Even as so
much changes, kids who tease others from different-type families will always
remain. In my day, the boy with the Asian dad was taunted, as was the girl with
the single hippie mom. Now, children being children (and bigoted parents being bigoted
parents), we can add same-sex couples to the list of potential abuse.
The
children of dual-mom couple Ebony and Denise have experienced it. This social
media influencer couple have agreed upon some defensive tactics to teach their three
kids (nine-year-old daughter by Ebony, three-year-old twins by Denise, same
donor). They share some insight with Popsugar’s Murphey Maroney.
It all
began when their daughter came home from gymnastics in tears. “She wasn't upset
by the fact that she has two moms, she was upset that somebody would be so mean
to make fun of her,” says Denise. “She'd never encountered mean people or mean
kids, and so that's when we realized we need to tell her about the other side
of society and how some people may not agree with how we live our lives. Now,
she's very equipped with navigating these situations. She's aware that we use
our platform to discuss these topics, and it honestly helps her in her
day-to-day."
Ebony
says, “Our model is to always kill people with kindness. We definitely don't
want her to retaliate back in a negative way. We told her to say, ‘I understand
that you don't understand my family, and that's OK.’ And just leave it at that.
We want her to interpret it as ‘I understand that you don't understand.’”
Besides learning
how to encounter such hostility from their peers, Ebony and Denise understand
other questions will arise. As families like theirs in the LGBTQ+ world grow,
and science makes conceiving a child in new ways more of a reality, parents
must now entertain questions that didn’t exist a generation ago. For instance,
Ebony and Denise’s kids have 20-plus donor siblings, or “diblings.”
“We're not
sure exactly what this conversation is going to look like,” Ebony tells
Maroney. "We've reached out to other two-mom families or two-dad families
who have children older than our kids to see what their experience was like.”
The main
goal is to have the talk. How will the talk go? They will get back to us on
that. Suffice to say, it will be interesting.