Developing and evaluating trauma-informed workshops for parents and caregivers of 2SLGBTQI youth


Andrea Sterling, Egale Canada

Parents and caregivers are instrumental in fostering positive experiences for 2SLGBTQI children. However, knowledge that promotes the wellbeing of 2SLGBTQI youth within the family is often obscured by misinformation, and it can be difficult for caregivers to navigate their child’s coming out with false information on hand. Furthermore, an increase in political attempts to undermine the human rights of queer, trans and nonbinary people via the introduction of transphobic or homophobic bills (e.g., Policy 713 in New Brunswick, pronoun policy in Saskatchewan), as well as the rise in hateful discourse in right-wing media (Corrêa et al., 2023), are major hinderances to accessing safe and appropriate information for caregivers and 2SLGBTQI youth. Furthermore, there is a general lack of access to reliable, centralized information for caregivers to access about 2SLGBTQI identities. Providing these resources will help to alleviate parental anxiety, which is a major obstacle for support. Community building and experience sharing are also crucial to decreasing anxiety levels in caregivers (Matsuno and Israel, 2021), which in turn has a positive effect on 2SLGBTQI youth’s experiences and their interactions. To contribute to improving 2SLGBTQI youth’s—as well as their caregivers’—experiences while navigating the world with marginalized identities, we undertook a project combining workshops for caregivers and intervention research with the idea of (1) providing truthful information about 2SLGBTQI identities to parents and caregivers of 2SLGBTQI youth, (2) building a network of parents and caregivers based on their common experiences of raising 2SLGBTQI children, and (3) assessing the impact of the provided workshops. The current presentation will focus on the latter, emphasizing the trauma-informed content of the workshops and the research tools for evaluating our anti-oppressive workshops. Our current project includes two main research activities: focus groups that will document experiences of caregiving for 2SLGBTQI youth, needs for support, and three surveys evaluating the acceptability, feasibility, appropriateness, and overall efficacy of the provided workshops. The surveys will be administered prior to the workshops, immediately after, and three months post-workshop, to assess the short and long-terms outcomes of the intervention. Documenting these experiences is crucial to knowing what information is needed by caregivers of 2SLGBTQI youth, keeping in mind the tenets of community-based research, and to determining what should be conveyed in future interventions. Furthermore, the research framework we are implementing via surveys will enable us to improve content and delivery in the future. Data collection will begin in the winter of 2024, and we anticipate that some challenges that caregivers will raise during our course and subsequent focus groups will include an inability to find trustworthy resources and filter through misinformation. We also expect relatively high levels of anxiety for their child’s safety and wellbeing in a homophobic/transphobic society, and concerns about disclosure in school or extended family settings. Furthermore, we are hypothesizing that our study groups will likely demonstrate relatively high acceptability ratings of the workshops, since the course we are offering will be advertised as supportive of 2SLGBTQI youth. Future iterations of the intervention will consider the appropriateness and efficacy ratings of the workshops, but formal predictions are difficult to formulate since our curriculum is being developed for the first time. By providing informational workshops based on community needs, we are challenging hateful discourse and aiming to sustain healthy family relationships between 2SLGBTQI youth and their caregivers. Ultimately, we aim to improve family relationships as it relates to acceptance of 2SLGBTQI children, decrease gender-based violence and rejection, and improve social supports for 2SLGBTQI youth and their caregivers. The evaluation of our intervention is intrinsically community-based, focusing on the needs and challenges of parents, furthering trauma-informed approaches to research and program development.

Non-presenting authors: Noah Rodomar, Egale Canada; Félix Desmeules-Trudel, Egale Canada

This paper will be presented at the following session: