Answer

If Parents Love a Child, Why Does Their Gender Matter?

You know families led by two loving adults who are doing well by their children, and the Proclamation’s claim about a mother and a father can sound like an insult aimed at them. If someone has put that to you as an argument, or if it is your own family being described, the question is not academic.

Because love is necessary and it is not the only thing a child needs. Nobody disputes that two loving adults can raise a child well. The Proclamation’s claim is narrower and more specific: children are entitled to be born within the bonds of matrimony and reared by a father and a mother, not because other homes contain less love, but because a mother and a father each give something the other does not.

Eternal Truths

The entitlement named belongs to the child. The Family: A Proclamation to the World frames it as something children are owed rather than as a rule imposed on adults. That is an important difference. It makes the sentence a statement about what a child should be able to expect, not a verdict on the adults in front of you.

Jesus went back to the creation rather than to custom. Asked about marriage, He answered that God “made them male and female” and that for this cause a man leaves father and mother and cleaves to his wife (Matthew 19:4-6). The pattern for parents follows from that, which is why the Church cannot revise it as social understanding shifts. It is not a policy tracking a consensus.

The pattern begins with Heavenly Parents. If the family we came from is a Father and a Mother, then what a child is entitled to is a copy of something real rather than a tradition that happened to prevail. Elder Neil L. Andersen taught in “Whoso Receiveth Them, Receiveth Me” and counselled members to be thoughtful and sensitive toward children and youth whose family life is not what that pattern describes.

What Can Make This Confusing?

The claim is usually heard as an accusation, because it arrives in an argument where somebody’s family is being judged. It also runs against a real observation: people raised without a mother or without a father are often deeply loved and doing fine. Both can be true. Some of them describe a specific absence anyway, one the love around them did not substitute for, and those accounts are worth listening to precisely because they do not fault anyone.

Questions to Think About

• Am I hearing this as a claim about a child’s entitlement, or as a verdict on adults?
• What did my mother give me that my father could not, or the other way round?
• Where a child near me is missing one of those, what could I supply?

What You Can Do

If your own family does not look like this, and most do not, notice that the entitlement the Proclamation names is the child’s. Where it was not available, that was a loss rather than a failure, and knowing what a child is owed is exactly what lets you supply as much of it as you can. Pick one gap this week, in your home or a neighbour’s, and fill a small part of it. The essay behind this Answer sets out the case in full.

Jesus Christ can make up what a child was never given, and He does that most often through people willing to stand in the gap.