There is nothing you could have done to change that. Maybe they are left-handed, or maybe they are terrible at math and great at sports. Boys don’t become gay because they were too sheltered by their mothers, and girls don’t become lesbians because they had negative relationships with men. Old Freudian theories that children become gay because of poor relationships with their fathers, or over-involved relationships with their mothers, have been completely debunked. Most gay children come from homes with straight parents and many positive straight role models. Nothing that a parent can do makes a child gay or straight. But the percentage of gay individuals has been pretty steady (they just used to live in hiding). This sometimes gives the impression that everybody is gay nowadays. Of course, a more accepting society allows gay individuals to come out earlier in life. Sexual orientation is inborn and mostly unaffected by culture. Here are some answers I give parents when they tell me that their child is gay. This is not to say that this picture becomes better or worse – it just changes. When your child comes out as gay, they are giving you new information about their identity that adjusts how you see them. Being LGBT can bring some extra complications into the mix, and it’s only natural for you to want to protect your child from hardship. As a parent, you want the best for your child. If you consider yourself an accepting person, who supports LGBT people around you, but you also struggle with the idea that your child is officially coming out, please don’t beat yourself up. I consistently notice that even the most accepting parent asks some of the questions that I will answer here.
Other times, parents need to process their own thoughts and feelings right after their child comes out as gay. They come to me because they want to prepare for the moment when their child opens up to them. I speak to many parents who suspect that their child is gay but hasn’t come out to them yet. To simplify, I am using the word gay to mean “gay or lesbian”.)
Most of it applies to kids who come out as bi or trans, but I hope to write a different post to address trans kids more specifically, since other social and cultural aspects come into play. (For the purpose of this post, I address parents whose children came out as gay or lesbian. Today, I have the same message for you – if your child just came out as LGBT. Thousands of LGBT people and allies created Youtube videos with encouraging messages that said just that, “ hold on, don’t give up – life will get better.” Maybe you remember Dan Savage’s wide-reaching anti-suicide campaign, It Gets Better. Times have a-changed! And although it sometimes looks like the world is getting worse, some things are definitely getting better.