Communities Moving Past The Daddy Daughter Dance: Adapting Gender-Exclusive Events For The 21st Century, Ezra Temko, Emily Love, Destiny Baxter, Heidi Masching, Adam Loesch

SIUE Faculty Research, Scholarship, and Creative Activity

Executive Summary

Parent-child community events like father-daughter dances are a celebrated tradition in many communities. However, when these events specify the gender of who can participate, they exclude many families. They also tend to reinforce gender stereotypes (e.g., a dance for girls and a sports event for boys), and are legally questionable for public school and associated P.T.A./P.T.O. sponsors that may be violating federal Title IX requirements and for local governments that may be violating the 14^th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution’s Equal Protection Clause.

Contemporary U.S. society is made up of families that come in diverse forms and …