Love Makes a Family

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I literally know of no parents my own age or younger, who haven't - at the very least - done a shitton of self reflection and tried a different way, when they realized something they were doing (yelling, spanking, bribing, fawning, helicoptering, whatever) wasn't giving them the results - attentive kids, better communication, clean bedrooms, less spoiled brat behavior, etc - they were hoping for. My family helped me to grow. I learned new skills, gained new knowledge and worked new jobs just so that I can return home and see the beautiful smiles on their faces. They mean the world to me.

We saw that society expected us to be independent, but that, as we got older, intradependence is what saved us, so we started teaching empathy and community and communication, even though we had to learn it from scratch then too. We saw that "hey you can't depend on your job for everything - maybe you can't depend on it for anything" and we started to tell kids to focus on things that made them feel whole, and happy, and to not neglect those things just because of their jobs/school/whatever society said was more important. We continue to get slapped in the face with the ways in which inequality is a planned feature of our society, and so we taught our kids to recognize it from the beginning, to name it when they see it, to actively work against it. When teaching an LGBTQ+ text like "Love Makes a Family," an affirmative approach would be most appropriate. This approach focuses on promoting understanding, acceptance, and celebration of LGBTQ+ individuals and families. It aims to create a safe and inclusive learning environment that recognizes the diversity of human experience.No conflicts can ever break a close-knit family apart. If there is love within a family, then love would be the power that helps the family thrive. Hence it’s my responsibility to make sure my children don’t grow up with any preconceived notion about anyone’s family type. Especially if you have babies and toddlers, discussions pertaining to family structure different than yours can be difficult for them to understand, but that doesn’t mean we have to refrain from introducing them to such topics .

Diversity 8: I want to know about other people and how our lives and experiences are the same and different.And we can say a lot of good things about our parents - the Boomers and Hippies, a lot of whom tried to do better in their own ways too - but self-reflection and re-examining the roles we all play in society and within families was not their strongest suit. Hell, depending on how old your parents were, you could've been raised with full on "emotions are evil, shut that shit down" Silent Generation-ers, and still you're out here attempting Gentle Parenting and letting your kid have a tantrum in the Target parking lot. I'm so proud of you! Book: Marisol McDonald Doesn't Match by Monica Brown (Children's Book Press, Bilingual edition, 2011)