual assistance that relatives are expected to provide one another, such as caring for children, supporting aging parents, and helping kin in crisis. They are shaped by cultural norms, law, gender, class, and the availability of public services. Marcel Mauss's analysis of gift exchange and reciprocity provides a foundation for understanding obligation in kinship, and Janet Finch and Jennifer Mason's research on negotiating family responsibilities showed that obligations are developed through negotiation rather than being fixed rules. Vern Bengtson analyzed intergenerational solidarity, and Gosta Esping-Andersen compared how welfare regimes either rely on or relieve family responsibility through the concepts of familialism and defamilialization. Arlie Hochschild's studies of care chains and the second shift highlight gendered burdens, and Joan Tronto and Eva Feder Kittay developed ethics of care that treat dependency as a public concern. Cross-cultural research, including work on filial piety, shows strong obligations to elders in many societies. Migration and remittances extend obligations across borders. Obligations can bring support but also strain, particularly for sandwich-generation carers. Family obligations remain central to research on care, gender, welfare, and kinship.