In recent decades, family-related migration research has undergone significant growth and transformation. However, key concepts such as ‘family,’ ‘kinship,’ and ‘marriage’ have not been adequately problematized, as researchers often rely on legal definitions and common sense categories instead of analytic categories of kinship and family. This reliance on categories of practice may inadvertently have problematic implications. These implications can include (a) ethnocentrism, when researchers rely on their own understanding of kinship categories, and more broadly, what kinship entails; (b) state-centered epistemologies, when researchers uncritically adopt state-defined categories of marriage and family; and (c) normative assumptions about the family and family relations that may differ from actual family practices, when researchers rely on their own and migrants’ normative conceptions of kinship. A closer engagement with kinship theory would allow researchers to address and possibly avoid these pitfalls and better understand the complex ways in which kinship relations intersect with migration and mobility.