Lgbt Co-parenting Part Three of Six

To help address the complexities of co-parenting arrangements in Toronto, the 519 Community Centre and the Sherbourne Health Centre in the gay village run workshops for gay, lesbian and trans-gendered people who intend to start a family.

Two of the most popular groups are Daddies and Papas 2B and Dykes Planning Tykes. Rachel Epstein, one of the group leaders, is herself a co-parent of a 16-year-old daughter. She’s also the editor of Who’s Your Daddy?,, a collection of 40 essays on queer parenting. Epstein counsels 200 people a year on navigating the legal system, finding sperm or egg donors, and negotiating the emotional world of co-parenting.

The pitfalls are legion. Often prospective parents are so eager to find an egg or sperm donor that they ignore the fundamental differences between themselves and their prospective co-parents. “People get into trouble because they want parenthood to happen so badly,” Epstein says. In parenting sessions, she encourages participants to be honest about their expectations for access and finances; she also holds private mediation sessions for co-parents trying to stay out of court.

Mediation doesn’t always work. Many co-parenting battles are triggered when one of the couples splits up. Quality time with the child becomes less frequent; if the two couples were alternating weekends, each half of the fractured duo is reduced to one weekend a month.

Parenting power struggles—disagreements over the child’s diet, clothes, activity schedule and so on—can lead moms to demote “daddy” to “donor.” John Mead, (40), a gay Toronto co-parenting father, has fought a series of legal disputes with a pair of lesbian co-mothers over their six-year-old daughter.

The arrangement started out amicably. Just after their baby was born, the moms and Mead hired a lawyer to draft a donor contract outlining the amount of access each party expected to have: in it, Mead was permitted unsupervised sleepover visits a few times a month. He is listed along with the biological mother on their daughter’s birth certificate, and his surname was chosen to be her middle name.

When the girl was about four years old, the relationship between Mead and the mothers soured, and they went to court to limit his access to supervised visits. They were unsuccessful: the court allowed Mead the same amount of unsupervised time that the three parents had stipulated in their original agreement.

(Author’s Note: Read Part Four and see if this is the fate that will befall Cooper, Roberts, Mathews and Series?)