Affirmation is a Powerful Parenting Tool: Believe Your Kids

In light of damning decisions by SCOTUS and the removal of funding for support services for LGBTQ+ youth, it seems to be an ideal time to emphasize the significance of affirmation in any child's life. Children thrive when they feel seen, known, and understood. Study after study shows that the presence of an affirming parent significantly reduces the risk of suicide and improves the overall mental health outcomes for LGBTQ+ youth as whole, and for trans youth in particular. Believing our kids when they tell us who they are is one of the most important parental acts we can make.

Ted Lasso got it right. Believe.

With that concept in mind, I want to share an excerpt from the latest chapter I've been writing. For those who don't know, I'm working on a book based on interviews with 20+ parents of gender-diverse kids from all over the US. Their stories, along with my own experiences as both a clinician and parent to a nonbinary kid, serve as examples for the six tools needed for raising gender-diverse kids.

In a chapter focused on ways to foster the healthy emotional development of our kids, I hone in on the power of affirmation.

In this excerpt, you'll meet Brenda and Abby (To protect their privacy, their names have been changed to pseudonyms.) Their family experience highlights a feature common to this community: the child's gender journey may be occurring silently and out of sight of the parent. For Brenda, playing catch up to her daughter's process provided an opportunity to explore her own ideas about gender identity, all while supporting her kid’s process.

Brenda* says her assigned-male-at-birth daughter began to understand her identity in an after-school program called The Gentleman’s Club. Geared towards fifth-grade boys who didn’t have significant father figures, this program provided male role models who taught things like how to tie a tie and, in Brenda’s words, “be a wholesome man.”

Her daughter met the criteria for this group and participated in it at the same time that she was beginning to experience the first signs of male puberty. The combination of experiences raised Abby’s first queries about her gender and led her to have dreams in which she was a girl. Brenda shared, “When [Abby] would wake up, she would just feel off and weird because she was in a body where she wasn't a girl. But in her dreams she was.”

Abby wasn't immediately prepared to tell her mom about the dreams. She eventually came out as gender fluid three years later when she was in eighth grade. Then, in high school, Abby stated her identity as transfeminine, requested she/her pronouns, and started using her desired name.

With each step in this process, Brenda met Abby with compassion and offered a safe landing spot for all of the internal and external challenges Abby encountered. Internally, this meant occasional depressive episodes. Externally, some teachers refused to use her name and the principal shut down the school's longstanding gay-straight alliance.

Brenda works as a school-based social worker and supports both queer kids and the staff educating them. She offers guidance and education on topics such as sexuality, gender-diversity, and allyship. Brenda knew how to navigate the school district and eventually secure a supportive learning environment for Abby. However, despite all of her experience and strategic knowledge, Brenda shared how raising her own trans kid challenged some of her ideas about the right way to come out.

She states: “I used to feel really bad because I meet a lot of parents whose kids knew from an early age, like maybe two or three [years old], that they were transgender. And I always felt bad. I worried did I miss something with my child? Why didn't she know earlier on? I had the thought: is she really not trans because she didn't know that early? And I think for anybody who has those thoughts, I want to say there's no right or wrong answer. [Abby] didn't know at a young age. And that doesn't mean that she's not trans. She just realized later in life. Some people realize when they're adults. There's no absolute right or wrong in any of this journey. I wish I’d known that earlier.”

Brenda's experience demonstrates how a parent's initial validation of their kid's truth empowered her daughter's identity to take shape in her own time. It also shows how a parent's depth of understanding can grow over time.

Abby knew from the beginning that her mom would be a source of affirmation and support. Any concerns or questions Brenda had along the way were explored and processed through her own support systems. They weren't suppressed or hidden and neither were Abby's. Instead, Brenda took action on her feelings and thoughts on her own time, such as in therapy, participation in a support group, or by some form of self-reflection and perspective exploration. In doing so, Brenda empowered herself to be a stable source of love for her kid. And, she modeled for her daughter, not to mention the kids she sees as a social worker, how to take care of oneself and seek reliable supports.

Her words about being a strong advocate sum it up best: "I'm doing all of this because I love her and I want our community to love her too."