Every family needs a leader

Kinkeepers build an invisible web that keeps people close

Credit: HBO

Thanks for checking out Nuclear Meltdown. This is sort of a belated Mother’s Day post. If you like mothers, you should subscribe to this blog.

In the course of one week back in 2007, I graduated with my bachelor’s degree, got married, and saw my parents and younger siblings move to a new home about 20 minutes north of the college town where I was living. It was a lot of change in a short time period. But looking back, possibly the most important of those three events — though I didn’t realize it at the time — was my extended family’s relocation.

That’s because after my parents’ move, they started hosting family dinners each Sunday night. My wife and I attended these dinners nearly every Sunday for the next five or so years until we moved away for a job. After we left, the weekly gatherings were one of the things we most missed. The dinners also helped establish long-standing family traditions, such as the tendency to debate heated topics or to eat chicken enchilada casserole — at this point probably the quintessential Dalrymple family dish.

A lot has changed since then — new marriages and new births have made the family much larger, we’ve since moved back to be closer to the larger group, etc. — but those regular family gatherings set a precedent of connectedness that continues to this day. Just last weekend, for instance, we got together on Saturday and Sunday, and then played with our family softball team on Monday.

Different people contributed to those family dinners in different ways, but the person I see as overwhelmingly responsible is my stepmom. She made the food. If we were curious about the timing or menu, we asked her. If we had questions about the goings on of non-local family members, she would know. And she was the one who made it clear that there was a standing weekly dinner invitation for both us and anyone else who might want to tag along.

In that way, my stepmom was occupying a specific type of family leadership role: the kinkeeper.

Researchers define kinkeepers as the people in families who initiate and maintain contact with the broader group. For a variety of reasons, they tend to be women in middle age who occupy “the metaphorical center of the family due to their stereotypical roles as caregivers and resource exchangers within the family network.”

Other researchers have described kinkeeping as a form of emotional labor that serves as the “glue that binds families together across time, distance, and divorce.” A recent article in The Atlantic additionally pointed out that people tend to be closer to their moms’ families, which researchers have suggested is a result of kinkeeping’s matriarchal tilt.

Additional kinkeeping tasks include collecting and sharing family history, establishing norms for family culture and shared obligations,¹ and — critically in my opinion — bolstering a collective sense of continuity, cohesion, and solidarity.

I’ve seen this idea play out in my own family with my stepmom and, more recently, my wife.

For a long time, my wife was one of the members of the broader group who was best at reaching out and catching up with people. Over time, she also ended up spearheading more real-world activities. For instance, she has been the point person on big family vacations (something my stepmom also spent years doing) and currently is the captain of our family softball team. She’s the captain not because she knows anything about softball — you’d be hard pressed to find someone who knows less about sports — but because she’s gradually emerged as someone who coordinates the group. She has become a “captain” in the family.

My family’s kinkeepers also play an important role in peacekeeping. I mentioned above that sometimes my family enjoys debating heated topics. But I have noticed that the family kinkeepers tend to be the ones who intervene and stop these conversations if they’re beginning to get too heated.

Other times, logistics and peacekeeping overlap. Last Thanksgiving, for instance, my wife and I hosted a large 45-person dinner that included both of our extended families. The dinner’s basic gist was my idea, and we both did work to make it happen. But my wife did all of the communication, spending hours back channeling with dozens of people to balance competing ideas and defuse microdramas. Without those efforts — without kinkeeping — not only would the event have failed, but it could easily have turned into a source of festering rifts.

Similar experiences have played out again and again, with strong kinkeeper-leaders making the difference between a moment that binds the family closer together verses one that breaks it apart.

The point is this: Kinkeeping forms a kind of invisible infrastructure that holds a family together even, or especially, when there’s pressure that might push it apart.

For some families, or in some communities where kinkeeping is more culturally expected, this may all sound pretty obvious.

But I suspect that for many American families strong kinkeeping is actually not the norm. Though I’ve had few conversations with people about the actual term “kinkeeping,” I have asked friends and colleagues over the years about the “leaders” of their families. Most of the time, people don’t even understand the question. In one memorable exchange, I asked a friend if his mom or dad tended to lead the family. He replied that “I lead myself. I’m a grown up!”²

The comment was telling because it highlights how some of us don’t think about the need for someone to proactively build that invisible communication infrastructure that creates cohesion and solidarity.

Even in my own family, the kind of group-building work that my stepmom and wife (among others) do seems to be the exception rather than the rule. For instance, my maternal grandparents didn’t do much kinkeeping. They tended not to proactively communicate. I grew up near their home, so we saw them often, but they didn’t call, or share much family information (eg gossip), or plan family events beyond a few holiday gatherings.

I don’t say this to knock them. They were great in many ways. My grandpa taught me a lot about hard work. My grandma was a great conversationalist for those who reached out to chat. But they didn’t proactively attempt to build the kind of invisible connective infrastructure that I see binding together other branches of my family.

And now, decades down the road, the chickens have come home to roost: At my grandma’s funeral, one of her adult children mentioned matter-of-factly that he might not ever see his siblings again. I rarely see my cousins on that side of the family. I couldn’t tell you what all their kids’ names are.

I really like that side of the family. We’re not estranged. We just… don’t have strong bonds. The same goes for other branches of my family. And for the families of many friends and colleagues. And I think that’s because over the years no one did the vital work of building bonds and keeping kin.

I don’t want to give the impression that my own family is exceptionally good or bad at kinkeeping, or that we’re some sort of multigenerational utopia. I think on the whole we’re pretty typical, at least for a large family with many people living near each other. But it’s interesting that within the family there are examples of both successful kinkeeping and not — and the level of closeness and solidarity varies widely in those examples.

In any case, the final point I’m making is that kinkeeping, at least for some of us, is not something that happens accidentally or automatically. It’s a job that someone has to proactively take on. And when no one steps up, family members may drift away from each other.

That’s a shame. One of the underlying premises of this blog is that everyone is better off with a community that supports them. As they say, it takes a village. But how do villages form? What sustains them? Why do some families, or some cultures, do so much better at this than others? And how can a family ultimately create more fertile ground in which a village might take root?

There are a lot of answers to those questions, and they touch on things like finance and property. But also, at the most fundamental level, someone has to choose to lead the family and maintain its identity as a unit. Someone has to smooth out differences and catch up on the latest drama. Someone has to share the family’s story about how it became a family in the first place. Someone has to host dinners and captain the team. If you want your kin to be a village and not just people who see each other at Thanksgiving, in other words, someone has to become the kinkeeper.

Thanks for checking out Nuclear Meltdown. If you liked this post, consider sharing it with a friend.

Headlines to check out this week:

Why Are We Ignoring Family as a Solution to Loneliness?

This is a shameless plug for a piece I wrote on how a new loneliness campaign leaves out family — even though family has a proven track record as a loneliness antidote.

“I appreciate that Murthy is highlighting the problem of loneliness. It’s a serious and widespread problem that doesn’t get as much attention as it should. But I also found his set of solutions inexplicable: He announced his anti-loneliness campaign by emphasizing the role family played in his own life, then goes on to almost entirely leave family out of his set of recommendations. In fact, the new advisory explicitly states that it’s trying to “cultivate ways to foster sufficient social connection outside of chosen traditional means and structures.”2

In other words, the advisory’s omission of family is apparently intentional.”

1. A useful example of norm-building is the role of grandparents. I know families in which it’s expected that grandparents will play an active role in childrearing for their grandkids, to the point that the older generation often moves in with the younger generations. In other families, grandparents play a relatively smaller role in their grandkids’ lives. Kinkeepers help set and enforce expectations on these types of issues, so that family members understand their obligations and what counts as a transgression against those obligations.

2. This was a conversation from a few years ago and I’m paraphrasing from memory. It’s not a word-for-word transcription.