ABSTRACT
People do not necessarily do what they are supposed to do for kin, but they know what they are supposed to do, when they should do it, and that kin will summon them to do family labor. This chapter presents a framework for examining how families as multigeneration collectives, and individuals embedded within them work out family responsibilities. We introduce kinscripts, a framework representing the interplay of family ideology, norms, and behaviors over the life span. Kinscripts encompasses three culturally defined family domains: kin-work, which is the labor and the tasks that families need to accomplish to survive from generation to generation; kin-time, which is the temporal and sequential ordering of family transitions; and, kinscription, which is the process of assigning kin-work to family members.
