Does your course teach you family values?

Recently, someone asked me:

“Tumhare course mein family values nahi sikhaye jaate hain kya?”

And I couldn’t stop wondering if this question had ever been asked to a man.

But hey, I’m a student of psychology, so I did what any reasonable person would do.

I went and read the research.

And apparently, even defining family values is more complicated than I thought.

Family values are usually described as principles that guide a family’s behaviour, decision-making, and interactions with one another and with the broader world.

So family values tell us what matters, and how we’re expected to behave because it matters.

And we learn these values from a very young age.

According to research by Pagano et al., parents play a significant role in the socialization of values, and the values they pass on are shaped by factors like ethnicity and gender.

Which got me thinking:

being family-oriented doesn’t necessarily mean just one thing.

Mucchi-Faina, Pacilli, and Verma make an interesting distinction in their cross-cultural study of Indian and Italian university students on Familialism : support obligations and traditional norms.

Basically, there’s a difference between “we take care of each other” and “we all know how we’re supposed to behave.”

Support obligations are about reciprocal emotional support within the family: being able to trust and confide in family members, share difficulties and pleasures, respect one another, and maintain closeness.

The traditional norms are different.

They involve expectations that family members will defer to the wishes of the family, make important decisions within the family, follow family advice, and maintain shared family values and beliefs.

This is a difference that does matter.

Support obligations are centred more around the needs of individual family members. The family provides its members with trust, closeness, and psychological support.

Traditional norms, on the other hand, are centred more around the family as a collective, where the interests of the family as a whole can take precedence over individual members’ goals and aspirations.

The study was done on Indian and Italian university students, about 100 in each country. Both groups considered support more important than traditional norms, but Indian participants placed greater importance on both support obligations and traditional norms than Italian participants did.

And Indian women gave greater weight to traditional norms than Indian males. (Hello, value socialisation)

That, of course, is the part I can’t seem to stop thinking about.

Being family oriented doesn’t sound simple anymore.

You can build a family where people feel deeply loved, supported, and connected.

You can also have a family that knows exactly what to expect from everyone.

At times they are the very same families.

And sometimes, they aren’t.

The two can be perfectly compatible, but they’re very different demands on the person.

If one part of Familialism is about meeting the needs of individual members, while another is about placing the family system above the goals and aspirations of those individuals, what happens when we start calling both of them simply “family values”?

Because family values aren’t just about whether family matters.

Of course, it matters.

The bigger question is:

What exactly are we asking an individual to give up in order to prove that it does?

I believe that, and this is why we must not try to determine if a person is living up to their family values, but rather ask:

What does that value actually do inside a family?

Froma Walsh makes a related point in her work on healthy family functioning.

A family pattern cannot really be judged in isolation from what it is doing for the people inside it.

For a single family, the same pattern may be appropriate at one level, and inappropriate at another.

What promotes family stability can also leave a certain family member in a role where they bear the burden of that stability.

Let’s take closeness as an example.

Walsh does not claim that healthy families are “detached families”.

Quite the opposite.

Connectedness and commitment are a part of healthy family functioning, but so are individual differences, autonomy, and separate needs.

At one extreme, there is disengagement: too little mutual care and support, leaving people fragmented or isolated.

And at the other, there is enmeshment: so much emphasis on unity and group survival that individual differences, privacy, and separateness are sacrificed.

The problem isn’t closeness.

The problem is what happens when closeness becomes incompatible with difference.

When disagreement starts looking like disrespect.

When having a different plan starts looking like selfishness.

When wanting something your family wouldn’t choose starts becoming evidence that you’ve forgotten your values.

When “Where are your family values?” quietly becomes another way of saying,

“You don’t get to be separate from us.”

Walsh’s framework of healthy family functioning also involves things like clear but flexible boundaries, equitable power and responsibility, open communication, effective problem-solving and conflict resolution, adaptability, autonomy, and the development and well-being of individual members.

You see that last part?

Development and well-being of individual members.

Because a healthy family isn’t necessarily a family where everyone agrees.

In fact, Walsh describes well-functioning families as capable of open disagreement, communication, negotiation, and compromise.

The absence of Kalesh isn’t the standard.

The family’s ability to manage conflict and solve problems is.

Which brings us to something else.

Keeping the peace is not automatically the same thing as resolving conflicts.

Sometimes the family is peaceful because everyone has learned how to talk.

Sometimes it’s peaceful because everyone has learned what they are not allowed to say.

Families also develop internal norms and rules — some explicit, some so implicit that nobody remembers who decided them — that establish expectations around roles, actions, and consequences.

Shared beliefs and values give meaning to experiences and guide how families respond to situations.

And these beliefs are transmitted across generations and through cultural, ethnic, and religious traditions.

But these family beliefs can be empowering or debilitating, depending on the themes underlying them and, importantly, on how responsive they are to changing circumstances.

When cultural myths are invoked as if only one particular mode of family structure, value, or living is the correct way, then beliefs can become problematic especially when this results in a family’s perceiving a different mode of structure, value, or living as deficient or deviant.

Because values don’t exist in a vacuum.

They become rules about how people should behave.

They mold the thinking that is deemed:

Responsible.

Respectful.

Selfish.

Appropriate.

Disloyal.

Successful.

Shameful.

Good enough.

And once a rule has existed for long enough, we have a funny habit of calling it a value.

So the question isn’t whether family and the individual have to be on opposite sides.

It’s whether you can build a family where both are allowed to exist.

It’s not as though there is one correct family structure or one set of rules for all families.

Healthy functioning may manifest in various ways in different cultures, contexts, resources, and circumstances.

But what’s important are the processes that actually work within the particular context of that family.

So the question isn’t:

“What’s the family value here?”

Maybe it’s:

“What does this value ask of the people inside the family?”

And who gets to define the rules?

Who gets to disagree with them?

Who’s the one who’s always accommodating?

Who gets protected by them?

Who gets to remain exactly as they are while someone keeps adjusting?

And who carries the emotional or practical cost of maintaining them?

Is the value helping the family remain connected, or is it requiring individual members to become smaller in order for the family to remain the same?

And this becomes particularly complicated when we look at women.

Ali Abbas Rizvi, 2026 conducted a qualitative study, interviewing 24 married women in Kurla, Maharashtra, on women’s autonomy in decision making with regards to marriage, reproduction, mobility, social visits, household expenses and living arrangements.

What I found interesting is that the influence of family members wasn’t always direct.

In joint families, extended family influence appeared across areas including marriage, child and maternal health, and mobility.

In nuclear households, the influence could take the form of more subtle expectations and indirect interventions around finances and living arrangements.

Autonomy of women was negotiated in intergenerational hierarchies, gender norms and socioeconomic conditions.

Which makes the phrase “We decide together” a little more complicated.

Because deciding together isn’t necessarily the problem.

It’s how much importance is given to the say of the one for whom the decisions are being made.

And who is expected to adjust when everyone doesn’t agree?

A family can genuinely care about a woman’s well-being while also having very strong ideas about what that well-being is supposed to look like.

Where should she live?

When does she get married?

Whether she should work or not.

How much should she travel?

What kind of a relationship is acceptable?

Whether having children is assumed?

How much responsibility she should take for keeping everyone comfortable?

And sometimes none of these expectations are announced as rules.

They’re simply presented as what a good daughter, wife, daughter-in-law, or woman does.

And this is where I think the language of family values becomes particularly important for women.

Because the same values can hold such different meanings depending on who is being asked to live them.

“Family comes first.”

But who is expected to put themselves second?

“You have to adjust.”

But who is doing most of the adjusting?

“Think about the family.”

But whose choices are being treated as a reflection of the family?

“Respect your elders.”

But does respecting someone mean listening to them blindly?

Or does it mean that disagreement itself becomes disrespectful?

Because maybe the question was never whether I know my family values.

Maybe it’s:

What do these values require of me?

If you’re wondering which of your wants are really yours, Family Pressure and Identity: How Do You Know What You Actually Want? goes deeper. And if the weight of what your parents have given up is part of it, When Your Parents’ Sacrifice Becomes Your Responsibility may help.