The Benefits Of Educating Your Children About LGBT Culture

Our society has made significant improvements in its tolerance and acceptance of the LGBT community more than ever within recent years and President Obama’s public support of gay marriage and legislative initiatives have certainly taken our advancement to new heights.

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We still, however, have quite a ways to go as more gay school-aged children attempt suicide due to bullying and adults are still discriminated against because of their sexual orientation. While anti-discrimination legislation is necessary in our efforts to become a more just country, there must also be changes on a micro-level within our individual homes.

As adults, many of our ideologies–which have led to our rigid and prejudice behaviors–are a result of how our parents raised us. Because home is the primary learning setting for children, and the children will evolve into leaders of our future, one of the greatest contributions we can make to society is engaging in dialogue with our kids about equality between straight people, gay people and every other sexual orientation.

Progressive change happens with education. Children learn about the various family structures early on in school: nuclear, blended, extended and single-parent. Anything that veers from this very limited teaching can seem weird or “wrong” in their fragile minds. As they grow up and matriculate through middle and high school, they take sex education courses and learn about abstinence, safe sex practices, STD’s and human reproduction—but the questions regarding sex between like genders are often left unaddressed, especially in more conservative regions of the country.

Because homosexuality is barely, if at all, addressed in school, parents have even more of a responsibility to teach their children about varying sexual orientations. What do you teach your children about gay people? Do you teach them that homosexuality is right? Wrong? Do you mention it at all? The argument is not that parents need to teach their children to support gay relationships, especially in the event that doing so is a religious or moral contradiction. But at the very least, parents should teach their children tolerance and instill in them the principle that all people are equal and deserve to be treated as such, regardless of any differences among us.

Children need to know that love will not always be as simple as man and woman. But it may be man and man or woman and woman, and that it doesn’t make people “bad” or less deserving of kind and fair treatment. I believe that if parents made a more conscious commitment to teach our young, it would eventually lead to fewer negative stigmas associated with being gay and as a result, less discrimination and ignorance to the unknown would occur. Not only will it initiate a shift in society’s thinking, but it will also encourage children who are gay to feel more comfortable and less fearful of owning their true sexual identity.

The night before the Inauguration, my dad, brother, niece and I were sitting on the couch of our hotel room watching “Here Comes Honey Boo Boo” for the very first time. Despite some of the negative controversy surrounding the show, I became an instant fan. It was not only warming to see a family make a ton of fun out of very little, but it was refreshing to watch the southern family from Georgia, an extremely conservative state, be so genuinely embracing of their gay “Uncle Poodle.”

When star child Alana aka Honey Boo Boo said, “Ain’t nothing wrong with being gay. Everybody’s a little gay” with her signature sass and shaking of the head, it spoke volumes of how she had been raised and conditioned to think that there should be no preferential treatment of straight people over gay people. If every parent would follow suit and instill that same principle of equality, it could be the start of a more improved and less prejudice generation!

What do you think of our country’s current state regarding treatment of LGBT people? Do you think that school systems should teach more about gay sexual identity in sex education courses? Do you think that parents have a responsibility to have early discussions with their children about the various types of couples? Share with your fellow beauties!

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