Family Roles and Routines Map

How to use it

1. Choose a routine or time period to map, and include only information people agree to discuss.
2. Add who notices, plans, decides, performs, follows up, and carries the emotional or practical load.
3. Notice access, age, capacity, paid work, care work, and power without assigning roles by gender or relationship title.
4. If safe and wanted, choose one small change to test and a way to review it.

Reflection prompts

• Which work or decision-making has been easy to overlook?
• Where are choice, authority, risk, and capacity uneven?
• Would a direct request, private planning, outside support, or no change be safest now?

Facilitator guidance

Protect privacy and screen for conflict, coercive control, financial abuse, retaliation, and unsafe expectations before shared mapping or redistribution. Do not assume direct assertion, negotiation, or equal division is safe or appropriate.

Adaptations & accessibility

• Map roles individually first and keep responses private unless sharing is freely chosen.
• Use icons, color-independent task tokens, translation, AAC, or clinician scribing.
• Create separate maps for routine work, care work, decision authority, and emotional load to reduce complexity.

Review considerations

Enhanced family-systems, coercive-control, financial-abuse, and second licensed-clinician review required before use.