Piloting Lead with Love: A Film-Based Intervention to Improve Parents’ Responses to Their Lesbian, Gay, and Bisexual Children

Abstract

Lesbian, gay, and bisexual youth are at increased risk for a variety of poor health outcomes, relative to their heterosexual counterparts, and recent research implicates family responses to a child's sexual orientation as an important predictor of these health difficulties. Lead with Love is a 35-min documentary-style preventive intervention created to improve parents' behaviors toward their lesbian, gay, and bisexual (LGB) children, by providing parents with support, information, and concrete behavioral guidance. The film was made available free online, and was promoted widely with a multi-media marketing campaign. In this paper we describe the theoretical and empirical rationale for the intervention, and report findings from pilot data collected in the first year after the film's release. Specifically, we gathered data to examine the feasibility of reaching parents of LGB youth with this intervention, to determine whether it was acceptable, and to provide preliminary indicators of its potential efficacy. In the first 12 months after launch, 10,949 individuals viewed the film online. The film successfully reached parents of LGB youth (n=1,865), including the hardest to reach parents: 21% had only learned about their child's sexual orientation in the past month, 36% reported having an LGB child was "very" or "extremely" hard for them, and 86% had never obtained any other formal support for having an LGB child. Parents who completed a follow-up assessment immediately after the film reported significant pre- to post-film increases in self-efficacy for parenting an LGB child.