LGBTQ Youth and Education: Policies and Practices by Cris Mayo;

Author:Cris Mayo;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Teachers College Press
Published: 2022-06-15T00:00:00+00:00

RECOGNIZING FAMILY DIVERSITY: LGBTQ-HEADED HOUSEHOLDS AND SCHOOL EXCLUSION

Harassment and exclusion based on homophobia and transphobia also extend to families, including families of LGBTQ youth or families whose members are LGBTQ (Casper & Schultz, 1999). Increasingly, LGBTQ families are involved in their children’s education or interested in advocating for LGBTQ youth and do not always find schools supportive of their concerns. Given that same-sex marriage is now legal, schools need to be more responsive to this historic time for the growth—and public representation—of families who are either LGBTQ headed or actively involved in ensuring that schools respectfully educate their LGBTQ children. Difficulties remain for parents who may not be easily recognized as parents, whether they are same-sex or appear to be racially or ethnically different from their children. As one gay male parent explains, “I still carry the adoption paper with me in my wallet just in case I’m ever stopped” (Wells, 2011, p. 167), knowing full well that single men with children, especially gay men, are still culturally suspect.

The most recent U.S. Census report on same-sex couple households showed over 980,000 same-sex couples in the United States (Walker & Taylor, 2021). Other estimates put the number of gay families between 1.4 and 14 million. There is no especially reliable way to get a baseline number of how many families are LGBTQ headed, have LGBTQ members, or have LGBTQ children, but there is a clear indication that LGBTQ families are there and want schools to be responsive to their concerns. Married same-sex couples are more likely to have children than unmarried same-sex couples. Same-sex couples are 10 times more likely than heterosexual couples to have adopted children (Walker & Taylor, 2021). Given other forms of family diversity, whether single-parent, adoptive, blended, and/or multigenerational families, LGBTQ families should be represented as one of many caring options that a child might aspire to join or might already be living in. But teachers themselves indicate challenges to including LGBTQ families in their lessons, voicing concerns that they will offend conservative parents or bring “sex” into the classroom (Martino & Cumming-Potvin, 2011). To complicate the potential controversy around same-sex-headed households, teacher education programs generally do not yet spend adequate time preparing preservice teachers to think carefully about the implications of forms that indicate a mother and father need to sign—an issue as important for children in same-sex households as it is for a variety of other family types, including single-parent, grandparent-headed, adoptive, blended, or multigenerational families—or to be welcoming when two same-sex partners come to parent–teacher conferences. If teachers are not adequately prepared to look for diverse family representation, they may exacerbate the feelings of exclusion that children from diverse family structures already experience from the exclusion that may be represented in storybooks or textbooks. Children from same-sex-headed households report a level of homophobic harassment similar to that of LGBTQ youth and represent yet another example of how pervasive homophobia affects more than LGBTQ people. Concern that same-sex parents will blame themselves for the harassment

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