How to Find Your Chosen Family: Q&A with Dawn O. Braithwaite

A “chosen family” is a group of people who operate together as a family, but without biological or legal connections. It’s a family group people create by choice in which members provide mutual care and support. The concept of chosen family is often used among people who have experienced distance or rejection from their families of origin, especially people in queer and trans communities.

We spoke with Dr. Dawn O. Braithwaite about the concept of chosen family. Braithwaite is a Willa Cather Professor of Communication Studies at University of Nebraska-Lincoln. She studies how people in personal and family relationships communicate and negotiate family change and challenges.

Her research centers on communication in understudied and changing families, communication rituals, and dialectics of relating in stepfamilies and among voluntary (fictive) kin.

In our interview, she explains what makes a chosen family and how, if you want to have one, you need to be willing to see these people as family.

She also talks about where to find chosen family, whether online family can fulfill the role, and why it’s important to use your language carefully.

How did you become interested in the concept of chosen families?

I’m an expert in interpersonal and family communication and former president of the National Communication Association. The main focus of my research has always been on communication.

So, how do people become families? How do they develop relationships? We do it through communication.

Early on in my career, I started studying communication in stepfamilies. In fact, I have been a stepchild since age 12, so it sparked an interest in how people communicate as strangers come together and become a family.

And whether it’s a healthy family or an unhealthy family, you still need to interact to become a family.

As I studied stepfamilies more, I realized that this was also a part of the picture: how do we develop these close relationships that take us through life, whether they’re close friends, or whether they seem to be more than friends?

Sometimes they seem to be family, and people often call these people family.

In the literature, the research literature, this is often called fictive kin. But we’ve found that these relationships are very real to people. So I use the terms “voluntary kin” or “chosen kin” interchangeably.

How would you define “voluntary kin” or “chosen family”?

Chosen or fictive or voluntary families are people who we regard or think of as family, but are not related by blood or law.

In our very first research project on this subject, we did in-depth interviews with 110 people who said that they had voluntary kin or chosen kin in their lives. We found four different categories of chosen kin.

The first category was substitute kin. And that’s where chosen kin replaces a bio-legal family — sometimes because somebody’s died, or sometimes because they’re estranged from those people.

Surprisingly, this doesn’t occur that often. I think out of 110, we only found three where they just didn’t maintain a relationship with their bio-legal family.

The second category we identified was supplemental kin. That is the idea that voluntary family is an addition to a person’s family of origin, often because they meet needs that are not met by their family of origin or their bio-legal kin.

This may be because of different values (religious or political), life changes, or just life states, like being LGBTQ or stepping in where there’s geographical distance.

Third, convenience kin is when sometimes we have voluntary kin or chosen kin at a certain time or stage of life. It could be drug rehab. It could be a sorority or fraternity in the military.

We interviewed a guy, for example, who was in a fraternity in college, and he was very close to these other three or four other men. They were convenience kin while they were in the fraternity, but now, 20 years later, he regards them as a supplemental family.

Fourth, extended kin is in something like a neighborhood, where your family becomes very close to the people next door or down the street. The kids are running back and forth between the two families, or families eat with each other.

How can people cultivate a chosen family of their own?

I think you have to first of all accept that chosen kin is a viable and valuable family alternative.

And that’s hard because there are some people who more easily become chosen kin, and others who have a more traditional definition of family — that if you’re not blood and if you’re not law, you don’t have a relationship.

Everybody has to do family in the way they want to do it. But you can’t have chosen kin unless you’re willing to see them as family and see that that’s really a viable alternative for you.

The other thing is finding places or ways that chosen kin can be grown and encouraged.

For example, some churches, especially large churches, have home programs where they have groups of maybe a dozen people who meet, say, on Wednesday night. So it’s finding ways that you can grow these families.

It happens organically. Finding hobbies, going to a church, volunteering, or getting involved in social groups are all ways to make these relationships, whether or not they grow into close friends. I think it’s just putting yourself in the right place.

Also realizing if you’re lonely, if you are desiring closer relationships in your life, or maybe even in your geographic location, chances are other people feel the same way.

Is the best way to find chosen family to get out into physical meeting spaces? Or does this also happen online?

I think it can happen online, especially with people who are used to depending on social media. I definitely think that people can form these relationships that way.

But I think that people still gravitate toward wanting to spend time with people. It’s one thing to have people online, but is that how you want to spend Christmas or Thanksgiving?

Ultimately, it’s probably both for most people, because most people do rely so much on technology today.

I think if you can find these relationships where you can have at least some face-to-face time, that could be a benefit.

Is it helpful to put a name or label on relationships with chosen family?

As we’ve interviewed people, I don’t know if we’ve asked that question directly, but it seems like they sometimes do come up with a name for their group, or they talk about it with another person.

They may not talk to their bio-legal family about that, and that’s OK. I think naming it and letting that person know that you regard them as family can be helpful.

I don’t know that people always do. But I suspect they often do. They talk about it and sometimes they’ve got to develop a series of rules and expectations for that.

How can people balance biological family and chosen family?

One of the real dangers is getting stuck in the middle between these different people. We call this triangulation. It can put a strain on the relationship with your bio-legal family.

We did another study where we interviewed people about supplemental kin. And we found that some people keep the chosen and the bio-legal separate.

I mean, the chosen people probably know you have a bio-legal family, but you don’t have to tell your bio-legal family about your chosen family unless they’re in the same geographic location. Then you might experience conflict, say, spending holidays with different groups of people.

So some people keep them entirely separate. But others sometimes just knit them together and everyone comes together on Thanksgiving, for example.

It’s important to choose your language carefully.

One of the things about communication is that it is irreversible and unrepeatable. Meaning, you can’t say, “I wish I hadn’t told my family about these other people and how close I am with them.”

So you want to think carefully about how your bio-legal family would feel. How would they feel if they knew how close I was to these other people?

Any final thoughts or encouragement you’d like to offer readers about the idea of a chosen family?

I think sometimes if people don’t give chosen family a shot, they’re missing out.

I always wish people would think about their neighborhood and their city and think about how many people are alone today.

I wish more people would give it a try. It’s worth looking around your own neighborhood and your church and your workplace and thinking about people you might invite over.

In short, I would just encourage people to stay open on both sides of this — the person that feels like they need some chosen family in their life and those who can offer it.

Just open up! Relationships can bring so much to your life.