The hidden economics of kinkeeping work

It helps if someone doesn't have to work a full time job

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A few weeks ago I wrote about kinkeepers, which is a term researchers use to describe the people who work to keep their families together. They’re the people who plan events, preserve and share lore, maintain family history, smooth over relationships and generally make sure that a collection of individuals continues to think of themselves as a group.

I had some great feedback on that post — thank you to the people who responded — and a few comments mentioned the idea that there seems to be an economic or financial component to kinkeeping. I think that’s absolutely right, and I wanted to tease the idea out; if it’s important for a family to have a kinkeeper, then it’s also important to cultivate the financial circumstances that allow a kinkeeper to flourish in the first place.

A lot of the research I’ve come across has focused on framing kinkeeping as labor. The idea is that it’s actually a lot of work to keep a family together, even if we aren’t accustomed to thinking of kinkeeping efforts as a “job.”

But I’ve seen less information on what I suspect is an equally important part of the equation: The tasks kinkeepers don’t do. In other words — and here is today’s thesis — kinkeeping is a big enough job that it’s hard to do if you have another full-time occupation.

Because I haven’t seen a lot of research on this (it’s probably out there, send it my way if you have it), I’ll illustrate with my own family. As I’ve mentioned previously, my wife¹ is among those who has served as a kinkeeper in my extended family. By way of background, for the first several years of our marriage my wife worked as a high school teacher. When we relocated for my job, she became a flight attendant. Technically she still is a flight attendant, though for the last several years while we’ve had multiple kids she hasn’t put in many hours at the job thanks to (unpaid) maternity leave.

My wife has always been pretty good at keeping in touch with various family members. But her role as a kinkeeper intensified at the same moment when her wage-earning career duties became less intense. That’s when she became more involved in planning trips and hosting events like holiday dinners².

She still does a lot of labor, both domestically and in the wage-earning world. But her work tends to be more flexible than most jobs. In fact — and this is key — she probably has the most flexible schedule out of anyone in my large extended family who lives in the same region. Every single other person in the group has a conventional full-time or near-full-time job.

I don’t think it’s a coincidence that my wife has this unique (for our family) work situation and is also a kinkeeper. And the lesson to me is that families probably need someone who doesn’t have a full-time wage-earning occupation to hold everything together. Or at least, they benefit immensely from having such a person. That’s not to say you can’t be a kinkeeper and have a job. Lots of people do it. But I suspect kinkeeping becomes easier and less burdensome as your schedule becomes more flexible.

In the case of my marriage, we’ve been incredibly fortunate that we can have one of us not wage earning full time. There’s not a day that goes by where I’m not thankful and amazed by that fact. We are not rich, but we get by and more people, everyone really, should have that opportunity if they want it.

But also, some families do have a choice and they choose to have everyone remain in the workforce. That’s fine. I don’t care what other people do with their lives. But it’s worth considering that in making such a choice, families may be sacrificing their ability to have a kinkeeper. The glue that holds the family together may become weaker.

I don’t know if that specific tradeoff is something most of us fully consider. I know I didn’t until recently. I generally always understood that if my wife and I both worked we’d sacrifice some time and freedom for more money. But I didn’t realize that in doing so, a critical role in the family might go unfilled³.

Still, there’s tremendous pressure to prioritize work. Much of the debate about public childcare, for example, has focused not on holistic things that might make families stronger — kinkeeping being one of many — but merely on funneling everyone into the professional workforce. And though this is far from universal, there are certainly many people who believe that a rewarding life requires a rewarding career. If that’s what you want, do it. But it’s worth at least being aware that in making such a decision your ability to kinkeep may be diminished. And if everyone in your family (nuclear or extended) makes that decision, there may not be a kinkeeper — and the benefits kinkeepers create — at all.

All of this is an attempt to make a few simple points. First, someone who doesn’t have a regular job, such as a stay-at-home parent⁴, can make an ideal kinkeeper. This is part of the reason that kinkeeping has historically fallen to middle aged women; traditionally (though less so today) they were the ones whose labor focused on the home and family.

Second, kinkeeping should be a part of the discussion when talking about the pros and cons of dual income households. I think it complicates that discussion. And while dual income households may be a necessity for many of us, it doesn’t hurt to acknowledge that they introduce tradeoffs in terms of family cohesion and identity.

And third, if I wanted to ensure that someone holds my family together, I’d start by finding a way to take the pressure to earn wages off someone in the group. Some people do that by having one partner in a relationship act as the breadwinner. But I don’t actually think it has to take place at the nuclear unit level; my wife kinkeeps for a large extended family group. If both members of a marriage need to work, in other words, living near a retired grandparent or a stay-at-home sibling can give them access to a kinkeeper without needing to leave the full-time workforce. But of course that also requires leaning in to an intergenerational family structure.

I didn’t always care about kinkeeping, but I gradually came to see it as essential by watching people do it. Today, many members of my extended family are close because multiple people have worked toward that end. But it’s also obvious that kinkeeping benefits from a certain baseline level of financial stability, and from family structures that give people the time to focus their labor on relationships. And in the never-ending quest to build better families, and find the ideal worth aiming for, it’s worth keeping that in mind.

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1. My wife isn’t the only person who serves as a kinkeeper in my extended family, but I’m focusing on her here both because we discuss these topics and because I know she doesn’t mind if I write about her in this blog.

2. Part of this in our case has to do with where we were living at various times, but that’s a story for a different day.

3. An imperfect analogy might be a manufacturing CEO who spends so much time pinch hitting on the factory floor that no one actually runs the business.

4. Obviously because I’m the breadwinner and my wife handles more of the domestic work our arrangement is pretty traditional (though in keeping with our age demographic, I’d say it’s less traditional than our parents’ arrangements). But it’s worth noting that I don’t think every family has to share that setup. I know a number of stay-at-home dads, and their lives seem to be great. They are certainly good candidates to be kinkeepers. In my case, I didn’t become the breadwinner because of any ideological reason. I became the breadwinner because when our first kid was born I was making more money and it made more financial sense for me to remain in the workforce. If my wife had been making more at the time, the roles would’ve been reversed and that would have been just fine.