When an eight-year-old asks, "Who's the real mom?"

No one asked them. Toronto, circa 1972.

I've got a million strategies — some more effective than others — for dealing with invasive questions about my family. But what happens when the questions come from kids? That's the topic I take on in my most recent Today's Parent post: 

I can easily see how the subject could become contentious: Forcing a kid (or a grown-up) into an inane conversation peppered with unanswerable questions seems like a surefire recipe for frustration, or worse. I, for one, do my best to be matter-of-fact and move on. Because, frankly, either you get queer families, or you don’t. If you do, we generally don’t need to explain the more philosophical questions about exactly what constitutes a “real mom.” And if you don’t, well, then you’re generally not looking for answers to your questions. Too often, you’re trying to get me defensive about my family. And I have better things to do than defend my family’s reality against people who can’t really deal with the fact that it exists, right there in front of them. Reality bites sometimes, dude.

But I will talk to kids, because kids do what kids do, which is test, and ask questions, and gauge from your words and your openness and your body language just how comfortable you are with a given subject. When kids ask questions—questions they already know the answers to—they’re trying to figure out the bigger picture, to solidify their own place in the world relative to everyone else’s, and see how we all fit together.

Two nice counterpoint to this whole discussion are my blog-girlfriend Casey Casey-Brown's recent post on SheKnows: Stop Asking Me Where I Got My Daughter, and Vikki Reich's (to whom I am blog concubine) article "How many moms does she have?" on VillageQ.

The kids are still all right, already

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Guess what? It turns out that kids of queer parents are still doing just fine.

In my post this week at Today's Parent, I talk about the findings of the Australian Study of Child Health in Same-Sex Families, released Monday.

In fact queerspawn aren't doing just fine — they are doing the same as or better than their straight-reared peers, a finding that is consistent with other studies on the subject showing that queer families do better in part because we're less likely to abuse our children, divide up childcare and household responsibilities more equitably, talk to our kids about how their families were created, and teach our kids about activism bullying, and standing up for the underdog. Just for example:

Specifically, children of LGBTQ parents showed no difference on factors such as temperament, mood, mental health, and self-esteem, and scored six percent higher in the areas of general health and family cohesion. Researchers collected data from 325 families with a total of 500 children. […]

What I find striking about all the studies isn’t that kids of queer parents are just fine — better than fine in fact. What I find striking are two things. First, it’s astonishing to me that we still need to study the issue at all, rather than accepting as a foregone conclusion that kids with loving and committed parents tend to do well.

Second, and more important: good parenting outcomes don’t depend on sexual orientation or gender identity. Any set of parents, gay or straight, could divide up chores equitably. No parent ever has to hit a child. We could all learn how to tell the stories of our family’s origins and what makes us strong — and we could all teach our kids to stick up for themselves and for the underdogs. We could all stand up to bullies.

Read more…

Photo Via Australian Marriage Equity

Fear, vomit, post apocalyptic YA, Jewish mothers & aliases

Friday is brought to you by dirty emoticons, my fantasies about post-apocalyptic science fiction, vomit, Jewish mothers, coddled children, and Shani Mootoo. To wit:

• A while back I tagged Emma Waverman and Tanya Gouthro to write blog posts about their writing processes. Read what gets them motivated (hint: fear and vomit).
• My post this month on VillageQ is a fantasy about a fantasy – thoughts on Patrick's Ness's More Than This and how we might deal with homophobic bullying in high schools.
• At Today’s Parent this week, I muse about rescuing my children. From what, I'm still working out.
• I also wrote about my mom's overinvestment in my own education. For chance to win a copy of Rachel Ament's anthology, The Jewish Daughter Diaries: True Stories of Being Loved Too Much by Our Moms, leave a comment here.
• And! Thunder Bay locals: this coming Tuesday, June 10, is the annual Thunder Pride Literary Evening, featuring headline reader Shani Mootoo (who has told me that she used to use the alias Susan Goldberg – for reals.) If you were as blown away as I was when I first encountered Mootoo’s writing — her novel Cereus Blooms at Night was so overwhelmingly lush and beautiful — you'll want to be there. If you haven't encountered her writing before, now's the time. See you at the Mary J. L. Black library on Tuesday at 7 PM