Sexual Minority Parent Families

Parents’ preparedness for parenthood and their parenting skills have important implications for child development and family functioning. Thus, there is great value in addressing parents’ parenting skills via prevention and intervention. Yet despite a modest literature on the use of empirically validated parenting interventions with heterosexual couples, even less work has examined the utility or validity of empirically validated parenting interventions for lesbian, gay, bisexual, or queer (LGBQ) parents. This chapter provides an overview of select research on LGBQ family building, the transition to parenthood, and parenthood, followed by a discussion of evidence-based parenting interventions. It attends to ways in which the LGBQ parenting research can inform unique considerations or modifications to existing intervention approaches. It concludes with a case study that illustrates some of the challenges that a lesbian couple might face in building their family and navigating parenting issues.