About this item
Unconditional: A Guide to Loving and Supporting Your LGBTQ Child will provide parents with a framework for helping their lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender or questioning child navigate through a world that isn't always welcoming. Author Telaina Eriksen, a professor at Michigan State University and the mother of a gay daughter, explains what she and her husband have learned through experience and what the experts say about how to deal with things like your child coming out to you, bullying, becoming an advocate for your kid and building a support system. She also covers the science on gender and sexuality and how to help a transgender child through the various stages of development. Throughout the book parents and kids who have been there share their stories.
About the Author
Telaina Morse Eriksen was born and raised in rural Michigan, the youngest of seven children and the daughter of a factory worker. Their house (formerly a one-room schoolhouse) was surrounded by corn or soybeans, depending on the year. She is pretty certain she learned more from reading and being in 4-H than she learned in the first 13 years of her formal schooling. She graduated from Michigan State University in 1990 with a degree in journalism and has worked as a waitress, a library assistant, a journalist, doing marketing and public relations for educational software companies, a freelance writer, and as a full-time mom. In 2009, she graduated from Antioch University Los Angeles with her MFA in creative writing and has worked as a fixed-term assistant professor in the Department of English at Michigan State University since 2011. Her poems and essays have appeared in Under the Sun, Compose Journal, ARS Medica, The Manifest-Station, poemmemoirstory, The Truth About the Fact, The Fem, Role Reboot, The Good Men Project and many others. In addition to Unconditional: A Guide to Loving and Supporting Your LGBTQ Child, Telaina is also working on a novel, The Technology of a Broken Heart, and a collection of poems, Knocking on the Roman Walls Around the Ruins of My Heart. She has been married to her college sweetheart for almost 25 years, and they have two children, Casandra, 21, who attends Western Michigan University, and Matthew, 17, a high school junior. The Eriksens have two dogs, Sprite, a 13-year-old Shetland Sheep Dog and Clement, a 10-year-old rescued American pit bull terrier. When not teaching, writing, cooking, cleaning, or arranging some sort of carpool for her teen, Telaina enjoys reading, watching movies, cheering on her son's water polo team, and spending time at Lake Michigan, hiking and swimming.
