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Parents: Love Your Gay Children: Ending Fear, Stigma and Trauma
This book, like its sponsor, A Thousand Moms, is designed to build family and community support for LGBTQ youth who suffer the worst mental and physical outcomes of all extremely high rights of depression, substance abuse, isolation, and suicide.
Parents obviously affect whether or not they work with a school in concert or in conflict raising a child, but parental influence is much broader and extends way before a child starts school. Whether it's their cognitive development, the food they grow up loving or hating, or their sense of self-worth, parents are the coauthors of their child's life. They define how that child grows up feeling about herself. There's a danger that every parent risks not realizing the power they have to shape whether or not a child realizes who they are positively or with a great sense of shame. Ultimately, we want to get to a point where a parent doesn't say, "Is my child too young to learn about LGBT issues?" but demands to know why they're not learning about them, and not just at school but at home, and it's about a lot more than sex ed. Why is this bridge so hard to build? And I know that in many ways, attitudes have moved forwards, but you need only look at a newspaper to see that hatred and suspicion around transgender people. So until recently, this "othering" of LGBT people demonized us as a target of moralized anger. But what does that mean? Well, it means that 3 in 10 people still think that same-sex relations are in some sense wrong. At its worst, you see that in the rise in hate itself in smaller ways. I remember the shock of a social worker when I responded to her question about when I knew I was gay. I responded it was in stages but really my first feelings were around the age of five. And this is about the time that attractions kick in for straight kids. Why should LGBT youth be any different? They aren’t. Many parents have the belief that being LGBT is going to make their child's life harder, that they're not going to be able to do everything that a straight child would. And this can be reinforced, I think, by the way that the gay community can be ghettoized, victimized by the soft bigotry of low expectations.
Parents obviously affect whether or not they work with a school in concert or in conflict raising a child, but parental influence is much broader and extends way before a child starts school. Whether it's their cognitive development, the food they grow up loving or hating, or their sense of self-worth, parents are the coauthors of their child's life. They define how that child grows up feeling about herself. There's a danger that every parent risks not realizing the power they have to shape whether or not a child realizes who they are positively or with a great sense of shame. Ultimately, we want to get to a point where a parent doesn't say, "Is my child too young to learn about LGBT issues?" but demands to know why they're not learning about them, and not just at school but at home, and it's about a lot more than sex ed. Why is this bridge so hard to build? And I know that in many ways, attitudes have moved forwards, but you need only look at a newspaper to see that hatred and suspicion around transgender people. So until recently, this "othering" of LGBT people demonized us as a target of moralized anger. But what does that mean? Well, it means that 3 in 10 people still think that same-sex relations are in some sense wrong. At its worst, you see that in the rise in hate itself in smaller ways. I remember the shock of a social worker when I responded to her question about when I knew I was gay. I responded it was in stages but really my first feelings were around the age of five. And this is about the time that attractions kick in for straight kids. Why should LGBT youth be any different? They aren’t. Many parents have the belief that being LGBT is going to make their child's life harder, that they're not going to be able to do everything that a straight child would. And this can be reinforced, I think, by the way that the gay community can be ghettoized, victimized by the soft bigotry of low expectations.
Paperback
Published November 5, 2021
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