Featuring a spectrum of families from diverse backgrounds, this book reveals the joys and challenges of adoptive and foster parenting. The authors outline how the experience of adopting and fostering has changed for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) people over the years, major changes in policy, and what the research can tell us about LGBT parenting. They interview families involved at different stages of the fostering and adoption process, from those undergoing assessments through to the experienced foster carers and adopters who were interviewed for the first edition of this book 20 years previously. While the number of LGBT people adopting or fostering has increased since then, some of the very real challenges still endure - including social stigma, homophobia and discriminatory policies - and families share some of the strategies they have used to help to address them. This is an essential source of information and advice for same-sex couples and LGBT single parents, as well as social workers, social work educators, sociologists of personal life, fostering and adoption panel members.

An essential step-by-step guide to adoption for lesbians and gay men, covering both the adoption process and the adoption experiences of several lesbians and gay men. Hill's book contains information that is relevant to both single adopters and same-sex couples and is the first of its kind to be published in the UK.

This collection of personal accounts is based on interviews of gay men and lesbians who have adopted, fostered or provided respite care. Their stories provide good and bad experiences, but overall the accounts emphasise the rewards of parenting.

All parents experience stress as they attempt to meet the challenges of caring for their children. This comprehensive book examines the causes and consequences of parenting distress, drawing on a wide array of findings in current empirical research. Kirby Deater-Deckard explores normal and pathological parenting stress, the influences of parents on their children as well as children on their parents, and the effects of biological and environmental factors. Beginning with an overview of theories of stress and coping, Deater-Deckard goes on to describe how parenting stress is linked with problems in adult and child health (emotional problems, developmental disorders, illness); parental behaviors (warmth, harsh discipline); and factors outside the family (marital quality, work roles, cultural influences). The book concludes with a useful review of coping strategies and interventions that have been demonstrated to alleviate parenting stress.

Adoption by Lesbians and Gay Men is an interdisciplinary examination of the myths, misconceptions, research, and practice literature related to sexual-minority individuals' efforts to adopt and raise children. It also provides a blueprint for research and professional training and highlights best practice standards for working with this group of adoptive parents.

This textbook offers a comprehensive overview of research on LGBTQ-parent families. The new edition of the textbook provides updated information and expands on the range and depth of current research. The volume features contributions from scholars in psychology, sociology, human development, family studies, gender studies, sexuality studies, legal studies, social work, and anthropology. In addition, the textbook offers an international perspective, with coverage spanning many diverse nations and cultures. Chapters highlight key research, exploring sexual orientation in relation to other key social identities, such as gender, race, and nationality. Chapters also discuss new, emerging areas of research, including asexuality and immigration. The textbook concludes with a section on the growing sophistication of research methodology in the study of LGBTQ-parent families. The second edition includes new chapters discussing: LGBTQ-parent families and health. LGBTQ foster parents. LGBTQ adults and sibling relationships. LGBTQ-parent families and poverty. LGBTQ-parent families and separation/divorce. LGBTQ-parent families and religion. LGBTQ-parent families and grief/loss. Methods, recruitment, and sampling in research with LGBTQ families. Teaching/pedagogy on LGBTQ-parent families. LGBTQ-Parent Families, 2nd Edition, is a valuable updated resource for graduate students as well as veteran and beginning clinicians across disciplines, including family studies, family therapy, gender studies, public health, social policy, social work and child and adolescent psychology as well as related disciplines across mental health and educational services.

This book explores the myths and prejudices that influence attitudes towards lesbians and gay men as parents.It also suggests ways that social workers can more effectively support lesbian and gay adopters and foster parents.

A leading expert on the family, Judith Stacey is known for her provocative research on mainstream issues. Finding herself impatient with increasingly calcified positions taken in the interminable wars over same-sex marriage, divorce, fatherlessness, marital fidelity, and the like, she struck out to profile unfamiliar cultures of contemporary love, marriage, and family values from around the world. Built on bracing original research that spans gay men’s intimacies and parenting in this country to plural and non-marital forms of family in South Africa and China,Unhitcheddecouples the taken for granted relationships between love, marriage, and parenthood. Countering the one-size-fits-all vision of family values, Stacey offers readers a lively, in-person introduction to these less familiar varieties of intimacy and family and to the social, political, and economic conditions that buttress and batter them. Through compelling stories of real families navigating inescapable personal and political trade-offs between desire and domesticity, the book undermines popular convictions about family, gender, and sexuality held on the left, right, and center. Taking on prejudices of both conservatives and feminists, Unhitched poses a powerful empirical challenge to the belief that the nuclear family--whether straight or gay--is the single, best way to meet our needs for intimacy and care. Stacey calls on citizens and policy-makers to make their peace with the fact that family diversity is here to stay.

In Radical Relations, Daniel Winunwe Rivers offers a previously untold story of the American family: the first history of lesbian and gay parents and their children in the United States. Beginning in the postwar era, a period marked by both intense repression and dynamic change for lesbians and gay men, Rivers argues that by forging new kinds of family and childrearing relations, gay and lesbian parents have successfully challenged legal and cultural definitions of family as heterosexual. These efforts have paved the way for the contemporary focus on family and domestic rights in lesbian and gay political movements. Based on extensive archival research and 130 interviews conducted nationwide, Radical Relations includes the stories of lesbian mothers and gay fathers in the 1950s, lesbian and gay parental activist networks and custody battles, families struggling with the AIDS epidemic, and children growing up in lesbian feminist communities. Rivers also addresses changes in gay and lesbian parenthood in the 1980s and 1990s brought about by increased awareness of insemination technologies and changes in custody and adoption law.