Our teenage son came out to us in the summer, about 6 weeks before our annual family reunion.  The prospect of communicating the news to our large family felt really overwhelming, particularly when we were still kind of reeling ourselves.  Writing a letter together turned out to be a great teamwork exercise for us as parents to develop some phrases that we were both comfortable with and that we had “at the ready”.  The next three posts are three different letters that we wrote – one to our siblings, one to the 93 year old patriarch of our family, and one to a niece who asked us for ideas on sharing our news with young children.  We were really grateful for the help and ideas we got from folks at the GO conference and Gender Diversity.  The best advice we got was to simply ask for kindness and respect.  Feel free to use all or part of these letters in any any way that is useful to you. ~ Laura