A bold, practical, and empowering guide to building your own “chosen family”

Chosen Family by Diana Adams—lawyer, advocate, and founder of the Chosen Family Law Center—is a groundbreaking guide to building meaningful, supportive relationships beyond the “traditional” nuclear family. At a time when more people than ever are living outside the nuclear family model, Adams offers a timely and empowering framework for creating family by choice.

Chosen Family helps readers navigate the real-life questions that arise when designing nontraditional family structures. What does it look like to co-parent with a friend? To share a home with chosen loved ones? To build systems of care that are equitable, intentional, and resilient? Drawing on years of experience helping clients craft agreements around housing, parenting, and partnership, Adams provides both practical tools and thought-provoking guidance for these deeply personal decisions. Chosen Family offers:

• Reflection prompts and conversation guides to help couples, co-parents, friends, and communities design the family structures they need.
• Real-life examples of creative families—from platonic co-parents to multi-partner households—navigating love, parenting, and legal protections.
• Practical advice on agreements, boundaries, and communication strategies to sustain healthy, intentional bonds.
• A visionary call to expand our definition of family in both culture and law—so that everyone has the right to be cared for and to care for others.

Structured around the key conversations we often avoid—but urgently need to have—this book invites readers to move beyond default assumptions and toward intentional, values-driven relationships. Whether you are single, partnered, widowed, or simply seeking a more expansive vision of connection, Chosen Family offers a roadmap for creating a life that truly fits.

Both visionary and actionable, this is an essential guide for anyone rethinking what family can be.