What would you do if your son decides to become your daughter (or if your child is a genius, dwarf or mass murderer?) Amazing stories of six truly inspirational families
Six stories of six very different families who could never be normal
Andrew Solomon's book aims to find out how can we love children so damaged or despised they shock their own parents
Book is a blow against prejudice forcing many children to society's margins
By Andrew Solomon
PUBLISHED: 17:00 EST, 26 January 2013 | UPDATED: 05:23 EST, 27 January 2013
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2268706/What-son-daughter-prodigy-dwarf-mass-murderer--Meet-inspirational-families-average.htmlNow, he has produced another monumental investigation on the question that no one dares to ask: how can we love children so damaged or despised they shock their own parents?
His new book is a blow against the prejudice forcing many children to society's margins. Andrew has a compelling story of his own to tell, but he starts with one of the extraordinary families he met on his long journey of discovery...
KIM'S STORY: The transgender who transformed from a male quarterback into a woman with a long-term girlfriend
When Kim Reed was a boy named Paul, she was the quarterback for her school football team in Montana. She made the transition in her 20s, and became a beautiful woman, who now lives as a lesbian in lower Manhattan with her long-time girlfriend.
'I had a paper round when I was ten,' Kim remembered. 'I used to cross-dress because I didn't think anyone would see me.
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Book review: 'Far From the Tree: Parents, Children, and the Search for Identity' by Andrew Solomon
By Lisa Zeidner,
http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/book-review-far-from-the-tree-parents-children-and-the-search-for-identity-by-andrew-solomon/2012/11/21/099600e6-3024-11e2-9f50-0308e1e75445_story.htmlAt what point should parents allow their male child to wear a dress to school or allow him to take puberty-delaying drugs, so as to make his eventual sex-change surgery easier?
Often Solomon embraces finding a balanced, measured middle ground. Autism, he says, "can be mitigated by some combination of treatment and acceptance, specific to each case. It is important not to get carried away by either the impulse only to treat or the impulse only to accept." About transgender children, he notes, "Parents must determine whether such children are in a transient obsession or expressing a fundamental identity. . . . Parents must take care not to squash their child's identity, nor to build it up so much that they create the truth to which they intend to respond."
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Coming Into Their Own
'Far From the Tree,' by Andrew Solomon
By JULIE MYERSON
Published: November 21, 2012
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/25/books/review/far-from-the-tree-by-andrew-solomon.html?_r=0"Parenting is no sport for perfectionists," Andrew Solomon rather gloriously understates toward the end of "Far From the Tree," a generous, humane and — in complex and unexpected ways — compassionate book about what it means to be a parent. A lecturer in psychiatry at Cornell and the author of "The Noonday Demon," a National Book Award-winning memoir about his journey through depression, Solomon spent 10 years interviewing more than 300 families with "exceptional" children. That is, children with "horizontal identities," a term he uses to encompass all the "recessive genes, random mutations, prenatal influences or values and preferences that a child does not share with his progenitors."
He developed what seem to be genuine relationships (entailing multiple visits, unsparing communication and significant follow-up over a number of years) with families of individuals affected by a spectrum of cognitive, physical or psychological differences: "They are deaf or dwarfs; they have Down syndrome, autism, schizophrenia or multiple severe disabilities; they are prodigies; they are people conceived in rape or who commit crimes; they are transgender." His interviews yielded nearly 40,000 transcript pages and his "anti-Tolstoyan" conclusion that "the unhappy families who reject their variant children have much in common, while the happy ones who strive to accept them are happy in a multitude of ways."
