TD Bank Responds About New Survey on Parents and Financial Literacy

If there’s one thing I like as a consumer and erstwhile marketing professional, it’s a responsive company. I posted yesterday about a survey sponsored by TD Bank that explored how parents teach their kids financial literacy, but clearly focused only on opposite-sex parents. This morning, I received the following e-mail from Jimmy Hernandez, a media relations officer at TD Bank. I repost it here with his permission: Read the rest of this post »

LGBT-Friendly Grants to Help with Adoption Expenses: Deadline Approaching

Need help with adoption expenses? An LGBT-inclusive nonprofit, Helpusadopt.org, is offering grants between $500 and $15,000 for just that purpose. The spring deadline for their semi-annual grants is April 15, so you’ll have to get moving if you want to apply. I have no affiliation or experience with the organization, so you’re on your own from here. I’ll simply pass along their press release in its entirety. (It’s from December, but just came to my attention. Thanks, Bernie!)

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
CONTACT: Becky Fawcett
becky.fawcett@helpusadopt.org
917.684.5484
Groundbreaking Nonprofit Organization Helps 8 Children Find Their Forever Families

Helpusadopt.org supports couples/individuals regardless of race, religion, ethnicity, gender, marital status and sexual orientation

NEW YORK, NY December 6, 2010 — On December 1, 2010, Helpusadopt.org, a national 501c3 organization that awards grants to those pursuing adoption, helped eight new grant recipients with the costs of their adoptions. Helpusadopt.org builds families, one adoption at a time. Twice annually (June and December) the organization distributes grants in amounts up to $15,000 to help with the costs of adoption. Since its inception in 2007, Helpusadopt.org has awarded 43 grants totaling $300,000 to recipients across the country.

The December 2010 grant recipients include: A West Virginia couple infertile due to cancer, a same sex Nevada couple, a Pennsylvania couple who recently dealt with infertility and five miscarriages, a single woman in Oregon, a same sex California couple, a same sex Tennessee couple, a single woman from Minnesota who is adopting a 4 year old, HIV positive child from Uganda and a Illinois couple who have endured six miscarriages and a failed adoption.

Funded solely by donations, the organization seeks to make the dream of parenthood possible for those who may have exhausted other financial resources in their quest to build their family. Adoption is expensive: the average adoption costs $30,000 and it doesn’t matter who you are or where you live. The high cost of adoption frequently presents a financial obstacle for families wishing to build their families through adoption. Read the rest of this post »

New Survey on Parents and Financial Literacy: Where Are the Same-Sex Parents?

April is Financial Literacy Month, and I’ve been receiving a number of related press releases, some silly and some less so. While I didn’t think many of you would really be interested in a talking piggy bank, I did think you might have some thoughts on a new survey from TD Bank. It’s titled, “Mom versus Dad: TD Bank Financial Literacy Poll Reveals the Role of Parents in a Fiscally Fit Family”—although it really should be titled, “Mom versus Dad: TD Bank Financial Literacy Poll Reveals the Role of Parents in a Fiscally Fit Heterosexual Family.”

Here are the key findings:

Dads are found to be nearly 10% more financially confident than moms. Despite these findings, 66% of dads also report they wish they had more conversations with their children about money.

Moreover, while moms perceive themselves to be less financially confident, 52% report feeling they take all or most of the responsibility when teaching their children about financial matters….

Moms are more likely to engage in everyday financial conversations:

• Teaching children how to count money (81%)
• Teaching money matters while shopping (70%)
• Saving money in a piggy bank (70%)

Dads, on the other hand, are more likely to focus on the tangible aspects of money:

• Providing an allowance (52%)
• Setting a savings goal (32%)

You’re probably way ahead of me already: What about same-sex parents?  Do the roles of parents with regard to teaching their children financial literacy vary in same-sex couples, too? Does one parent—say, the primary caregiver—tend to take a larger role than the other? And do the financial confidence and aptitudes of LGBT people vary by gender in the same way they do for non-LGBT people? I would have thought that TD Bank, with a perfect 100 on the HRC Corporate Equality Index, might have looked at this, but alas, no.

One might conclude from the study that children of lesbians moms get a different financial education than children of gay dads, and that both get a less balanced financial education than children of opposite-sex parents—but I can’t quite bring myself to believe that’s true. LGBT people tend to break gender stereotypes, and I’m not sure we can expect findings about gender roles among non-LGBT people to apply in exactly the same way.

What are your thoughts about gender and financial literacy? How do you (and your co-parent, if you have one) teach your kids about finance?

Full press release after the jump:

Read the rest of this post »

LGBT Parenting Roundup

Personal Profiles

• South Coast Today (Massachusetts) profiles several gay dads and their struggle for acceptance.
• Pediatrician Maja Castillo writes for Gay City News about what happens when a child prefers one parent over the other, especially in cases of a biological and non-biological mother.
• Two lesbian moms in Birmingham, England have launched the U.K.’s first gay-only fertility clinic. Irish lesbian blog Gaelick has an interview with them.

Sports and Entertainment

• Ellen DeGeneres will be producing the big-screen version of Jodi Picoult’s new novel about lesbian moms, Sing You Home. Read the rest of this post »

Nurse Jackie: The Return of the Lesbian Moms

So who else is watching the season premiere of Nurse Jackie on Showtime tonight? As fans of the show will know, it’s full of all kinds of The Gay—plus Edie Falco, whose character Jackie isn’t gay, though her hair is. Personally, I’m most excited about the fact that Dr. Coop’s (Peter Facinelli’s) lesbian moms will be making a reappearance (thanks, After Ellen!)—with Swoosie Kurtz as Leslie and Judith Light as Maureen (replacing Blythe Danner, who had “scheduling conflicts”).

Here’s my take on the moms’ appearance in Season One. There’s a clip of them after the jump.

(Also, if you’re a new subscriber to Showtime, make sure to download the $25 rebate form from the Showtime Web site. No, they’re not paying me to say that. Just trying to save you some pennies here.) Read the rest of this post »

Should Preschools Direct Children’s Learning?

I’m hard pressed to find a preschool these days that doesn’t call itself a “childhood learning center” or the like. But in a recent article in Slate, “Why Preschool Shouldn’t Be Like School,” Alison Gopnik discusses two studies that have found “While learning from a teacher may help children get to a specific answer more quickly, it also makes them less likely to discover new information about a problem and to create a new and unexpected solution.”

In other words, less “instruction” in the early years is better for developing creativity and problem solving. According to Gopnik, though, President Bush’s No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) “explicitly urged more direct instruction in federally funded preschools.” While I leave it as a rhetorical question as to what type of early education George W. may have had, I think it’s going to be very interesting to watch this year’s attempt to revise the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) this year. We’ll get to see, I think, just how well President Obama and Congress have developed their problem-solving skills.

Weekly Political Roundup

• The U.S. and 85 other countries backed a United Nations declaration calling for an end to violence and human rights abuses on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton also issued a statement in support of ending such persecution and discrimination.
• The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit denied a request from plaintiffs in California’s Proposition 8 case to lift a stay on a lower court ruling and allow same-sex couples to marry while the case is being heard.
• The Colorado Senate passed a civil union bill, which now goes to the House.
• A civil union bill was introduced in the Delaware legislature. Read the rest of this post »

Legal and Financial Hurdles for Same-Sex Parents

The New York Times has an article today on “The Extra Hoops Gay Parents Must Jump Through” to gain legal and financial protections. Three experts—a lawyer, a financial planner and an accountant (which sounds like the start of a joke, but it’s not)—offer their advice to lesbian couple in Michigan with two children.

It’s worth a read—and if you’re like me, your blood boils regularly this time of year as you fill out your tax forms and think about the financial inequities we face. I’ll note, though, that unlike the couple in the example, some couples (Helen and me, in fact) would actually pay more in taxes if the federal government recognized our marriage. That doesn’t mean we’re against marriage equality, of course. With rights come responsibility, and we’d be more than willing to pay up if we also gained access to all of the other benefits (financial and otherwise) of legal recognition.

It’s great that the NYT is covering the topic—but I feel obliged to point out that the couple in Michigan is white, and one mom is a commercial litigator. Even though the other mom is staying home with the kids, I’m guessing they’re doing all right financially. With recent data showing same-sex parents are more common in the South than elsewhere, and Black or Latino same-sex couples are twice as likely as white ones to be raising children, I’d love to see more coverage of the legal and financial hurdles for same-sex couples of color in southern states—couples who, statistically speaking, are also more likely to be struggling financially. The NYT touched on these topics in a piece they did back in January that helped bring the demographics to light. I hope they dig further into the subject.

(Thanks to RealLifeUnplugd, whose tweet alerted me to the article.)