G&STC’s Director Jesse Kahn talks with Gabrielle Kassel at Folx Health about Queer Family Building and the Option of Co-Parenting
Check out G&STC’s Director Jesse Kahn talking with Gabrielle Kassel at Folx Health about queer family building and the option of co-parenting.
Ask a traditional dictionary what ‘parent’ means and you’ll get served a half-baked definition of someone who identifies as a mother or father. But these definitions don't do justice to either the breadth of genders who can be parents or the depth of care required to parent well. A better, more expansive definition comes Jesse Kahn, L.C.S.W., C.S.T., director and sex therapist at The Gender & Sexuality Therapy Center in NYC. “A parent is anyone who is involved in raising and caring for a child.”
What Is Co-Parenting, Exactly?
“Co-parenting refers to the phenomenon of two (or more) people sharing the responsibilities of raising and caring for a child,” explains Kahn. While the people who co-parent together could be romantically and/or sexually involved— or could have been at one point—but the key is that romantic and/or sexual entanglement is not implied in the definition.