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The ageing population is posing increasingly similar challenges to the societies on both shores of the Mediterranean, where families remain the primary welfare agencies. The socio-demographic and ethnographic evidence surveyed in this article reveals that although old forms of relatedness such as co-residence in extended families continue to play a role, they are complemented by coping strategies in which a familistic ideology favors the “extension” of families through new forms of relatedness ranging from close residential proximity between children and parents to live-in homecare where domesticity may catalyze kinning processes between elders and their caregivers.