Tips For Discussing Homosexuality With Children

A few decades ago, homosexuality has been reduced to a taboo – shunned by most people and deemed unacceptable by a lot of societies. Nowadays, it is a completely different case. More and more homosexuals are coming out from the works and are slowly (but surely) making their voices heard. In fact, in some states, homosexual is already recognized as a separate gender and marriages between homosexuals are now considered legal. Although the role of genes, human pheromones, and other factors has not been proven, homosexuality has slowly been mostly accepted by a lot of people. However, because of the sensitive nature of this particular topic, parents cannot help but find it very awkward to discuss with children.

Here are some tips you might want to consider for discussing homosexuality with your children.

• Treat the matter objectively. The easiest way to discuss any topic is to approach it objectively. Just like when you are explaining the subject of reproduction (which is also quite a sensitive topic in itself) to kids, you treat it without any malice or with as less subjectivity as possible. It only gets awkward if you are expecting to integrate values or principles with it or when you expect the listener to share the same values or opinions you have on the matter. Remember, these are children. Treat them as blank slates – clean, pure, but unfortunately easily swayed. You will make it easier for you and them to stick to simple definitions absent opinion and social values. Most of all, do not get into the side of attraction between the same gender or if there is any pheromone advantage between homosexuals.
• Be open-minded. It is usually difficult to talk objectively about a topic when you have a strong bias for or against it. This is one problem that parents often have. Since they have their own opinions on homosexuality, they cannot help but discuss it with their children subjectively. This results in more difficult questions. Why is it bad to be gay? Why do you not want us to be gay? And so on and so forth. Save yourself the trouble of answering these questions by being open minded about homosexuality. This will make the discussion easier and more free-flowing because you can look at it from more than just one angle.
• Research on the matter beforehand. Arm yourself with as much technical information about homosexuality as possible. This will make answering questions easy. There are tons of information on the matter available online. You can even site them as references should your kids question your credibility because they usually do. You do not have to interview a homosexual if you do not want to but it would still be of great help if you get some firsthand information.