Cognitive-affective and religious values associated with parental acceptance of an LGBT child

Parental reactions to a child's lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender (LGBT) identity are impacted by a process of cognitive-affective experiences and behavioral responses that are influenced by contextual factors that may include parents' religious value system. The purpose of this study was to test a theoretically based model of parental acceptance that included cognitive-affective factors (cognitive flexibility, emotional regulation), religious-value based factors (religious fundamentalism, parental sanctification), and demographic characteristics (parent gender, parent sexual identity, child gender, and years out). Participants were 663 parents of LGBT children who submitted responses to an online survey. A Tobit regression analysis with a singleindicator latent variable approach revealed that higher levels of the control component of cognitive flexibility, lower religious fundamentalism, higher parental sanctification, parent gender (female), and parent sexual identity (nonheterosexual) were significantly associated with higher levels of parental acceptance. Findings suggest that attending to these factors in future research and clinical practice may be important to the health and well-being of families that include LGBT children.