ABSTRACT
This chapter examines how family discourse establishes, influences, and reflects family identity to members inside the family and to people outside the family. When family identity is threatened, some families are especially dependent on discourse to communicate their identity (e.g., foster families, adoptive families, LGBTQ families, families with a stay-at-home dad, or military families). In this chapter, we explore the communication of family identity from the perspective of theories such as symbolic interactionism, social constructionism, relational dialectics, communication theory of identity, and narrative performance. The chapter focuses special attention on family stories, family secrets, and family rituals. In the telling of stories, family members reference, evaluate, and make sense of events, as well as affirm belonging and socialize members. This review shows how family storytelling can be studied from retrospective, interactional, and translational approaches. Next, an analysis of family secrets shows that some family discourse purposely leaves out information or limits access in efforts of communication privacy management. Family members often make consequential decisions about what and whom to tell. Finally, the chapter discusses family rituals as symbolic behaviors that in some cases provide stability in the face of family stress.
