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This essay presupposes that household, family, and marriage have a social vocation—a natural, outward trajectory in forming networks of families, extended kinships, and neighborhood networks.  It seeks to explore what this entails through a survey of recent scholarship on families, homes, and children.  It discusses family as a place of common work, common standards of judgment, and the membership cultivated through common life in a place. It notes that parents are concerned to equip children for what they will need to earn a good living. Doing so, however, is typically conceived in a personalist, privatized manner—often reduced to matters like loving one’s family. In this privatized context, it is as important as ever to see within family a generative social role, as place where social interdependence and engagement is produced.