The Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA) provides job-protected, unpaid time off to certain U.S. employees for pregnancy, childbirth or adoption or during periods of personal or family illness. One basis upon which eligible employees can take FMLA leave is to care for a family member with a serious health condition, but the language of the statute limits covered family members to only an employee’s parent, spouse or child. Not siblings.

That is why when Celestia Chapman approached her employer, Brentlinger Enterprises dba the Midwestern Auto Group (“MAG”), in 2019 to take continuous FMLA leave to care for her adult sister who was dying of cancer in another state, MAG, a luxury car dealership in Columbus, Ohio, confidently (if unsympathetically) denied her request. Ms. Chapman exhausted her accrued paid time off traveling back and forth to Kentucky to provide daily care for her sister in her final days, providing the type of care a parent might provide an infant. Due to her sister’s advanced illness, Ms. Chapman provided care with all activities of daily living—cleaning her home, shopping for groceries, cooking her food, spoon-feeding her, toileting and later changing her diapers, bathing her, administering her medicine, paying her bills, driving her to medical appointments and finally tending to her bed sores as her approached her final hours. After Ms. Chapman exhausted her paid time off, MAG provided her a brief unpaid, non-FMLA leave of absence and modified her schedule, but Ms. Chapman still had difficulty keeping up with work due to her constant travel between Kentucky and Ohio and the limited availability of other caretakers for her dying sister. When these challenges manifested as attendance/tardiness issues, MAG fired Ms. Chapman by text message. Her sister died two days later.

Despite these tragic circumstances, MAG opposed Ms. Chapman’s unemployment insurance claim (citing job abandonment) and mishandled her benefits conversion. Then, when Ms. Chapman threatened to sue for FMLA interference and related claims, MAG threatened to seek sanctions against her, claiming that siblings are not on the list of relatives for whose care FMLA leave may be taken (citing 29 U.S.C. § 2612(a)(1)(C)) and arguing that any lawsuit to that effect would be frivolous.

Undeterred, Ms. Chapman filed suit, arguing the FMLA permits employees to take leave to care for an “in loco parentis” parent or child, not only a biological parent or child. And, since she was functioning at the time of her FMLA request like a parent would to a dependent, incapacitated child, Ms. Chapman argued that she should have been viewed as her sister’s parent for purposes of the FMLA. But the trial court rejected Ms. Chapman’s argument, explaining that she needed to show she was functioning as her incapacitated sister’s parent or guardian before the “child” (i.e., the dying sister) turned 18 years old. Since the putative parent-child relationship did not begin before her sister’s incapacity and her sister’s incapacity did not begin before she reached age 18, the court ruled Ms. Chapman could not claim “in loco parentis” status.

The Sixth Circuit disagreed and rejected the trial court’s literal reading of the statute’s limited family relationship protections. Opining that the FMLA does not facially address when the in loco parentis relationship must begin—whether before or after eighteen years of age, or even before incapacity—and finding that MAG’s additional, non-statutory persuasive authority did not conclusively establish the parental relationship must begin in childhood, the Sixth Circuit instead looked to the common law meaning of the phrase, which is not so temporally circumscribed. Indeed, by including in loco parentis relationships within the scope of covered family relationships supporting FMLA leave, the Sixth Circuit concluded Congress intended to reach other relatives or adults outside the traditional nuclear family definition of biological father and mother, including, such as here, an employee who needs job-protected leave to provide for a critically ill dependent who is unable to care for herself. Then, looking at Sixth Circuit decisions in other contexts, the Court concluded there was no precedent limiting in loco parentis relationships to ones formed during minority.

Instead of bright lines like age at the time of incapacity or the formation of the caretaker relationship, the critical question for the Court was whether the sibling requesting accommodation had taken on more responsibility for providing care than one would ordinarily expect to provide to a sibling, and nothing about this question logically limits the relationship to one that forms before the age of majority. “Therefore,” the Court concluded, “reading the FMLA against the backdrop of the common law, we conclude that in loco parentis relationships can form between adults, including adults who also happen to be siblings….[T]he “child” in the in loco parentis relationship need not be a minor at the time the relationship forms, have developed a debilitating condition as a minor, or have developed that condition before the relationship formed.” As a result, the Court remanded the case to the trial court to determine whether Ms. Chapman had intended to form a quasi-parental relationship with her dying sister akin to those relationships held in the past to constitute in loco parentis relationships.

The Chapman decision introduces a new wrinkle for employers that (reasonably) believed this to be one area where a black-letter rule dictates FMLA entitlement. At least those employers in the Sixth Circuit (covering Ohio, Kentucky, Michigan, and Tennessee) must now exercise restraint before issuing kneejerk denials of FMLA leave requests where employees provide enough information to put the employer on notice that their role as caretaker exceeds the ordinary role of “devoted” sibling (or cousin, or friend) offering “generous assistance” and instead reflects an intention by the employee to assume a parental status.