Chosen Family

A visionary call and empowering guide to building your own “chosen family”

For decades, the nuclear family—one mother, one father, and their children—has been the gold standard of society. Yet the vast majority of us are not living in nuclear families, or we see ourselves as failing if we’re exhausted mothers, single, or divorced. In a world where rising costs and rollbacks on women’s and LGBTQIA+ rights are making it harder to build a life, is the nuclear family really the only way to structure a family?

Busting open long-held assumptions about tradition and care, Chosen Family provides a road map for creating and maintaining intentional family networks based not just on the default but on shared values, needs, and commitment: your “chosen family.” Having spent twenty years helping couples, platonic partners, and polyamorous folks design non-nuclear family structures, lawyer and family mediator Diana Adams guides readers through key questions that arise when creating one’s chosen family, including: Do I want to structure my family around a romantic partner? What does it look like to co-parent with a friend? How do I ask for and offer more mutual care?

Breaking down the historical and political forces that have shaped our limited understanding of kinship and sharing real-life examples of successful chosen families, Adams offers practical advice for creating mutual agreements around finances and co-parenting, setting boundaries while living with others, having tough conversations about commitment, and helping couples, co-parents, and friends build systems of care that work for them.

We don’t have to allow society’s expectations to keep us trapped in structures that don’t support us. Chosen Family invites us into a new, positive movement that expands our definition of family in both culture and law—so that everyone has the right to be cared for and to care for others.