You’re the one who remembers every family member’s birthday, who sends flowers when a friend’s parent passes away, and makes sure the kids sign all the Christmas cards before sending. On their own these tasks seem like no big deal, not that hard, just part of life. But on top of work, parenting, and the enormity of the mental load of running a household, these little acts of keeping your family connected to others become much more burdensome. They even have a name: kin keeping. So, what is kin keeping exactly, and how can you shuffle some of that responsibility onto your partner’s plate if you realize you’re doing it all?
What is kin keeping?
The term kin keeping refers to all of those invisible tasks you complete to strengthen your family’s ties to others in your extended family (and close friends of the family, I’d add).
“It’s the labor that’s involved in maintaining and enhancing family ties. That might include organizing for holidays or social occasions. It might be things like remembering birthdays, sending gifts, things like that. Usually it’s done by women and it’s typically unpaid. These are things that often women do to keep a family connected and bonded,” says clinical psychologist Dr. Annie Hsueh.
Kin keeping is not about physical caretaking of your home or kids, says Zoe Spears, LMFT, licensed marriage and family therapist. “It is carrying that mental load of family connection, whether that is remembering birthdays, buying gifts, or planning travel to see family. Maybe it’s reminding your partner to call their mother on their birthday or on Mother’s Day. It could be coordinating visits.”
Entire academic articles have been written about the ways women facilitate the relationships between their adult partners (typically male) and their partner’s parents. They point out that emotional labor between your family and extended family — like discussing conflicts and relaying family news and updates — are also considered kin keeping tasks, and disproportionately fall on women’s shoulders.
Why does kin keeping so often fall on the woman of the house?
If you’ve ever caught yourself telling your husband to call his mom and check in about her doctor’s appointment, or relaying news he definitely could’ve, you’ve probably thought, “Why am I the one doing this?” In their couples’ therapy practice, both Spears and Hsueh say it is typically their women clients in heterosexual relationships saying they’re tired of maintaining all the ties that bind.
“They feel like they need to maintain these family relationships and closeness, and if they don’t, then it won’t happen,” says Spears. “That’s not something that necessarily they and their partner have sat down and agreed upon, but oftentimes there is this pressure on women to maintain family relationships. And so that becomes this kind of invisible expectation that partners may not even realize. Unconsciously, they just expect their partner to do those things. And oftentimes I think women do put this pressure on themselves too.”
How To Talk To Your Partner About Kin Keeping & Doing Their Fair Share
Maybe you’ve brought up your kin keeping burden before only to have your partner say something like, “But you’re just so much better at that stuff.” Or, “I just don’t think about it.” Good news for you, bad news for them: women are not born inherently better at kin keeping. It is a learned skill, which means they can learn it too.
Start with a clear conversation about the division of labor in your household at large, Hsueh says; kin keeping is part of that. But you’ll want to get specific about your ask. She uses Dr. Becky Kennedy’s “FNS” acronym to teach her clients how to talk about their needs. It stands for “feelings, needs, specifics.”
“For example, rather than just saying, ‘Hey, I’m really overwhelmed. Can you help more with the kids?’, it’s going to sound closer to, ‘I’m feeling overwhelmed at home this week. I really need more support around giving our children a bath at night. Can you take that over Monday, Wednesday, and Friday this week?” she explains.
Spears recommends the Fair Play Policy Institute’s card deck to her clients who need to have a conversation like this. Each card represents an invisible labor task, like calling parents/in-laws and sending holiday cards, and clearly lays out the steps involved in each one. It’s sort of like a neutral third party that can clarify what unseen work goes into every responsibility. If you print out the cards and each take the ones you currently do, you can then talk about how to redistribute them into more equitable piles.
“I say equitable, not equal, because I don’t think it is necessarily realistic for things to be 50-50 all the time,” says Spears. “What feels equitable in their relationship? There are going to be tasks that people naturally tend to gravitate towards, that they like, that they enjoy. And so this card deck really plays to working with their strengths and helping the couple find something that feels more equitable.”
If things are mostly equitable as is, you could also just let your partner know you’re done with a certain kin keeping task that is, arguably, not your responsibility.
“It could start with something as simple as like, ‘Hey, I really need you to be in charge of planning things for your family.’ If you’re constantly reminding your partner to call their mother, it could be shifting that responsibility from yourself by saying, ‘Hey, in the future, I’m not going to remind you to call your mom or remind you to get her a birthday present. Those are things that you need to be responsible moving forward,’” says Spears.
Permission to scoot that right on off your plate and onto theirs: granted.
