4th EFTA conversation with Federico Ferrari

LGBTQ+ parent families: specific clinical problems for families like any other.

Families with LGBTQ+ parents are perfectly capable of responding to the developmental needs of their children, but in doing so they face a specific challenge: the heteronormative social premise. The response to the specific needs of each age must therefore be combined with the task of supporting the construction of the children’s identity in the constant confrontation between family semantics (inclusive) and social semantics (heteronormative): this is both in the family dialogue, in the confrontation with school and socialisation agencies, and in the connection with other LGBTQ+ families.

Federico Ferrari, clinical psychologist and systemic dialogic therapist, PhD in social psychology, Milan Approach and Open DIalogue trainer, EFTA CIM board member, who has been working with these families for 18 years, talks about this with Slavica Gajdadzis-Knezhevikj, psychiatrist, psychotherapist and systemic supervisor, EFTA TIC executive member.