Experiences of mothers of LGBTQ+ children: Reactions to coming out
Abstract
Parental responses to a child’s coming out play an important role in the
psychological well-being, sense of safety, and psychosocial development of young
people with minority sexual orientations or gender identities. Family support
represents an important protective factor, whereas rejection, invalidation, or
ambivalence may increase the child’s psychological burden.
The aim of this study was to explore how mothers in the Czech sociocultural
context perceive and process the coming out of their LGBTQ+ children, what
sources of uncertainty, stress, and support they identify in this process, and
how their responses change over time.
The study employed a qualitative design and reflexive thematic analysis, drawing
on semi-structured interviews with 13 mothers of children with minority sexual
orientations or transgender identities.
The analysis showed that mothers’ responses ranged along a continuum from open
acceptance through ambivalence to initial questioning of the
child’s identity. Key factors shaping this process included the degree of
uncertainty, access to comprehensible information, flexibility in gender-related
beliefs, social support, and concerns about the child’s future in a
cis-heteronormative environment.
The findings show that acceptance cannot be understood as a single moment, but
rather as a dynamic process in which mothers’ outwardly supportive responses
may diverge from their internal affective and cognitive processing of the
child’s disclosed identity. The study contributes to understanding parental
acceptance as a temporally changing and relationally embedded process and offers
implications for more sensitive counselling work with families of LGBTQ+
children.
https://doi.org/10.29364/epsy.555
(Fulltext in Czech)
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