How to be an ally to LGBTQ+ families

ACROSS THE COUNTRY and around the world, LGBTQ+ people are under attack. Hundreds of hate-fueled laws are proposed each year. Now is the time to demonstrate your support and allyship at every level. Here’s how:

Take Personal Action

• Take time to get to know the families you serve.
• Learn about and implement these anti-bias education principles and practices.
• Commit to learning about and implementing these anti-bias education goals and practices.
• Continue building your knowledge about family diversity.
• Personal action can have a ripple effect. So spread the word! By speaking up, you’ll lighten the burden on LGBTQ+ families to educate others—and encourage the children and adults in your early childhood community to be better LGBTQ+ family allies.
  • Share what you learn with colleagues.
  • Challenge the preconceptions and biases of others.
  • Encourage children to engage in gender-expansive play.
  • Address the concerns of Rainbow families (e.g., they may worry that their children will be targeted in some way)
  • Prepare all young children to accept, support and defend their classmates, regardless of their identities, as they move into K-12 settings.
• Stay informed about local and national laws and policies that support or restrict LGBTQ+ rights and consider how this legislation affects the Rainbow families in your community.

Take Local Action

• When you plan events for families, plan them with LGBTQ+ families in mind.
• Request LGBTQ+ inclusive books from your local library. You’ll save money and raise awareness of the need for these books in your community.
• Plan informal community-building activities such as family nights, picnics or field trips. These activities will give families an opportunity to get to know one another in a relaxed and supportive setting before assumptions about their diverse parenting journeys take root.
• Participate in community-building activities that bring diverse voices together to address local issues that affect everyone, such as safety, bullying, etc.
• Show your support for Rainbow families at school and community meetings.
• Attend and lend your voice and support to local LGBTQ+ rallies.
• Challenge local officials to better support LGBTQ+ people.
• Remember that every voice counts! Use your voice and vote to stand with LGBTQ+ people in local, state and national elections. Contact your representatives to support legislation that protects LGBTQ+ families and challenge legislation that harms them.

Take National Action

• What happens on the national stage directly affects the LGBTQ+ families in your community. Stay informed about national efforts to support or undermine LGBTQ+ rights. The UCLA School of Law Williams Institute and the Movement Advancement Project, as well as our RESOURCES section, are good places to start.
• Join or follow organizations and social media accounts that support the LGBTQ+ community. Visit our Resources section for examples.
• Request that your professional organizations—such as the Division for Early Childhood (DEC) and the National Association for the Education of Young Children (NAEYC)—expand their resources and supports for Rainbow families.

Anti-bias education:
What's it all about?

ACCORDING TO Louise Derman-Sparks and Julie Olsen Edwards, the authors of Anti-Bias Education for Young Children and Ourselves, “Anti-bias education is an optimistic commitment to supporting children who live in a highly diverse and yet still inequitable world. Rather than a formula for a particular curriculum, it is an underpinning perspective and framework that permeates everything in early childhood education—including your interactions with children, families and colleagues.”

What are the four core goals of anti-bias education, and how do they apply to LGBTQ+ social justice?

Goal 1: IDENTITY

Teachers will nurture each child’s construction of knowledgeable and confident personal and social identities so that children will demonstrate self-awareness, confidence, family pride, and positive social identities.

Early childhood educators can work toward this goal by:

• Encouraging children to express positive feelings about their gender identity and become comfortable with their own way of expressing gender
• Creating opportunities for children of any gender to explore a wide range of opportunities, interests and activities
• Encouraging children to share openly about their families

Goal 2: DIVERSITY

Teachers will promote each child’s comfortable, empathetic interaction with people from diverse backgrounds so that children will express comfort and joy with human diversity, use accurate language for human differences, and form deep, caring connections across all dimensions of human diversity.

Early childhood educators can work toward this goal by:

• Teaching children about the diversity of people both within and across genders
• Celebrating the uniqueness and assets of diverse families

Goal 3: JUSTICE

Teachers will foster each child’s capacity to critically identify bias and nurture each child’s empathy for the hurt that bias causes so that children will increasingly recognize unfairness (injustice), have the vocabulary they need to describe unfairness, and understand that unfairness hurts.

Early childhood educators can work toward this goal by:

• Engaging in activities that help children recognize and challenge stereotypes
• Helping children understand the unfairness of identity-focused harm
• Questioning unfair depictions or erasure of LGBTQ+ families

Goal 4: ACTIVISM

Teachers will cultivate each child’s ability and confidence to stand up for oneself and for others in the face of bias so that children will demonstrate a sense of empowerment and the skills to act, with others or alone, against prejudice and/or discriminatory actions.

Early childhood educators can work toward this goal by:

• Empowering children to claim their identity and gender
• Modeling how to support others, regardless of their identities
• Teaching children how to resist rejection, teasing or bullying

Interested in learning more about anti-bias education? Check out the book, Anti-Bias Education for Young Children and Ourselves, by Louise Derman-Sparks and Julie Olsen Edwards (Second edition, 2020)