This study describes nurses’ beliefs and practice regarding family involvement in the care of hospitalised children in Mozambique. Cultural circumstances influence nurses’ everyday practice that is shaped by community culture, organisational hospital culture, nursing culture with a personal view of generic care captured by traditions in families and a professional view of care learned through nursing training. Influences of the institutional culture of a workplace and values inherent in medical science complicate relations in health care settings. The social understanding within a specific workplace with its special characteristics implies that staff share beliefs and ideas as ‘common thinking,’ which then influences the way they understand and act in everyday situations. In order to address social-cultural conditions and shared thinking we investigated Mozambican nurses’ beliefs and practice regarding family involvement in the care of hospitalised children. Ethnographic fieldwork was used to explore nurses’ involvement of family members in their everyday work. The data production consisted of field descriptions from observations and interviews with 36 nurses. Qualitative content analysis was used. The findings show that nurses’ practice of family involvement reflects a society that is poor, hierarchical, family-oriented but at the same time still adaptive. Four themes were identified: family members’ presence in order to assist the nurses in the caring, nurses’ support and education of family members to be involved in the caring, nurses’ shielding of family members from family involvement and difficulties and conditional dilemmas in the nurses’ involvement of families. In conclusion the authors state that emphasising culturally congruent nursing care is necessary if Mozambican families’ way of life is to be accommodated. However, to empower family involvement, the nurses themselves need to be empowered. The desired opportunity for nurses to develop culturally congruent family involvement is also closely connected to community awareness and empowerment of children’s rights.