“Oh, you’re Mia,” the camper from the other bunk said. “You’re the one who’s adopted and has two moms.”
The comment wasn’t intended to be mean — at least Mia didn’t think it was — but it bothered the 11-year-old enough that she mentioned it to her mothers when she came home from camp.
“She just said it was really weird that they said that, that that’s what they remembered about her,” said Mia’s mother, Gerri DiBenedetto, who is now thinking about how her daughter will fare at her new Manhattan middle school. “I think she’s going to have a whole new world of ‘coming out,’” Ms. DiBenedetto said.
Although decades of research have found that children of gay and lesbian parents aren’t different from children of heterosexual parents in terms of developmental, social and academic milestones or sexual orientation, studies also show that most children of gay parents still endure remarks like the one aimed at Mia. It’s a type of slight that researchers call a “microaggression.” These comments may not be malicious or constitute overt bullying or harassment, but they still single out children and make them feel different.
In a new study, researchers found that by the time children of lesbian and gay parents were 11 years old, 58 percent of them had experienced slights or microaggressions focused on their families. The findings were presented in early August at the annual meeting of the American Psychological Association in Toronto.
[For more of this story, written by Roni Caryn Rabin, go to http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/...?ref=health&_r=1]
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