Coming Out, Coming Home: Interview with Michael C. LaSala, Ph.D. - a podcast by Jonathan B. Singer, Ph.D., LCSW

Episode 66: Today's Social Work Podcast is about helping families adjust to a gay or lesbian child. According to the website, comingoutcominghome.com, "The discovery that a child is gay or lesbian can send shockwaves throughout a family. A mother will question how she's raised her son; a father will worry that his daughter will experience discrimination. From the child's perspective, gay and lesbian youth fear their families will reject them, and that they will lose financial and emotional support. All in all, learning a child is gay challenges long held views about sexuality and relationships, and the resulting uncertainty can produce, for all parties, anger, resentment, and concern for safety and acceptance." So, how can social workers help families adjust to a gay or lesbian child? To get some answers, I spoke with Dr. Michael LaSala author of the 2010 book, Coming Out, Coming Home: Helping Families Adjust to a Gay or Lesbian Child, published by Columbia University Press. Dr. LaSala is director of the MSW program and associate professor at the School of Social Work at Rutgers University. He has been in practice for more than twenty-five years and he currently treats LGBT individuals and families at the Institute for Personal Growth in Highland Park, NJ. (www.ipgcounseling.com). Dr. LaSala recently completed a Fulbright Fellowship in Estonia where he investigated the impacts of stigma on Estonian lesbians and gay men. In addition to his book and numerous scholarly publications, you can read his blog on Gay and Lesbian Well-Being on PsychologyToday.com

I had the pleasure of meeting Dr. LaSala when he came to Temple University in March of 2011. He gave a talk sponsored by Temple's School of Social Work about his federally funded qualitative study of 65 families of gay and lesbian youth, which formed the basis for his book, Coming Out, Coming Home. One of the surprising findings in his study was that some of the young people he interviewed "wanted to disclose their sexual orientation to their mothers and fathers because they believed that their parents could provide the support they needed to cope with the challenges of being gay" (LaSala, 2010, p. 55). Ok, so what's surprising about kids wanting their parents support? Well, until recently, it was just kind of assumed that straight parents wouldn't be supportive if and when they found out their child was gay or lesbian. Gay and lesbian children often found themselves disowned, kicked out of the house, cut-off financially, and even abused. As a result individual therapists and programs for LGBT youth focused on finding support networks (peers, friends, gay and lesbian adults, straight supporters), people who became the youth's "chosen family" who could provide emotional, financial and emergency support when biological families turned their backs on their LGBT kids. For decades it was standard operating procedure for professionals to support youth to stay "in the closet" until college or into adulthood when they could be financially and emotionally independent of their parents.

So, ignoring the family seemed to make sense in 1980. But, according to researchers like Michael LaSala, Cindy Conley (whom you might remember from episode 62 of the Social Work Podcast), Caitlin Ryan (whom you can hear on episode 33 of Living Proof, the podcast series of the School of Social Work at the University at Buffalo) and others, ignoring the family doesn't work so well for gay and lesbian youth in in 2011. And it wasn't what the kids in Dr. LaSala's study said they wanted from their parents.

There's a very practical reason for this shift: youth are coming out much younger than in the past. According to a 2006 study by Caitlin Ryan and her colleagues, kids in the USA are, on average, 13 when they come out. For professionals this means that you're not dealing with kids about to graduate from high school, or in the middle of college. You're dealing with 8th graders. And there's a big difference between supporting a graduating senior to stay in the closet for three months so that her parents won't refuse to pay for college, and supporting an 8th grader to stay in the closet for five to six years.

We've also learned that that parental support matters to adolescents. Even though peer influence increases during adolescence, it turns out that parents and families are more important peers. Pop quiz - what's more important in keeping high school students from trying to kill themselves – parental support or peer support? Ok. I know that was a bad pop quiz because I set you up for the answer. But, just to be clear, it is parental support (Kidd et al., 2006). This recent emphasis on families is creating a paradigm shift in work with gay and lesbian youth. The importance of families in the health and well-being of LGBT youth was highlighted by the Institute of Medicine's first-ever report on LGBT health, published in April 2011. In that report, families were identified as "an important social structure." Now the kids in Dr. LaSala's study didn't need to read an IOM report to know that. They knew that their families were an important source of support. They also knew that coming out wouldn't be easy, and that's why they wanted to come out to their parents - so their parents could provide that support. The IOM report also said that families were "a promising venue for interventions." Dr. LaSala's study, Coming Out, Coming Home, provides valuable insight into the types of interventions that might be useful with families of gay and lesbian youth.

In today's interview, Michael and I talked about the five stages that families in his study described going through before, during, and after finding out their child was gay or lesbian. We talked about some of the challenges that social workers face when a child hasn't come out to his or her parents. Michael gave some examples of practical and useful indirect questions that therapists can use with young clients whom they suspect are questioning their sexual orientation, but are ambivalent about discussing it. We talked about how managing stigma was a family affair. We ended our conversation with a discussion about empirical support for family-based work with gay and lesbian youth, as well as resources for social workers interested in learning more.

And now, on to Episode 66 of the Social Work Podcast: Coming Out, Coming Home: Interview with Michael C. LaSala, Ph.D.

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