Aims: This article aims to demonstrate their significance within selected concepts of life design and to present opportunities for using analyses of these contexts in contemporary career counselling, which has become increasingly narrative and biographical. Method: The article is a review of selected theoretical approaches based on Polish and international literature. Results: This article presents different approaches to the family in selected career counselling theories, presents Life Design as a new career counselling perspective and examples of narrative counselling interventions. Conclusions: Parents are their children’s primary counsellors and their impact on their children’s future professional choices is obvious, even if young people’s decisions express their contestation of life models offered/forced upon them by their parents. In many studies in the fields of sociology, psychology, and pedagogy such obvious relationships are analyzed and described, but everyday career counselling tends to ignore individual life ecology, including family contexts and their impact on career-related decisions. The new narrative approach to career and life design includes family contexts and their impact on professional decisions.