Ahead of a new national survey of rainbow parents, George Parker shares their parenting reality.
It’s a new school year and I’m steeling myself for the “meet the teacher” evening. The 15-minute window intended to get the school year started right via a quick chat with the new teacher can feel a lot more complicated when you are a parent from the rainbow community. I’ll spare you the minutiae of how our family works but suffice to say it’s a bit of a process explaining to a teacher you are meeting for the first time just how much our whānau doesn’t conform with mum and dad, nuclear family norms. This is a process repeated with every doctor, Well Child nurse, ECE teacher, and even the admin person for after school care.
I parent in an extended blended family that includes four kids, multiple households, and several parents who have diverse genders and sexualities. Conveying some basic information about who we are to the providers of the services we engage with has proved essential to ensure we can access services that are appropriate and effective. For example, it is important to achieve some clarity with providers of education or health services around which adults can and should be called in an emergency, and who has decision making authority in our whānau for which children.
Ensuring providers understand who is in our whānau, and how we organise ourselves, is also important because we need our kids to receive messages from the world around them that communicate that families like theirs are anticipated and welcomed. This is communicated in small but significant actions like correctly gendering their parents, being curious about rather than assuming who is in their whānau, and affirming their diverse family structure. As celebrations like Mother’s Day and Father’s Day roll around, affirming families like ours ask providers to reflect on how gender and sexuality norms, alongside other cultural norms, shape their assumptions and practices around parenting and families, and to be creative in challenging these. This helps ensure our kids receive affirming messages about their whānau, an essential building block of any child’s wellbeing, as well as promoting a wider social environment where whānau diversity and inclusion is the norm.
Providers have a lot they can learn from children being raised in all diverse family structures that challenge Eurocentric and binary gender and sexuality norms. I constantly marvel at my children’s commitment to correcting people who misgender me, their own creative solutions to Mother’s and Father’s Day (Non-Binary Parent Day anyone?), and their confident assertions to those beyond our whānau, about how their whānau works and who matters to them.
The number of children growing up in whānau with rainbow parents has grown dramatically in recent decades with improved access to assisted reproductive technologies and legal protections, along with growing social acceptance. The number of young people identifying with diverse genders and sexualities is also increasing, suggesting that diversity in parent identity and family organisation will grow commensurately over time. Despite this, there is a lack of visibility and recognition of the diversity of rainbow parents and their unique contexts and needs in Aotearoa.
To date there have been limited Aotearoa-specific population-based studies that provide insight into the diversity of whānau with rainbow parents, and existing national child and family cohort studies have not collected parents’ gender and sexuality data. This erasure is perpetuated at a service level, with many health and education providers failing to ask about or record parent identity and family organisation. Without my annual “meet the teacher” spiel, and the many other proactive efforts we make to have our whānau known to our health and education providers, they will generally lack the mechanisms to know we are there nor how to affirm us.
Our invisibility perpetuates a cycle where parenting and family norms remain unchallenged, leaving services without a reason to build their capability for inclusive practice at a systemic level through, for example, inclusive data collection systems and the provision of rainbow inclusion education to providers.
This leaves rainbow parents with the dilemma of either accepting their invisibility and exclusion, or shouldering the work to address it, one service and provider at a time. Both options can be harmful, as can the real time dilemma of deciding which approach to take in any situation. Many queer and trans parents will relate to the quick mental arithmetic: “is coming out worth it?” “how many times will I see this provider?” “which will feel worse today, being misgendered in front of my kids or dealing with a provider’s awkwardness or worse, their resistance?”
Evidence is now abundant that these kinds of efforts to navigate norms that exclude or erase our identity as a rainbow people constitute forms of minority stress that wear away at our nervous systems, and subsequently our wellbeing. The link to higher levels of mental distress in rainbow communities is clear. Evidence is also clear that the impacts of this stress compound for people who navigate multiple forms of social discrimination and exclusion on a day-to-day level.
With Father’s Day right around the corner, it is a great time for providers to reflect on where parenting and family norms are thriving unchecked, in ways that erase and exclude the richness of whānau diversity in Aotearoa. Visibility is a key first step. The newly launched Inclusion through Difference Project is aiming to get a national picture of who our rainbow parents are, how we organise our families, and how we experience navigating norms in child and family-related services.
The national survey of rainbow parents opens on October 1 and will be hosted on the Moana Vā. Follow the project on Instagram for updates.
