Responses to the Syrian refugee crisis have varied widely globally, with Canada’s 2015 refugee resettlement initiative, Operation Syrian Refugees, capturing significant international attention, including accolades from the UN and the Open Society Foundations. Amidst the wider geopolitical responses to the refugee crisis, concerns over Syrian refugee families—specifically the welfare of women and their children—feature prominently in both international aid and humanitarian responses to the crisis. The resettlement of the family, family reunification, and moral imperatives to care for families remain foundational to the discourses used by governments, aid and human rights organizations, and the media when responding to the Syrian refugee crisis. However, the family—specifically who constitutes the family and what a family is—remains largely uncontested. Turning to queer theory, this paper interrogates the role of Western discourses around the family through the neoliberalisation of the nuclear family model. In doing so, the paper argues that a key facet of responses to the refugee crisis involve the disciplinary management of the family. Looking specifically at the case of refugee sponsorship in Canada, the paper theorizes how we might reimagine the role of the family in responses to the refugee crisis by examining the ideologies underlying the framing and determination of the family in refugee resettlement policies. Drawing on research conducted using a discourse and media analysis of human-interest stories featuring Syrian refugees and their Canadian sponsors, the paper examines public narratives of how the refugee family is constituted and how Canadian immigration policy impacts and shapes Syrian refugee families upon arrival to Canada. Looking at the relationship between Syrian refugee narratives of the family and the role of sponsors in acculturating refugees into Canadian society, the paper considers how the family as a site of population management and economic independence in Canada intersects with the role and structure of family in the lives of Syrian refugees.