Family rejection and acceptance (Ryan, Family Acceptance Project)
The concrete things parents and caregivers do in response to a child’s sexual orientation or gender expression, counted as actions more than as feelings. Ryan measured both sides: rejecting behaviors and accepting ones, each drawn from interviews with families, and their links with the young person’s later health.
What drives it
Counting actions changes the question a family argues about. A parent who still holds the same beliefs can change what they do, and a young person can name the actions under ‘they love me, but’. For identification it separates how much a family loves a child from how the child is treated, which in a rejecting family can feel like the same thing.
How it shows
Work
Taking extra shifts to save for rent after being told to leave home. A young worker who lists a friend as emergency contact instead of a parent. Dreading the office party where partners come, because no one at home knows.
Relationships
A parent who says ‘I love you, but don’t bring him home’. Being sent to a pastor or counselor to change. Siblings told not to discuss it. Or the other side: a mother who asks the girlfriend’s name and sets a place at the table.
Self
Notice which family reactions you replay, and whether they were things said or things done. Notice who in the family has shown acceptance, even in one small act.
What tells it apart
Adolescent individuation: Most teenagers clash with parents over rules and independence. Rejection is more likely the issue when the conflict is about who the young person is or loves, and the parent’s warmth changed after the disclosure.
Emotional cutoff: Emotional cutoff describes ending or shrinking contact to cope with family tension. After rejection, distance may be the young person keeping safe, or the family’s doing, and the two can look alike from outside.
Conflict between faith and sexual orientation or gender identity: A parent torn between faith and child may say hurtful things while trying to stay close. Faith conflict may be the larger part when the parent is visibly struggling, and acceptance may grow as they find a way to hold both.
A test
Ask the young person to list what each parent has done since finding out, as actions, and sort them into ones that felt rejecting and ones that felt accepting. A long rejecting list, especially with threats of being thrown out or pressure to change, may point to the kind of rejection Ryan linked with health risks.
Questions to carry
- After my family found out, what was the first thing someone did that I still remember?
- Which of my family’s reactions do I carry around as if it were the last word?
Go deeper
- Watch: Love, no matter what, Andrew Solomon, TEDMED, 2013. A writer who interviewed families raising children unlike themselves: deaf, dwarf, transgender, gay and more. He opens with a 1966 Time magazine line calling homosexuality a sickness, and a memory of his mother steering him away from a pink balloon. He calls traits a child learns from peers "horizontal identities", and asks where love for a child ends and acceptance begins. A writer's reading of many families, free to watch.
How strong the research is
moderate. In 224 white and Latino lesbian, gay and bisexual young adults aged 21 to 25 (Ryan, Huebner, Diaz and Sanchez, Pediatrics, 2009), those who recalled high levels of family rejection in adolescence were 8.4 times more likely to report a suicide attempt, 5.9 times more likely to report high depression and 3.4 times more likely to use illegal drugs than peers who recalled little or none. In a second sample of 245 LGBT young adults (Ryan and colleagues, 2010), recalled family acceptance went with higher self-esteem, social support and general health and with less depression, substance use and suicidal thinking and behavior. Both studies asked young adults to look back on their teens and measured everything at one point, so they show strong links without proving cause, and memories of a painful time can shift. The behaviors in the scales came from earlier in-depth interviews with families.
Where it comes from
Caitlin Ryan and colleagues, Family Acceptance Project, San Francisco State University. ‘Family rejection as a predictor of negative health outcomes in white and Latino lesbian, gay, and bisexual young adults’, Pediatrics, 2009. ‘Family acceptance in adolescence and the health of LGBT young adults’, Journal of Child and Adolescent Psychiatric Nursing, 2010
On the family tree: Caitlin Ryan