Goals
Brief description of the issue
For an adult, talking about family diversity with children and approaching the subject of homoparental families mean accepting the possibility of questions about how families are formed, about diversity and about sexual orientation. Children are naturally curious about where babies come from. However, when a young child asks a question about a family with two moms or two dads, he is not really interested in what goes on in their bedroom (LGBT Family Coalition, 2014).
If a child from your group lives in a homoparental family, or if you do or some of your colleagues do, you might want to bring awareness regarding family diversity with children of your group. However, it can sometimes be uneasy to talk about this with children if we don’t know from first-hand experience what it’s like to have a homoparental family and we might fear some of the children’s questions.
Generally speaking, children are looking for the simplest explanation. Homoparental families can be explained simply as the desire of two men or two women who love each other to have a baby, just like a man and a woman who love each other might want to have a baby (LGBT Family Coalition, 2014).
To help educators answer children’s questions, the LGBT Family Coalition created a wonderful guide with pre-written answers that you can download below.
Document
References
LGBT Family Coalition (2014). Responding simply to children’s questions, accessible at: https://www.familleslgbt.org/documents/pdf/Guide_Repondre_en.pdf