Navigating Fear: Supporting Your LGBTQ+ Child with Love and Understanding

If we were to line up 100 parents and go one by one and interview them about the emotions they feel around parenting we’d hear lots of things but I can almost guarantee that we’d come up with one major theme, fear. Fear is a centralizing and universal experience parents from every culture feel. But especially when you're the parent of a child (young or adult child) who is LGBTQ+, it's easy to be consumed by fear. The first 3 months of your grief process probably had fear weaved throughout, but as the information settles in and the shock wears off something new can begin to take hold, a different kind of fear that is around your child possibly being harmed because they’re different.

The Impact of Fear: How It Shapes Parental Reactions and Responses

Your fears around your child being harmed because they are LGBTQ+ isn’t present because you're a bad parent, highly anxious or negative thinker. It’s based on real stories, real people, maybe even people you know. The news often features a story about LGBTQ+ people being bullied, laws passing limiting resources and protection, physical violence occuring and sometimes death. I’ve heard so many parents I’ve worked with explain that they feel its their duty to let their LGBTQ+ identified child know about their fears so they can edit their behavior or change their clothes to fit more into society so that they don’t become the object of violence. As a parent it feels as if you don’t do this, you’ve let your child down and if they get hurt in some way, it was your fault for not warning them. As a parent, its our way of helping them.

Breaking the Cycle: Why Expressing Fear to Your LGBTQ+ Child Can Do More Harm Than Good

I’ve been a therapist for 20 years and research confirms my findings, that expressing your fears and warnings to your children doesn’t help them, in fact it hurts them. It doesn’t help your child evaluate their choices, “hmm, maybe i shouldn’t be trans, it sounds scary and dangerous. Or, maybe I shouldn’t wear my pride shirt, maybe someone will see that I’m gay and want to hurt me.” When you share your fear with your kids it comes out more like, my parents are so scared, therefore I must be scary. It gets internalized as an identity about them, I'm bad for stressing my parents out, life is scary and I’m bad. So what are we to do?

I want you to pause, take a moment and ask yourself, what are your fears as a parent, or caregivers of a LGBTQ+ child/kid/teen/adult?

Unpacking Stereotypes: How Negative Perceptions Can Influence Parental Fear

One major thing that can happen for parents is that even if they have positive references for LGBTQ+ people, maybe one of their best friends is even gay, all the many negative stereotypes of being LGBTQ+ come flooding in and fill up their internal worlds. Negative stereotypes are based on real and true things, but are often shortsighted, lack nuance, context and are not universal. But for a parent those stereotypes become like an internal ambulance siren that never turns off. It’s screeching, warning warning, SOS, this is dangerous, do not let your child continue down this road. But again, research shows, expressing your fear to your children doesn't help them, it hurts them. So then, what are we to do as parents?!

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The First Step to Support: Recognizing and Addressing Your Own Fears

If there is one thing I want you to remember it is this, that the first step and most important thing you can do for your child is to realize, acknowledge and accept that you are in your own process and get care for yourself in that. Realize that the fear that’s within you is yours and is about you. It’s yours to deal with, not for your child to hold or worry about.

Embracing Self-Care: Nurturing Your Emotional Well-being as a Parent

Your feelings are normal and okay to have, but they need to be separate from your kids. In other-words, it needs to be your own and that’s why it’s so amazing that you’re reading this. You are already so ahead of the process by being a parent that is willing to learn and adjust.

So naturally, if we are going to attempt to not parent out of fear we need to be able to recognize our feelings and care well for them. You deserve and need support and care in this process.

Courageous Conversations: How to Navigate Fear and Support Your LGBTQ+ Child

So we are going to practice this right now, I want you to take a moment with yourself and see what kind of feelings you’re having right now. As you think about your child being LGBTQT+ what comes up for you. What is your body doing? Is there tension somewhere? Is a certain part of your body hot? Are there thoughts that you keep having even if you feel bad for having them? Are you have a feeling that feels familiar, or really foreign and new? It’s okay if this feels strange and awkward, you can remind yourself that it's new and takes practice. I want you to write down what it is that you're feeling both in your body and heart/mind. And once you’ve finished writing it all down, no matter how short or long it is I want you to say to yourself and write down in response to what you’ve written, I hear you, I'm here with you and you are not alone. Repeat that as many times as you need. If you have a friend or therapist, you can also do this practice with them but is also okay to do alone.

From Fear to Resilience: Building a Foundation of Trust and Understanding

We want you to know what you are feeling, and separate that from how you are going to respond to our kids.

The Power of Presence: Supporting Your LGBTQ+ Child Through Tough Emotions

Acknowledge, validate, and permit your feelings with yourself, find a supportive friend, spouse or therapist and get care for those places. And then you can do the same for your child. You can’t give something that you don’t have first. To be clear, this experience you’re giving yourself is exactly what your child needs, acknowledgment, validation and permission.

Your children don’t necessarily need answers, solutions or gameplans, they need your precise, support and love. There don’t even need to be a lot of words.

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Seeking Support: Finding Resources and Allies for Both You and Your Child

Ultimately, we want our kids to be safe, especially with our queer kids, right?! Well, research shows the biggest way we can help kids to be safe – both physically and emotionally - is to BE WITH THEM IN THEIR FEELINGS. But all of these things add up to the foundation for our LGBTQ+ kids to be resilient in this world. We all want resilience for ourselves and our kids. We know that it is a good thing. Resilience is the thing that's going to help them be successful in life, to keep going after a setback, to stay in the game after a loss, to keep working towards health even when it takes so much work.

Resilience comes from our ability to tolerate tough feelings, not get out of tough feelings. We learn to tolerate these hard feelings by acknowledging,validating and permitting them. What we will begin to learn with our children is that emotions aren’t scary, or dangerous. This will help give our kids the courage to get through difficult seasons, and to learn to trust themselves, simply by sitting with them when they are struggling and not freaking out and going down a fear spiral ourselves. If we haven’t dealt with our own fears, we won’t be able to do all of this for our children.

Your fears aren’t bad, it's just that you need support and care and a safe place to process them with someone other than your child. Reach out to someone today and begin to feel the difference in your relationship to yourself and your LGBTQ+ child.