Want Parenting Advice That Doesn’t Make You Feel Like a Failure?

A self-described life-long “advice column enthusiast,” S. Bear Bergman first dipped his toe into advice-giving in the 2010s with the intention of filling a void.

Advice columns, he told The Tyee, “didn't seem to take into account people's context, their identities, their family style or other reasons that a standard piece of mainstream advice might not work in the same way for everyone.”

“Like encouraging women to be more assertive in negotiating for a higher salary in their job negotiations,” he added. “Without any discussion that sometimes that works for white women, but for women of colour, it is at least as likely to backfire.”

Bergman’s “Ask Bear” advice column was first published on the popular but now-defunct website The Toast, before later migrating to bitch media.

His first graphic novel-style advice book, Special Topics in Being a Human, illustrated by Saul Freedman-Lawson, was published by Arsenal Pulp Press in 2021.

Bergman’s latest, Special Topics in Being a Parent, out now — also illustrated by Freedman-Lawson and published by Arsenal Pulp Press — offers parenting advice from his perspective as a trans and queer Jewish man married with children.

The book covers a variety of parenting themes and situations, including how to introduce new foods to your kids; how to know if you want kids; how to get everyone out the door on time without crying; and how to acknowledge parenting mistakes, forgive yourself and move on.

The advice in Special Topics in Being a Parent challenges social norms, broadening ideas and approaches for raising children in ways that better reflect parents’ own values.

“As a queer and trans person, I have learned very immediately and directly how much of mainstream advice or cultural imperatives that seem absolute aren't really absolutes,” Bergman said.

For example, adults often assume children are and will grow up to be straight and cisgender.

“I want that to be available to more people, that moment of being able to say, ‘OK, I hear that that's what's supposed to happen. I see that that's what everyone else is doing. Cool. Am I sure that's the best idea for me or for us?’” Bergman said.

“Sometimes the answer is definitely ‘no.’”

The Tyee spoke to Bergman about their new book, the importance of writing from his perspective as a queer and trans parent and who gets planted in our family gardens. The following is a condensed version of our conversation, edited for clarity and length.

The Tyee: Why did you decide to write this book now?

S. Bear Bergman: Parenting advice often comes with a side order of judgment. I don't think that parents need a lot of judgment. Parenting is very complicated for a lot of important reasons. Rather than being encouraging or forgiving, it felt like there was a lot of scolding.

I didn't love how gendered a lot of parenting advice was. A lot of the dad books read like they had been written by committee in a sports bar, not giving dads credit for wanting to be engaged, present parents. It was very like, ‘Hey, you should do some dishes once in a while. Little lady's gonna love that!’ Which, yes, do some dishes. But maybe we could remember that it's 2024 and there are a lot of dads who want to be parenting. Where are the books for them?

And a lot of us, especially progressive parents, maybe don't have the best modelling for how to put our values into action as parents, if our parenting values are very different from our parents’.

My youngest, of three children, is now nine. My oldest is 29. I've been through a lot of the parenting stages already. So I started to feel like, I have, through trial and a lot of error, figured out some things that could be useful.

Did you have an imagined audience of progressive parents or parents who didn't see themselves in other advice columns in mind? Or is it broader than that for you?

My imagined audience is everyone who is trying to put their values into practise as a parent. I would describe my parent values as progressive. But I don't think that that is everyone who could find Special Topics in Being a Parent useful.

Overall, for people whose parenting values are more 2024 than 1974, this is a book that they may be able to find useful things in.

We are experiencing a backlash against trans and queer people, especially if they have children, are children or are ever around children. Why is it important to have a parent advice book from a queer and trans parent perspective right now?

The context of this moment in the culture about queer and trans people and the whole ridiculous, exhausting, incorrect groomer narrative, people definitely suggested to me that maybe this wasn't the perfect time for me, as a queer and trans dad, to be writing a parenting book. I chose to ignore that advice, which is my lifetime MO.

I came out when I was 15 in 1990. Not a lot of teenagers were out, not like now; God bless all the out teenagers, preteens and elementary students. I am deeply grateful that it's much more common now for teenagers to feel empowered to come out.

I was one of the founders of the first ever Gay Straight Alliance. In 1991, the Massachusetts governor created the first Commission for Lesbian and Gay Student Safety. I was on that commission, and I spoke in favour of it very publicly in the newspaper, at the State House, blah, blah, blah. People were mad about queer kids when I was a queer kid.

I never lost my sense of refusing to care about any of that noise, and saying what I knew to be true. Which was that queer and trans young people are great, perfect and delightful as they are. And they deserve to be able to not just survive school, but thrive at school, at home and everywhere else they may happen to be.

I have been incredibly heartened by some of the pushback against the anti-trans, anti-queer narrative. But I set phasers on “ignore” for that whole false narrative of queer and trans adults being a danger to children sometime in the early ’90s. That switch has remained firmly on “ignore” for the subsequent 35 years.

The only way it has impacted my work is I have become very attentive to the questions of celebration, joy and welcome for 2SLGBTQ+ people. I know those people who are full of lies, hatred and antagonism are constantly yelling about how we're terrible. And my choice is to address that by talking about trans and queer joy, happiness, love, peacefulness and accomplishment.

How much of the advice and parenting skills you talk about is a reaction to or reflection on how you were parented? The reason I ask — I decided not to have kids, but before that I kept thinking about what I would do differently as a parent. Not because my parents were awful; every parent makes mistakes. Just like, ‘When I have kids, I'm going to do this thing a different way.’

Ah yes. My parenting choices have evolved in my time, and I think that my parents parenting choices evolved in their time. I think that we all — me, my folks, everybody's parents — try to do their best. And I'll find out from my children what I messed up in another 10 to 15 years.

As your book says, parents never stop parenting. But did you have a particular age group of children in mind for your parenting advice?

We really are talking about, mostly, the parenting we do when our children are at home. But it's really for all of the ages when your children are home. There are some parts that are reflective of the experience of having smaller children, of having teens and older.

And some parts are reflective of the experience of thinking about having children, in the way that you were talking about, like, ‘if I have kids,’ or ‘do I want to have kids?’ or ‘I am at the beginning of a journey that I hope will result in children.’

But I would say once they're adults, it's a very different series of parenting conversations. I'm no longer responsible for making sure my 29-year-old has put on socks and shoes in the morning. She's on her own ticket in that regard, and seems, I would like to say for the record, to be doing a great job. No notes.

When they're little and in the house, it's a different story. There's a lot of values transmission and coping with the million tasks of parenting in the up close, hands-on way.

When The Toast co-founder Daniel Lavery wrote the Dear Prudence advice column, I noticed — and this relates to his personal experience, but I've also heard this from other white queer and trans people — often his advice was to cut off contact with problematic family members.

I was reflecting on this when reading Special Topics in Being a Parent’s suggestion to envision family ‘gardens’ with kids, rather than family trees — offering flexibility when envisioning relationships and lots of different metaphors to think through them. You talk about how everyone’s family garden might look a bit different, and how some family members might need to be potted, or be placed in their own greenhouse, meaning the relationship there needs a more intentional approach, with perhaps some boundaries and limitations. Does that differ from the idea of cutting off family members?

That piece of advice, like a lot of the pieces of advice in this book, is not intended to be prescriptive. It's intended to be descriptive. People have to make those decisions based on a complicated group of factors, including to what degree they may want more separation from certain family members, but not always be able to have it.

Or they still want to be in contact, but they need that contact to be limited. I am not the one to say you should cut your family off, or you should try and keep working on it with them no matter what.

What I am saying is that your truth can be your truth, and you can represent it in your family garden. And also that your family garden and the family gardens of other family members don't have to look the same.

My father's mother, my grandma, I was very close with. She was an amazing grandmother, and I always felt loved and supported and encouraged by her. And according to the reports of everybody who knew her as a parent, she was a very difficult mother. So my representation of my grandmother in my family garden potentially could look very different from my dad's or my uncle's representation of the same person in their family gardens.

It's really about honouring a kid's truth and their perceptions. I don't think it's good for children to pretend that family relationships aren't difficult or strained if they are. It's more honest and gives a child more agency to acknowledge, ‘Yeah, that's a hard relationship for me. But it doesn't have to be a hard relationship for you. If it is, that's legit. If it's not, that is also legit.’

I don't think that anyone should feel forced or even encouraged to stay engaged in a relationship of any kind that feels harmful to them. And sometimes that means that you just can't talk to that person anymore. But sometimes it means other things, and those are also valid ways of addressing people who may be difficult, harmful or toxic.

What's next for you?

I have a new show, a theatrical performance called “The First Jew in Canada: A Trans Tale.” It's a historical storytelling show that overlaps my story as a trans Jewish immigrant to Canada with the story of Jacques LaFargue, the first Jewish person in the colonial record to arrive [in] what we now call Canada. And he, as far as I can tell, was a trans man, although that has not historically been how his story has been told.