Creating a Welcoming Family Foundations Program for LGBTQIA+ Headed Families
Achieving cultural sensitivity in working with LGBTQIA+ headed families requires the skills and confidence to appropriately acknowledge a client’s family make-up and engage sensitively. We should all seek to create safe environments which ensure equality, respect, and dignity for all parents and staff members, regardless of their sexual orientation, gender identity, marital status, or gender expression.
The focus of FAMILY FOUNDATIONS is the co-parenting and couple relationship, and that relationship should be defined by the couple themselves. To support couples to name their own relationships and family make-up we use gender neutral language in the referral forms, parent workbooks and evaluation forms.
Video content
The video content for Family Foundations was developed some years ago, and features only heterosexual couples becoming biological parents for the first time. We are working with the creators of the programme (in the US) to add in more content featuring a more diverse range of families and routes to parenthood. We recognise that this is a limitation of the programme as it stands, and would advise facilitators to acknowledge this when introducing the programme, and if possible to have a private discussion with any participants who may feel their experiences are unrepresented by the content, to recognise this as a problem and to ask them to ‘read between the lines’ for key universal messages.
Language
Sometimes we will use the terms ‘mum’ and ‘dad’ to refer to birth parents and other mother- and father-figures, including stepmums, stepdads, partners or boyfriends/girlfriends who have a caring role. We do this not with the aim of ‘essentialising’ a particular, traditional family model, and in the hope of including any such adults who identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender. We recognise that families may include ‘a mother and father’, ‘two mothers’, ‘two fathers’, or any other combination of carers around the child. Instead of addressing the group with binary language such as ‘ladies and gentlemen’, try more inclusive alternatives such as ‘folks’, or ‘everyone’
Not everyone is comfortable with gendered titles such as ‘Ms’ or ‘Mr’. Titles are not always necessary, but if they must be used it’s good to provide alternative ones such as ‘Mx’ (pronounced mix or mux)
Be careful about how you use gendered pronouns. Here is some guidance from Brighton and Hove clinical commissioning group: https://www.gp.brightonan dhoveccg.nhs.uk/about- gender-pronouns .
Our view is that as a general principle, promoting your focus on ‘mothers and fathers’ rather than ‘parents’ enables you to make crystal clear to your audience that you value, and are addressing the issue of, men’s involvement in parenting. If fathers stay hidden, fixed gender roles are reinforced, to the detriment of everyone.
The ‘F’ word
One of the points we stress in our work is the importance of actively using the ‘F’ word (Father) in any letters, posters, papers, briefings, tender documents or other communications you produce. Unless you explicitly address fathers, they are overlooked and implicitly excluded: most people (mothers and fathers, practitioners, policymakers, researchers etc) see the word ‘parents’ and read it (consciously or subconsciously) as meaning ‘mothers’.
This is important because it helps create a situation where dads (by which we mean the full diversity of men with a significant caring role in children’s lives, including biological and other fathers and father- figures), as well as mums (in a similarly diverse sense), feel comfortable and valued – in the context of a culture which still privileges women as more naturally suited to caring, and more important as parents (and by extension, less important in other contexts, eg the workplace).
Family Foundations UK 