Answer

What Do I Do When My Child Comes Out?

Your child has just told you something, and you are trying to respond well while your own reaction is still arriving. That is an extremely hard position, and whatever you feel right now does not disqualify you from handling this well.

Do not treat the conversation as the emergency. The most consequential thing in the next ten minutes is whether your child learns they can tell you things. You can hold everything you believe and still make that the outcome. If you do not, the conversations you actually want to have later will not happen, because there will not be any.

Eternal Truths

Who your child is was settled before today. The Family: A Proclamation to the World teaches that each person is a beloved spirit son or daughter of heavenly parents with a divine nature and destiny. That is not a rebuttal to what your child has said. It is the frame everything else sits inside, and children who have it are markedly harder to talk out of it.

Love and doctrine are not competing claims. The Church asks members to hold to the doctrine of marriage while treating every person with love and respect, and says plainly that attraction is not a sin (Same-Sex Attraction). President Russell M. Nelson taught that there is a strong connection between God’s love and His laws, and that it is because we feel the depth of His love for His children that His laws matter (“The Love and Laws of God”).

Christ went to the one. He taught that a shepherd leaves the ninety and nine and goes after the one that is missing, and that the finding is the occasion for rejoicing (Luke 15:4-7). Your child is not missing. But the posture of going toward rather than waiting for is the one He models.

What Can Make This Confusing?

Your child is hearing, at volume and constantly, that one part of their experience is the whole truth about them. You cannot outshout that, and trying tends to cost you the relationship that makes anything else audible. Almost every parent also starts hunting for the mistake they made. Usually there was not one, and the search consumes energy the relationship needs.

What Research Shows

Marshall Duke and Robyn Fivush found that children who knew more of their family’s stories scored higher on measures of self-esteem, sense of control, and family functioning, and coped better under stress. The research says nothing about this particular conversation. It does say that a child rooted in where they came from carries hard things better.

Questions to Think About

• Does my child believe they can tell me the next hard thing?
• What am I doing out of love, and what am I doing out of fear of what people will think?
• Which ordinary family habits have quietly stopped since this began?

What You Can Do

Tell your child one family story this week, an ordinary one about a grandparent or about the day they were born, with nothing attached to it. Keep family prayer and scripture going even if it feels hollow. The essay behind this answer deals with the longer road in more detail.

Jesus Christ knows your child by name and loves them more than you do, and He is not in a hurry in the way you are.