Tom Daley feels "extra pressure" as a parent because he's gay.
Tom Daley feels extra pressure as a gay dad
The 27-year-old diver thinks he and husband Dustin Lance Black come under more scrutiny for how they care for their three-year-old son Robbie and the pair always feel they have to "prove" themselves because the little boy has two dads instead of a more traditional home set-up.
He said: "“Being same sex dads, I felt that a lot of feeling extra pressure to be good parents and to be doing the right thing and you do always feel a bit judged when you’re out in public because you want to be showing that you’re doing the best you possibly can and I think it can be weird sometimes for people to see two dads and a baby and so we always felt like we had to be the best parents that we could ever be and do all of the right things.
"We were desperate to be parents just like everybody else. […] It was that constant feeling of having to prove ourselves above and beyond.”
Tom admitted he always wanted to be a parent and hopes he and Robbie can share the same bond he had with his own dad Robert, who died in 2011.
Speaking to Giovanna Fletcher on her 'Happy Mum, Happy Baby' podcast, he said: "“For as long as I could remember, I have wanted to be a parent.
"I think because of the relationship with my mum and dad, we were so close and then, when I lost my dad, it was like, I want to be everything that he was to me to someone else because every child deserves to have what I had with my dad because it was such a special relationship, we were so close.”
But the Olympian admitted becoming a parent when in a same-sex relationship is an "extremely complex" process.
He said: "Once I started to realise that I was gay, it was like, how am I going to have children in the future? What does this look like for me? What are the options? And having to figure out exactly how that was going to work, looking down the routes of adoption, surrogacy and all of those different things.
"It is a lot more complicated for same sex parents to have children and you have to really think about it and like really, really want to have kids in order to be able to make it work and it’s extremely complex for same sex couples in a number of different ways.
"Lance and I had lost so many people in our families and there was something about surrogacy that we were drawn to that just meant that we could pass on the people that we’d lost, their genes and their thoughts, their feelings, their personalities and being able to bring someone into the world, that felt so extremely special.”
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