My Advice to First Time Parents: "Parenting Journeys, Like Coming Out Journeys, Are All Different"
March 23, 2023BT Group’s Mark Armario, a Senior Manager in Learning Consultancy at BT Group, shares his advice for first-time LGBTQ+ parents after adopting his sons 15 years ago.
My husband and I adopted our two sons 15 years ago now. I believe at the time, we were the first same-sex couple to be approved for adoption in the local authority we applied through. At least, that’s what we were told. We’d had a challenging path to adoption as our own local authority told us that as a same-sex couple, they wouldn’t work with us or consider us for adoption. Crushing. But thankfully, there were others who would. 15 years on, our eldest is at University studying international relations and politics, and the youngest is studying to be a chef.
My first piece of advice is a simple one. You’re not an LGBTQ+ parent. You’re a parent who just happens to be LGBTQ+. The job is to focus on the needs of your child, and that becomes the priority. Yes, there are some things that mark you as unique as an LGBTQ+ parent, but they aren’t the child’s considerations, and they won’t even understand those differences for a long time.
Without wanting to seem preachy, the second piece of advice I’d offer is that it’s really important to ensure your child has exposure to all different types of families. I know when we first became parents, our immediate thought was, “We must find others like us”. The reality was different and wouldn’t have prepared our boys for the years ahead. The reality was we came across a wonderfully eclectic mix of family and parents, and over the years, many became and still remain great friends. Years of prep for school events or sitting through plays and concerts helped us bond, and it changed our social circle over time. But the variation really did help our boys and us.
That variation was also important in another piece of advice, prepare your child for the inevitable (in our case) “You have two dads”. We kept it simple, and that appears to have worked. We told our sons that if the question were to come up, then simply point out other people have one dad, some have no dads, and some have Granddads that look after them. It was a simple and effective way to help, especially when they were younger. I witnessed it play out in the school playground when the eldest was about 7. A young boy he was playing with said, “You have two dads,” and our eldest looked at him and said, “You only have one.” Then they both carried on playing. That was it.
For us, it was important to work with schools to help them understand our family setup. Choosing schools, finding schools, getting the best school….it’s like The Hunger Games. But, when you do settle on a school. We found it really useful to go and meet the principal and our boy's teachers. Help them understand that our family was different to some. At that time, we may very well have been the first same-sex couple they had encountered. I genuinely think it helped lay a foundation that was useful throughout the whole of the boy's schooling. They are important formative relationships for the children, and we felt like we were in partnership in making sure their schooling went well.
Some of the above may help. But I think that leads me to the piece of advice I wish someone would have us. Parenting journeys, like coming out journeys, are all different. There is no set way of doing it, no pathway. You will get some things brilliantly right. You will get some things very, very wrong. There’ll be times you question yourself. If you're a couple, there’ll be times you disagree on approaches, and that is hard. But there is no right or wrong way to do this, there is only your way. As I reflect back on our way, with one son in university and the other in college, I guess it’s ok at this point to say, “We did ok!”