Supreme Court gay marriage decision could end debate over children’s well-being

Mashable.com June 21, 2015 by Rebecca Ruiz

Matthew Mansell and Johno Espejo are like most American parents. They juggle work and family, try to keep up with household chores, and spend weekends with their two children, Wyatt, 8, and Elyse, 7.

Saturday nights are a special occasion. Mansell’s mother, who lives with the family in their Placentia, California home, treats everyone to dinner at a local restaurant. They come home, pile on the couch, and watch a movie selected by one of the kids. Most recently, Elyse chose the animated children’s movie ParaNorman.

It would all be rather ordinary — except for the fact that Mansell and Espejo are plaintiffs in Tanco v. Haslam, which has been consolidated with four other lawsuits under Obergefell v. Hodges, a landmark case before the Supreme Court challenging same-sex marriage bans in Michigan, Tennessee, Ohio and Kentucky. (The couple lived in Tennessee when they filed the original suit.)

While the case disputes the constitutionality of gay marriage bans, it also raises emotional questions about whether children of such couples are somehow worse off than the offspring of straight couples. An estimated 122,000 same-sex couples in the U.S. are raising more than 200,000 children, according to the Williams Institute, a think tank at the University of California, Los Angeles.

Though decades of research show no emotional or psychological harm, opponents of same-sex marriage argue the possibility of such a thing is a compelling reason to prohibit gay unions. This line of reasoning is central to the defense of Michigan’s ban.

When the Supreme Court rules on the case in the coming weeks, its opinion could very well render that argument irrelevant. Mansell would welcome such a decision, but doesn’t need the Supreme Court to say what he already knows.

Click here to read the entire article.

in Adoption / Foster Care / Legal / Parenting  by Anthony Brown 0 comments

BABY LOVE: HOW AMBER MADE A GAY COUPLE’S DREAMS COME TRUE

Gayswithkids.com, by Asaf Rosenheim, June 13, 2015

babybumpThis is the story of Baby Love. Baby Love isn’t her real name; it is the name we chose for the purposes of this story. One reason we are going to call her Baby Love is that her parents would like to give her a choice when she grows up to keep this story to herself. More to the point, we are calling her Baby Love because three people took every ounce of their love, from the far corners of New York to the depths of Texas, to bring Baby Love into this world.  If you stick with the story, you will hear about the moment Baby Love was born.

I had the pleasure of interviewing Amber, the surrogate who carried Baby Love. Amber will be the guest at the Men Having Babies (“MHB”) Pride meeting this week in New York. This is a real cause for celebration for anyone who cares about our gay families. MHB has grown from a program that ran at the NYC LGBT Center starting in 2005 to an independent nonprofit organization that provides valuable invaluable support to prospective gay fathers, including online resources, ratings of surrogacy agencies and fertility clinics, seminars, exhibits and workshops worldwide.

Most importantly, MHB provides prospective fathers who cannot afford the expenses involved with parenting through surrogacy with over a million dollars’ worth of cash grants, discounts and free services from about forty leading service providers through the Gay Parenting Assistance Program (“GPAP”). To date GPAP has already provided almost 200 couples with access to substantial discounts, and more than two dozen couples and singles received full support, including grants and free service. These prospective parents, who otherwise may have not been able to complete this journey, were chosen by a grant committee. As of today, about 10 babies are already expected to be born later this year, with many more to come. Applications for stage I of the program is open year round, and stage II applications for 2016 are received from eligible stage I recipients until August 1.

The celebratory Pride meeting of the organization will take place at 6:30pm on Wednesday June 17 at the JCC Manhattan. It will start with a networking reception, with a short briefing by the organization’s board about recent developments, future plans and opportunities to get involved. Following the reception Amber and the parents she helped will tell their stories. Tissues and light refreshments will be provided.

This story began ten years ago when Amber, pregnant with her first son, decided that she would be a surrogate one day. Amber doesn’t remember where she heard about this option, but what she does remember is that, from that moment on, for ten whole years, she knew she would one day carry a child for another family. For the most part Amber’s pregnancies were easy: she enjoyed them, and she even said that she felt like she “could be pregnant forever.” Despite her amazing outlook and good pregnancies, there were moments that weren’t easy, but none of these hardships came close to stopping Amber from pursuing her dream.

When I asked Amber what pushed her all this time, she said that, as a mother, she couldn’t imagine someone not being able to start a family because they couldn’t have a child on their own. She knew she wanted to give this gift, not only to them, but also to herself.

Five years ago, Amber, by then a mother of three, moved to Texas, where surrogacy is legal; and the moment she and her family unpacked, she started exploring it. For a long time she was a fly on the wall on Facebook groups dedicated to surrogates and their networks, and she recommended that any women considering surrogacy do the same: hear the stories, the lovely with the ugly, the good with the bad. Amber, in a way that is typical for her personality, spent a long time researching agencies, clinics and speaking with surrogates who had gone through this journey. So it was hardly surprising that, three days after she submitted her application to her preferred agency, she got matched with a gay couple from New York. Two days later she had her first phone call with the intended parents. I asked Amber about the moment before she hit “send” on her application. She remembered that she had butterflies because she had put so much of herself into it. She felt very vulnerable.

It had been a while since everyone on that phone call had been on a first date , but that’s exactly what it felt like. Excitement mixed with anxiety is how they all described that call. Amber remembers the exact date: January 8. Will she like us? Will they like me? Can I make sure I make a good impression while being completely honest? Is this the right person for us?

Amber says that she got some very good advice from an experienced surrogate before the call, who told her not to say “yes” just because she felt excited to start the process. But after an hour-long conversation, which had no awkward silences, it took both parties less than two minutes to write back to the agency and say: YES YES YES.

Amber told me that a few days ago while going through some documents she re-read the couple’s application. She said that everything they wrote in that application was spot-on, and that everything they had hoped for happened. She attributes this to both parties being emotionally ready and being in the right place at the right time.

Click here to read the entire article.

in Family Stories / Parenting / Surrogacy  by Anthony Brown 0 comments

Same-Sex Couples More Equitable in Childcare, Chores than Different-Sex Ones

June 10, 2015 – via Mombian,com

Same-sex couples tend to share child care and certain household chores more equitably than different-sex ones, according to a new study.

Both same- and different-sex couples divvy up household chores, according to “Modern Families: Same- and Different-Sex Couples Negotiating at Home,“ conducted by the non-profit, nonpartisan Families and Work Institute. Different-sex couples, however, “generally do so in ways that align with traditional gender and power roles.”

The study looked at 225 dual-earner couples who have been married or living with a partner for at least one year, including same-sex and different-sex couples, with and without children. Both members of the couples completed the surveys.

In different-sex, dual-earner couples, a person’s sex, relative income, and work hours more often predict his or her household responsibilities. Women, lower earners, and those with fewer work hours take primary responsibility for stereotypically female chores (cleaning, cooking, laundry, grocery shopping), whereas men, higher earners, and those with more work hours take primary responsibility for stereotypically male chores (outdoor work, household repairs). Errand tend to be shared.

For same-sex, dual-earner couples, however, relative income and work hours do not reliably predict household responsibilities. A greater proportion of same-sex couples share routine and sick child care responsibilities (74 percent versus 38 percent and 62 percent versus 32 percent, respectively). More same-sex couples also share laundry (44 percent versus 31 percent) and household repair (33 percent versus 15 percent) responsibilities.

in Parenting  by Anthony Brown 0 comments

The 2015 MHB Brussels conference on Parenting Options for European Gay Men – highlights

in International / IVF / Legal / Legislation / Parenting / Personal Stories / Professional Resources / Surrogacy / Videos  by Anthony Brown 0 comments

The Regnerus Gay Parenting Study Is Even More Flawed Than We Thought

by Camille Beredjick, May 12, 2015

As they gear up for legal battles nationwide, anti-LGBT activists’ weapon of choice is the infamous “Regnerus study,” a report by University of Texas sociologist Mark Regnerus that claimed to “prove” same-sex parenting is inherently harmful to children. The study has been thoroughly debunked as methodologically and ethically flawed, and experts far and wide — including Regnerus’ own university — have said they want no affiliation with it.

We thought we’d seen it all, but nope — two sociologists are taking another crack at determining the study’s scientific validity (or lack thereof), and what they’re finding is even more absurd than the fallacies we were already aware of.

Indiana University’s Brian Powell and the University of Connecticut’s Simon Cheng actually redid the study for Social Science Research, the same journal that published the original article. Not surprisingly, when they used proper methodology and eliminated “suspect data” — see below for a laughable example — they found that kids fare just as well when raised by a same-sex couple as by a mom and dad.

From Right Wing Watch:

By eliminating suspect data — for example, a 25-year-old respondent who claimed to be 7’8″ tall, 88 pounds, married 8 times and with 8 children, and another who reported having been arrested at age 1 — and correcting what they view as Regnerus’ methodological errors, Cheng and Powell found that Regnerus’ conclusions were so “fragile” that his data could just as easily show that children raised by gay and lesbian parents don’t face negative adult outcomes.

“[W]hen equally plausible and, in our view, preferred methodological decisions are used,” they wrote, “a different conclusion emerges: adult children who lived with same-sex parents show comparable outcome profiles to those from other family types, including intact biological families.”

In his original study, Regnerus claimed adults who had been raised by gay or lesbian parents were more likely to have depression, abuse drugs, engage in criminal behavior, and acquire STDs, as well as have a higher likelihood of having experienced childhood sexual abuse. Regnerus and others have used these findings to testify against marriage equality, but a more detailed look at the study shows that he hardly spoke to any children of same-sex parents at all:

The Regnerus study was promptly scrutinized by fellow social scientists, who pointed out major flaws in his methodology. Many people who he categorized as having been raised by a gay or lesbian parent had spent very little time with that parent or with his or her same-sex partner. Even Regnerus admitted that his data included only two people who said they had been raised for their entire childhoods by a same-sex couple.

…

Regnerus compared the outcomes of children raised in what he called “intact biological families” (with married biological parents) “lesbian mother” families and “gay father” families, finding differences between “lesbian mother” families and “intact biological families” in 24 of the 40 areas he looked at, and differences between “gay father” families and “intact biological” ones in 19 areas.

But in scrutinizing Regnerus’ data, Cheng and Powell determined that of the 236 respondents whom Regnerus had identified as having been raised by a lesbian mother or gay father, one-tenth had never even lived with the parent in question and an additional one-sixth hadn’t lived with that parent for more than one year. Still more had provided inconsistent or unreliable responses to survey questions, throwing their reliability into doubt. That means, Powell says, that over one-third of the 236 people whom Regnerus classified as having been raised by a lesbian mother or gay father “should absolutely not have ever been considered by Regnerus in this study.”

Click here to read the entire article.

in Education / Parenting / Religious / Science  by Anthony Brown 0 comments

Changing The Way We Think About Mother’s Day

May 7, 2015 by Asaf Rosenheim via Gays With Kids

changing

Our family belongs to a gay synagogue, so most of the parents who attend the children’s services with their kids are gay. One Yom Kippur our rabbi asked for a show of hands. “Who has two moms?” she asked. “Who has two dads? Who lives with a grandparent or an aunt or uncle? Who has only one mom? One dad?” And so on. The kids kept on raising their hands, one group after another, sometimes giggling, sometimes saying something proud like “ME!” Finally, rabbi Weiss asked: “Who has a mom and a dad?” All the (mostly gay and lesbian) parents in the room raised their hands. And then it hit me: while we are trying to provide our children with alternative views of families, the families we grew up in are almost always the traditional nuclear mom-and-dad model; for most of us, this was and still is our parenting experience.

In our family there are two dads, and a daughter and son (twins) who turned 3 just a few months ago. When I’m asked, it is very easy for me to affirmatively state: Our kids have two dads or, as we say at home, an aba and a daddy. But people always wonder, and people sometimes (especially kids) are brave enough to ask: Do they have a mom?

Technically they don’t, our kids were born with the help of a gestational surrogate, which means that we received an anonymous egg donation which together with our sperms was used to create embryos, which were subsequently carried by our friend, who served as the children’s surrogate. Over the years, friends, family and many strangers have suggested that one of these two women must be “the mother.” We answered politely that we call one the egg donor and the other the surrogate, but mostly they seemed unsatisfied by these answers. Usually I think this is just a matter of educating them on our family structure, but sometimes I do attributed it to being insensitive, homophobic, dad-phobic, or mother-centric depending on the person asking and his or her tone. Many people think it is just fine for a same-sex couple to have kids but still believe that a mother is necessary for the healthy development of a child. Others have pointed out that children born using anonymous sperm or egg donation will always wonder about their genetic parent, and that we are depriving them of a right to know their biological mother.

My friends in similar family settings have tried to address these issues in many admirable ways: I have seen fathers asking their children, “Do you have a mom?” just to demonstrate how the kids answer so clearly, “No, I do not; I have two dads!” Others have created strong bonds with women in their lives that the children could identify with as the equivalent of a mother figure: an aunt, grandmother, the surrogate herself, or sometimes a caregiver. When asked, many of us will gladly point you to solid research indicating that children of same-sex couples are just as happy and healthy as children who grow up with a mother and dad. I would be grateful if someone could show this information to my 3-year-old, who was at that moment extremely unhappy about a variety of things: from not being able to play on my iPhone to having to take a bath.

For example, in her book “Modern Families: Parents and Children in New Family Forms,” Dr Susan Golombok says that children of same-sex couples do just as well as children in traditional families. The problems some children face come from outside the family rather than within it and depend very much on where they live. She argues that schools should make an active effort to combat the stigmatization of children in different families. Dr Golombok is currently carrying out a study of children with gay dads who were born with the help of a surrogate. The study should be completed this summer, and the very much anticipated findings will be available shortly after.

In spite of these positive research results, it’s hard not to wonder about the effects of growing up without a mom, and not only that, but with no mother ever having existed. My husband Eric sometimes points out that women used to die in childbirth with terrible frequency, and that even his grandmother never knew her own mother because of this common tragedy. While she was raised by her father and grandmother, she still knew that a woman who was her mother had at least lived at one time and had been known by the people in her life. Our kids wouldn’t be able to imagine a mother. The idea of our kids having nothing but a void where a mother would normally be sometimes kept me up at night.

Click here to read the entire article.

in Egg Donation / Family Stories / IVF / Parenting / Surrogacy  by Anthony Brown 0 comments

Expensive, Exhausting, And Deeply Unsexy: Babymaking While Queer

April 21, 2015 by Lindsay King-Miller at Buzzed.com

My partner Charlie and I had been married for a little over a year when we decided to start trying to have a baby in August 2013. Despite being the butch in our relationship and using male pronouns, Charlie knew from the start that he wanted be the gestational parent. He’s always had a fascination with pregnancy and birth — a fascination that once led him to briefly pursue a midwifery apprenticeship — and he was excited to experience all the highs and lows of carrying a child. I, on the other hand, dread physical pain, and was overjoyed by the prospect of becoming a parent without going through pregnancy.

Charlie’s cycle operates with clocklike precision, so we figured it would be easy enough to identify the opportune moment. We started by trying to conceive at home — all you need is a syringe and a clean jar. We painted our guest room in pastels, recruited a dude we know and love to donate sperm, and got underway.

Unfortunately, the magic I’d anticipated was pretty much gone the first time I went for a walk around the block so that our friend could jerk off in our bathroom. After that, we decided that it would be less awkward if he made his donation at his own home, then dropped by with the jar — sperm can live outside the body for several hours, especially if they’re kept warm — but calling and saying, “Charlie’s ovulating, can you come over?” wasn’t very romantic either. We had to skip insemination one month because our donor couldn’t escape his roommates, who didn’t know about our conception attempts, for the requisite five minutes. Also unforeseen was the discomfort of making small talk every time he dropped off his jar, camouflaged in a paper bag — no one really wants to chat about how work is going at such a moment, but without a little conversation the whole thing felt too transactional. “Thank you for your genetic material, Unit B. Your service is no longer required.”

And there was a squick factor that neither Charlie nor I anticipated. We were competent, sex-positive adults who wanted to have a baby — surely we could handle a jar with a little semen in it! Turns out that other people’s bodily fluids are disconcerting, no matter how chill and mature you promise yourself you’ll be about the whole thing. I’m sorry to contribute to the body-shaming and negativity that pervades our culture, but let’s be real: A jar of sperm is super gross. Every month, Charlie would calmly draw up the sperm into the syringe while I shrieked and covered my eyes as though it was the gory scene in a horror movie (no, that’s not true — movie gore bothers me way less).

The insemination wasn’t much better. We had originally looked forward to this part — the two of us alone in our room, sharing the beautiful, intimate moment of creating our future child. Inseminating just before or even during sex is supposed to up your odds of success, which we figured was a bonus. We’d read about it online and it seemed easy, straightforward, and even fun. But it was almost impossible to get into the moment, since we were pressed for time (sperm were dying by the second!) and limited by the necessity that Charlie stay lying on his back with a pillow under his hips. I tried to help with the syringe, but couldn’t find a comfortable angle, so Charlie had to take over.

Nothing kills a mood like a syringe.

(Originally Posted Marrh 19, 2015)

Click here to read the entire article.

in IVF / Known Donor / Legal / Parenting / Science  by Anthony Brown 0 comments

5 Things This New Gay Dad Was Not Prepared For

The Handsome Father – March 26, 2015 by Scott Ballum Cohen

We welcomed our gorgeous, bright-eyed daughter six weeks ago. We had driven to Massachusetts a week before the due date to get ahead of an impending blizzard, and to wait. On a Saturday night five days later, our surrogate mother — a remarkable and generous relative — told us that the baby would come in the morning, so we should all get to sleep. We arose at six, took showers and a quick breakfast, and drove to the hospital. Our ‘Little Bear’ was born four hours later. It was the most civilized birthing story I’d ever heard of.

It was a moment no amount of planning could have prepared us for. Upon reflection, I can think of five other surprises my husband and I experienced in the weeks before and after the arrival of our baby girl, and a few things I learned:gay and lesbian adoption, adoption process for gay couples, adoption rights for gay couples, adoption for gay couples, gay families, gay parents adoption

1. The Other Big Decisions

Most of the research we had done, and the topic of most conversations at the group meetings we had attended, was about the logistics and options for having a baby and protecting our future family’s legal standings. But how to go about “getting pregnant” was only the first of many big decisions to make. Of course, at the start, this is the only one that matters. What I didn’t see coming, though, was the litany of big decisions that then had to be made – that really had nothing to do with how gay we were (mostly) and everything to do with the fact that we were about to become parents.

What kind of formula were we going to feed the baby? Organic? Ready-to-feed? Powdered? Something we could buy off the shelf locally, or that we had to order online from New Zealand? What about Diapers? All the charts show how much we would save over her early years by using cloth – but realistically we knew we needed to consider disposables, too. Which meant two separate research projects to determine what brands and styles we wanted to try. Same with bottles, lotions, clothes(!), cribs and crib sheets, nail clippers, and burp cloths. Don’t even get started on vaccines.

My lesson: I relied heavily on The NightLight for product reviews, and Reading My Tea Leaves for simple and natural essentials. Hand-me-downs were a mixed blessing, but we found some of the unlikeliest to be the most useful. The proprietor at our local baby shop patiently explained the ins-and-outs of cloth diapering to me on at least four separate occasions.

2. The Clumsiness of Baby Showers

We were lucky enough to have two friends in two cities offer to host baby showers for us. Given that we had already moved (which meant housewarming gifts) and got married (meaning wedding gifts) this year, I was reluctant to presume that anyone wanted to be given another shopping list for us — but family and friends insisted, so (following the stress of decision making above) we pulled together a thoughtful registry and handed over the email addresses of our close friends and family. The events were lovely and sweet, and we are so appreciative — but they truly were awkward for us. So awkward that we didn’t even open the presents until everyone left at the first shower, which was obviously a faux pas. Opening gifts at the second shower felt like Christmas — except it was Christmas only for us and no one else in the room; not quite a Birthday Party, either, because we were cautiously celebrating something that hadn’t happened yet. Yikes. My husband was so sure that we would receive everything we needed off our registry. That proved to be a silly assumption.

The only thing that wasn’t clumsy, surprisingly, was having our surrogate at our baby shower. We wondered if there would be a strange tension over who in the room we were celebrating. Seriously, no one was confused.

My lesson: In hindsight, I would have preferred gift-free showers. I ended up using My Registry as my own shopping list, but prices and availability changed between the time I listed them and when I went back to buy them. I wish I had just bought the things I knew I was going to need or really loved. My suggestion is that if grandparents want to gift you the crib or rocking chair or that adorable aviator hat with little bear ears, see if they’ll mind reimbursing you.

3. The Kindness of the Hospital Staff

June was born at a city hospital in Massachusetts, which meant that they had seen a lot of things, and that we certainly weren’t the most unusual situation to come through. But it also meant there was a ‘rough around the edges’ element to the facility. It was a Catholic hospital, at least theoretically, but one where our surrogate’s own children had been born. We weren’t sure how we’d be welcomed.

I started calling the hospital social worker and attending nurse months in advance, so I knew from the beginning that they were on board. “How can we make this the most positive birthing experience for all of you?” one asked on our first call. We talked through a birth plan, and I was feeling quite positive.

Then the hospital attorneys got involved, and suddenly we were a liability. We weren’t going to be allowed to leave with our new baby until after the four-day required waiting period after which our surrogate could relinquish her maternal rights. Our lawyer was furious; their lawyer threatened to call social services. This was all hard news – but to be frank, this is the kind of attitude life had prepared us for. What we actually faced at the hospital before, during, and after the birth, though, was far more shocking. We were welcomed into the birthing room, doted on as new parents, given our own suite on the maternity floor, and treated with utmost respect. Delivery nurses came to find us to thank us for the opportunity to be part of our story. After days of seeing us handle baby June, the cleaning crews and food service staff came back in to tell us they found us inspiring, and that the amount of love in our room was remarkable, “even after working here a long time.” In a hospital that often sees young or unwed mothers, reluctant fathers, or worse, the joy in our family was very welcome. “They aren’t all good days,” one delivery nurse told us. “Today was a good day.”

My lesson: Allies are often where we least expect them. We had also received some sage advice to not let the inevitable stressful moments or unsupportive individuals take our focus off of the joy of those days. I am so glad we heeded that advice.

Click here to read the entire article.

in Family Stories / Parenting / Personal Stories  by Anthony Brown 0 comments

Kids thrive just as well in non-traditional families, new book says

MyKwartha.com, March 20, 2015 – By Andrea Gordon

Baby Jasmine Chan delivered the ultimate Valentine’s Day gift to her parents this year. It was her first word, clear and deliberate.

“Daddy,” she said, beaming across the dinner table.

Music to her two dads’ ears.

When they met 12 years ago, Paul Chan and Ewan French never imagined they would one day answer to Daddy or Papa.

Chan had recently come out to his family. It was a tough period and his mother was heartbroken. She wanted grandkids. He assumed his own dream of being a father would never come true.

It wasn’t until they married two years ago that the couple started to explore the idea of parenthood. Chan, 33, was confident they could be good, loving parents. French was on the fence.

“I always knew we’d have a strong community around us,” says French, 34, who was born and raised in Scotland.

“But I didn’t want (our child) to face any challenges because of having same-sex parents. Would we be putting her at an unfair advantage because of it?”

According to a new book from University of Cambridge developmental psychologist Susan Golombok, the answer is a resounding “No.”

Golombok, director of the university’s Centre for Family Research, has been studying the impact of evolving family structures on children for almost 40 years.

Modern Families: Parents and Children in New Family Forms, which rounds up research from around the world, concludes that children raised by same-sex parents and solo moms by choice or born as a result of donor conception or surrogacy fare just as well as kids raised by a two-parent, heterosexual married couple.

“The main conclusion is that what matters for children is not so much the structure of the family — the gender or sexual orientation of their parents, the number of parents or whether parents are biologically related to their children,” Golombok said in a phone interview from England.

“What seems to be more important is the quality of the relationships within the family.”

In other words, while the traditional model of mom, dad and biological kids was once considered “the gold standard,” four decades of research doesn’t bear that out.

All other things being equal, children manage just as well — and face the same difficulties — whether they have two dads and no mom, or two moms and no father as they do with two heterosexual parents. There is no evidence they have more psychological problems, difficulty adjusting or atypical gender development, Golombok found.

The fluidity of partnerships and family is also the subject of a soon-to-be-released book by Hollywood actress Maria Bello.

Her memoir, Whatever…Love is Love, follows her 2013 Modern Love column in the Sunday New York Times, which drew accolades. Titled “Coming Out as a Modern Family,” it told the poignant story of how Bello explained to her 12-year-old son that she was in love with her best friend, a woman.

The piece, which made the list of the top 10 Modern Love columns ever written, highlights the resilience and adaptability that kids can demonstrate when they have trusting relationships with parents.

It’s something Chantal Saville has seen in her 6-year-old daughter Nikki, who she’s now raising with the help of her own mom.

After Saville’s marriage broke up two years ago and the couple sold the business they ran outside Peterborough, she wondered how she’d make ends meet.

Her mother, widowed a decade earlier, was still living in the Toronto bungalow Saville grew up in as an only child. The two had always been close.

“Now we are effectively co-parenting Nikki,” says Saville, 42, a writer.

In the early days, mom and grandma occasionally locked horns over discipline when the era of, “because I said so” clashed with modern refrain of, “sweetie, here’s why I need you to do what I ask.”

But they’ve learned that communication is key and that whoever is in charge at a given moment gets the final word.

Organizations like American Academy of Pediatrics and the American Psychological Association have already endorsed findings that the sexual orientation of parents has no bearing on child-rearing abilities or the well-being of kids.

What’s new about Modern Families is it brings together empirical research involving many thousands of families from around the world and explores some of the reasons that more unorthodox families seem to do so well.

Golombok’s career has spanned an evolution in family life, starting in the late 1970s as lesbian moms came out and divorced husbands fought for the right to raise their children, followed by the arrival of the first test-tube baby in 1978.

The book comes amid a huge shift in how society recognizes and accommodates the assortment of families created as a result of assisted reproductive technologies. Modern kids may have a “solo mom” who chose to have a child on her own using donated sperm, or relationships with as many as five parents, including two legal parents, a sperm donor, egg donor and a surrogate.

The careful planning and lengths these parents go to in order to have children may be one reason their kids do well, says Golombok.

It can require years of fertility treatment and facing other barriers like social disapproval. The less motivated give up along the way.

Click here to read the entire article.

in International / Legal / Legislation / Parenting / Science / Surrogacy  by Anthony Brown 0 comments

5th Grader’s Delightful Review of “And Tango Makes Three”

Via Mombian.com – March 11, 2015

tangoFifth grader Zoe, at her blog Kids’ Animal Station, has written a terrific review of And Tango Makes Three, the lovely picture book about two male penguins who raise a chick together.

Zoe started her blog in 2012, and bills it as, “For kids who love animals by a kid who loves animals.” The face that Tango is about “cute waddling penguins” qualifies it for coverage—but Zoe’s love for the book goes beyond just that. She explains:

This book has a particular soft spot in my heart, considering I know many people who are within the LGBT community, so this book was one of the first times I actually got a chance to learn about it, since you don’t really get to learn about LGBT people and things like that at the age this book is targeted to.

She adds a touch of humor, noting that when it comes to the acronym LGBT, “half the kids in my school think it’s a sandwich.”

Then she calls for more books like Tango:

What everyone can take away from this book is that families come in all sorts of ways, which is a lesson a bunch of the kids at my school don’t seem to know. . . . It would be better if more books like this were around, because I have noticed that the books you read when you are really young greatly impact your later years,

Click here to read the entire article.

in Education / Family Stories / Parenting / Personal Stories  by Anthony Brown 0 comments