Thinking Out Loud with Alan Shlemon - Determining the Time to Tell Your Kids about LGBT Ideology

Episode Date: September 18, 2025

Alan provides five principles to help you, as a parent, determine the right age to begin telling your kids about homosexuality and transgender ideology.

When should parents start teaching their children about homosexuality and transgenderism? Well, in this episode of my podcast, I want to offer some principles that will help you to answer that question. Our world is obsessed with sexuality. Right. I mean, there's very few segments of our society that are not saturated with images and, of course, even messaging, talking about and even promoting LGBT ideology. In fact, almost everyone listening to this episode probably has friends or family who identify as gay, lesbian, transgender, non-binary, or bisexual, right? And so, of course, this prompts a lot of parents to ask me. They'll say, hey, Alan, look, we want to prepare our kids to navigate the world with wisdom, right? But what age should I start teaching my children about topics like homosexuality and transgenderism? Now, I'm completely sympathetic to this question and to their concern, right? I think it is absolutely wise to inoculate your children against false ideas before they're exposed to them and before they're exposed to more insidious forms of them. And

I've talked elsewhere about inoculation and the concept of inoculation, but this is simply the idea that we need to teach our children, teach young believers, false ideas, define them, explain why people believe these false ideas, but then also explain what's wrong with their reasoning. And that way, when kids and young believers are exposed to these false ideas out in the world, they're already. already inoculated against them. They're already aware of them, what they are and why people believe them and what are the reasons why their reasons for believing them are wrong, right? So anyway, so I'm all for inoculating children, absolutely. But I also know that parents have a concern about being balanced as to when they start teaching their children and inoculating them to false ideas, right? Because you don't want to start too early and expose them at an unnecessarily young age, because then, of course, you just might confuse them, right, about normal and

healthy relationships and sexuality. But at the same time, as I say, you don't want to start too late, which would then lose your chance to prepare them, lose your chance to inoculate them, and then try to, you know, lose your chance to kind of set them on a proper trajectory. Now, while I'm not going to give you an exact age to begin teaching your kids this stuff, like okay at age six start or age 12 that's not my point of this podcast but what here's what I can do and that is provide you with five principles that will help you as a parent to determine the right time and the right approach for your family as to when to start teaching your kids about these topics all right so here's the first principle um my suggestion to you is to

start general and then get more specific later. In other words, no matter when you begin to teach your kids about the false ideas and ideology of homosexuality or transgenderism, I suggest you start teaching them more general information first and then slowly add more details over time. So for example, you know, with my own children. That's what my wife and I did, right? We started with foundational principles when they were very, very young. and then we added more details as they got older.

So long before they were ever introduced to what homosexuality was or meant, my wife and I taught our kids about what the Bible says about, you know, the basics of marriage and family. Like, look, hey, a man and a woman come together and they get married, right? That's what marriage is. They become husband and wife. Eventually they produce children. And of course, we didn't, you know, explain the details of that initially,

but eventually over time we did tell them the details as they got older, right? We got with more specific details later. You know, so when a husband and wife come together, they produce children, that's what a family is, right? So they knew from the beginning what a family was so that if they got exposed to a false definition of family, they would immediately recognize it as false. So notice, even with the little information, right, that was more general. And again, without the specifics of unhealthy, sexuality. They already had a level of understanding that provided them with some protection from

the falsehood that they're undoubtedly going to come across. Now, as they get older, right, yeah, we added more details. And by details, I mean, we started talking about how some things go wrong, right? How sin destroys good things, right? We told them that, yeah, some marriages will break. They'll falter. Sometimes families will fracture. And so we slowly added. to that information more and more until we felt they were ready to hear the false views of homosexuality and transgenderism. So in other words, it's kind of like you start with, you first build a skeleton of the truth about sexuality, about marriage, about family, and then you slowly add more details about how that can go wrong. You know, you're slowly adding the muscle, the skin,

and the blood vessels, if you will, to that skeleton. Okay. So that's first principle. Here's principle Number two. Know your child's personality, temperament, and intellectual rigor. So every child is different, right? Some kids are ready to receive false ideas about sexuality earlier than others. And so it's necessary for you as a parent, and I would argue you as a parent are in the best position to know, you know, when your kid is ready, to know when your children are, are old enough or prepared enough to be able to handle ideas that are hostile to their worldview. And the key point here is that every kid has a different age when they're ready. So, for example, at the age of 10, I took my son to UCLA's campus. Now, for those of you don't know, UCLA is a very secular campus, right? And I took him there when he was 10 years old and I had him engage people about the subject of abortion at a pro-life rally, and the people that he was engaging about abortion were twice his age,

right? He's 10. These kids were 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, or whatever, right? Now, that's kind of bold, right, for me to do that, right? But I didn't just throw him out there with no prep. I spent a few days teaching him, training him, and role-playing him on how to engage. I taught him tactics of pro-life persuasion. I explained to him the objections he'll hear and how to engage them. And of course, I also modeled some of them when I was there with other students so he could see me using the tactics I had told him the days before. Now, with him, with my son, I had a sense that he was ready based on how well I knew him, right? I knew he had a very vigorous temperament and a very stubborn personality for that matter

that led him to be resistant and very highly skeptical of people who challenged his views. In fact, that's what made him such a challenging son for my wife and I to raise, right? But by contrast, our daughter is different, right? She's got a much more sensitive temperament. She's slightly more of a follower than a leader. She's more of a people pleaser, right? And I knew that she wouldn't be ready at the age of 10. So we waited maybe five more years to engage her with the same kind of hostility, right?

So again, the point I'm making is each kid's different. Every person's different. And so you have to take that into account as you decide when to expose each of your kids to some of these false ideas, especially about sexuality. Okay. Principle number three. Know what your community situation is like. What I mean by that is if you have close friends or family who identify as LGBT, then it's going to be far more likely than you. that you'll end up spending time with them

and even have them in your home. And so in this case, you'll need to start inoculating your children and teaching these ideas about homosexuality and transgenderism sooner than later, you know, earlier than if you didn't have family and friends who are over your home. It's the same thing with your kid's school, right?

For example, if your children attend public school, well, of course, they're far more likely to be confronted by LGBT, ideas and messages before those kids who are homeschooled, for example, or maybe even private schooled, right? So again, therefore, the ideal timing for preparing your kids depends on the situations they will face in daily life. Okay, principle number four, your responsibility to your children should take precedence over your sensitivity to others. Okay, so let me unpack this. Many families have close relationships with friends and family who identifies LGBT, right? And so as a result, these Christian families are going to find themselves facing a dilemma,

right? Because they want to welcome their LGBT friends and family into their home. But at the same time, they're concerned that their children might not perhaps properly process what they hear or they might get confused, for example, if your friends and family come over and they're engaging in some sort of, you know, romantic same-sex affection. And now, by the way, just a quick aside here, I've always advocated for Christians to love their friends and family

who identifies LGBT and for us to lean into those relationships, right, to pursue these people, to love them, to care for them, and to connect with them, all right? So I've written and spoke about that principle for over a decade. And so that's, and I think that's what we should do, right? But here's the thing. While I would applaud the desire to welcome and to love LGBT friends and family into your home, I believe parents should prioritize their children's faith and worldview above their sensitivity to be welcoming to people outside their home. In other words, your primary responsibility

as a parent is to your children over and above your obligation to be well, welcoming to non-Christians and to ideas that might jeopardize your children's thinking, worldview, or spiritual development. When children are younger, in other words, I think it's appropriate if you need to to refuse to have LGBT friends and family over in some cases, right? Especially if they're not going to honor your requests to abstain from showing romantic same-sex affection in front of your young children. Which, by the way, I actually think it's fine to ask, you know, same-sex couples to refrain from that kind of affection when they come over, right?

And especially if you think it's going to be concerned for your kids. Now, it could be that the same-sex couple doesn't like that or they're going to refuse and say, no, we're not going to abstain, you know? And that's fine. I'll say, okay, I understand, you know, maybe you don't want to refuse. I get that. But then maybe this gathering over at our home is not going to work out for you guys. And that's fine. okay so now i i recognize that might jeopardize your relationship with the people in your life who

identifies LGBT but what i'm saying is it's okay because your first priority is to your children and not to people outside your family by the way this would apply to anybody not just people who identifies LGBT anybody outside of your family who wants to come over and if you think they're going to be a bad influence at your children it's okay to to refuse them to come over. Your primary responsibility as a parent is to your children and not to those outside, right? As your children get older, of course, and they develop a more robust faith and a more robust worldview, then they'll become more resistant to being influenced by what they see and they hear. And it might be more strategic then to wait until your children are older before

agreeing to invite same-sex couples over to your home, especially if, you know, they're going to be, you know, being, you know, showing affection, you know, romantic same-sex affection or, you know, however, whatever that might look like, right? Again, I'm not saying don't invite or allow people who identifies LGBT into your home. That's not what I'm saying. On the contrary, I think it's good. But what I am saying is, don't let that take precedence over your responsibility to care for and to nurture your kid's worldview and spiritual development. Okay. Fifth principle, final principle. here. You need to expose your kids to false ideology before someone else does. Okay. And I think this is perhaps the most determinative principle for when to start exposing your child or to your children to

false ideas and unpacking why they're false. Okay. So here's what I mean. At the end of the day, right, you need to be the first one who teaches them about sexuality and false conceptions of sexuality and not someone else. You don't want their friends or extended family or their school or Hollywood to be their first exposure to these ideas. Otherwise, your kids are more likely to perceive the outside perspective as truth and be suspicious about your subsequent response, right? You don't want to be responding after the fact of them being exposed to these ideas.

You want to be the first to explain the truth. and falsehood to them so that you can lay a proper foundation of understanding and so that they are more likely to interpret what they hear from the outside of home as foreign and false. So anyways, again, that's the whole thing about making sure that no matter what, you are the one who is teaching your kids about these false ideas before anybody else does. And so that should be a prime determining factor in deciding when should you teach your kids. this stuff. If you know they're going to be exposed to this material at the age of 12, then you need to be teaching the stuff before that, 11, 10, right? If I'm not going to hear it until

16, okay, maybe you can wait until 14. But if you're going to be hearing it at 10, you've got to be somehow implementing teaching this, say, by the age of 8. I don't know. Again, in age-appropriate ways, from general to more specifics, so on and so forth. Okay. So anyways, these five principles, I think, are just some guidelines that will help you to consider when to start introducing concepts like homosexuality, like transgenderism, into your child's thinking, right? Because by inoculating them to these false ideas at the right time, he'll prepare them for what I believe is going to be the inevitable challenges to their faith, to their values, and to their worldview. All right. Well, that's all I have for you today. If you've enjoyed this episode, I encourage you to.

to share it with a friend. And also don't forget to subscribe to my podcast. And that way, if whenever I produce a new one, you won't miss any future episodes when they're released. And again, thanks for listening. I look forward to thinking out loud with you next time. Thank you.