Phrases for talking about

your family
There is a saying that blood is thicker than water, which means that the
bond we have with family members is stronger than with anyone else.
Whether you agree with that or not, chatting about our families is
something that most of us do quite often, so it isn’t surprising that words
for family members and words to describe their personalities are often
among the first things we learn in a new language. In this post, I aim to
build on that by presenting some less obvious words and phrases for
talking about families.

We use the phrase immediate family to describe the closest members of

our family – usually our parents, children, wife or husband. In some
cases, especially if we live with them, it may include
our siblings (brothers and sisters). Our extended family is all the people
we are related to, for instance cousins, aunts, uncles and their wives,
husbands, children, etc. We can also say whether we are related to a
person by marriage or by blood (we sometimes use the phrase a
blood relative/relation).

If you have a good relationship with a family member, you can say that
you get on (well) (usually UK)/get along (well) (usually US) with them. If
you want to emphasize that you understand them well and spend a lot of
time with them or talking to them, you can use the word close:

My sister and I are close.

I’m very close to my sister.

The phrase love someone to bits (UK) or love someone dearly literally
means to love someone very much, although we tend to follow it with the
word but: I love her dearly, but she can be very annoying. The
word doting describes a very loving parent, aunt, grandparent, etc., while
a hands-on parent, grandparent, etc. is one who spends a lot of time with
a child, both playing with them and looking after them.

On the other hand, if your relationship isn’t so good, you can say that you
are not very/particularly close or that you don’t get on very well. If
you have argued with a family member and don’t see them any more, you
can use the word estranged:

I’m estranged from my sister.

His estranged mother sent him a letter.

Arguments between brothers and sisters are often called sibling

rivalry. In order to describe problems in a marriage, people often say that
they are going through a bad/rough patch and to describe problems in
the past, they say they’ve had their ups and downs.

We often talk about our parents in relation to the kind of upbringing we

had, often using the phrasal verbs grow up or bring up:

I grew up in a working class household.

Our parents brought us up to be ambitious.

We also like to compare people within families. For instance, we say that
a younger person takes after an older one if they are similar in some
way. Or, to end with another saying, if we want to emphasize how similar
a child is to one of their parents, we can say the apple doesn’t fall far
from the tree.