Gender Identity: Transgender Parenting and Child Development

The parent and child relationship is likely the most powerful relationship each person has ever experienced. From day one, there are challenges, struggles and rewards like in no other relationship. The relationship provides the foundation for one’s ability to communicate - to listen and to be heard. It creates one’s ability to love and be loved and to experience conflict or disagreement but then to heal and reconcile. The parent/child relationship provides life’s sustenance, which results in one’s confidence that their environment will provide for basic needs (food, shelter, creative and intellectual stimulation). Ideally, the relationship develops one’s capacity for confidence in both his or her own identity as well as trust in the stability (the extension of identity - availability, presence, existence) of an available parent. Every parent/child pairing also has its conflicts and challenges. It is the continuity of love and care from parent to child that provides the rich foundational qualities listed above, and this protective and fundamental relationship always needs to be supported. 

There are many things that can put stress on a parent/child relationship, though none quite as unique as when one or the other experiences turmoil with his or her gender identity.