Voice and Mental Health Support for Trans Teens and Their Parents: A Workshop Model.

Abstract

Providing parents and their teenage children with an opportunity to experience voice modification techniques and discussions about mental health issues could alleviate some of their tremendous minority stress. Speech-language pathologists and counselors can use experiential learning and a multidimensional family approach to support parents and their trans teenagers to build connections and learn individual perspectives on their personal phases of transitioning. Participants of the 3-hour webinar included nine dyads of parents and youths across the United States. Topics on voice modification and mental health strategies were presented. Only parents completed the pre- and post-surveys to measure confidence in their knowledge to support their youth's voice and mental health needs. There were 10 Likert scale questions (5 voice, 5 mental health). The Kruskal-Wallis H-test results revealed that the median responses to the pre and post voice survey did not show a statistically significant change (H = 8.0, p = 0.342). Similarly, the mental health surveys did not reach significance (H = 8.0, p = 0.433). However, the growth trend shows strong promise for developing effective future experiential training workshops as a viable service provision for increasing parents' knowledge in supporting their trans child's voice and mental health needs.