The central purpose of this chapter is to explore the process of social change. We think broadly about the relationship between the concept of the “family” and many decades of transnational migration to the Arabian peninsula. The first portion of this chapter is devoted to a suggested categorization of that relationship, and proposes a tripartite conceptual structure: there are the families that singular migrants leave behind in their countries of origin; there are nuclear families that migrate to the Gulf states as a unit; and there are families in the Gulf States that, as a result of this migration, incorporate domestic workers into the households they comprise. After explicating and discussing this structure, this chapter turns to an ethnographically-informed discussion of the families typifying the second of the categories we establish: how does the migration of nuclear familial units to the Gulf States revise, shift, and alter members’ roles and responsibilities within the familial unit? In the concluding section of the paper, we take note of the global consolidation and simplification of the concept of “family” around its nuclear core, and then speculate that this fact suggests the ongoing conceptual hegemony of Western ideas and knowledge.