How do I explain same sex marriage to my seven year old?

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Tis_Bearself said:
So, are you going to go to your child’s school on parents’ night and tell his classmate who is there with his two same-sex parents, “It’s not your fault, but your situation isn’t normal and your family isn’t a real family”?
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Speaking as someone who isn’t a parent, I look forward to letting my children do my dirty work for me. Let them deal with the consequences…😈

Edit: Because I’ve already had two replies about this: Yes, I’m joking. This comment is a great example of Poe’s law.
goout said:
Take a look: we are the brink of infanticide .
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Infanticide has been legal for a while. We’ve just limited its scope (for now), given it less horrifying names, and passed it off as “women’s rights”.
 
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ZMystiCat said:
Speaking as someone who isn’t a parent, I look forward to letting my children do my dirty work for me. Let them deal with the consequences
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I find it interesting that you consider that your dirty work. I don’t think it is your job at all. I hope you were joking.
 
ZMystiCat said:
Speaking as someone who isn’t a parent, I look forward to letting my children do my dirty work for me. Let them deal with the consequences…😈
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I hope to high heavens that you are not serious.
Your children are likely to feel very differently about that, because you are not suggesting an impish thing to do to children. What you’re suggesting is something that is very unfair to put onto a pair of unsuspecting 7 year olds. I would go so far as to say it is extremely irresponsible, not to mention unfeeling.
 
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The OP isn’t responding so it would make sense before getting into arguments. Making a new thread so that the OP can find advice instead of a fight. I would recommend monitoring the T.V. and not saying anything if the child isn’t able to be discreet with what he says at school.
 
On the subject that keeps coming up about ideal families versus not ideal families, I think the concept of something being ideal might be a bit heavy for most 7 year olds. The example was brought up that even adopting children on some level is not ideal. Here I think we should be careful to emphasize the good. Adoption is good. That we should be supporting and rooting for biological moms to get their lives in order and not have to give up their babies is a more complicated topic for when they are a little older.
 
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When I was a kid, if a show dealt with sensitive issues (teen pregnancy, drugs, eating disorder, etc), there would be a message at the beginning of the show to alert parents to the theme, and to urge them to discuss it with their kids.

At some point, producers have decided to take parents completely out of the equation to discuss LGBT issues with kids.
Amd kids are getting exposed to a lot of stuff through cartoons and book and parents aren’t even aware.
 
JMMJ said:
Families, like people, come in all different shapes and sizes. One is not better than another, as long as they are about love.
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Sorry, that just isn’t true. My family after my dad died was not as good as my family before my dad died. What death did to my family, sin does to others. We can explain this to young children while also telling them to be kind to their classmates with divorced or gay parents.
 
Children are not stupid and can gather a lot of truth even before they are told.Reteaching isn’t a great idea.7 is the age of reason…for a reason.
Explaining a same sex marriage …well there’s the problem right away,it’s not a marriage…plain as the nose on my face :thinking:If you want to teach your children to be Catholic ,then you teach them the real definition of marriage .
 
heidi_storage said:
Sorry, that just isn’t true. My family after my dad died was not as good as my family before my dad died. What death did to my family, sin does to others. We can explain this to young children while also telling them to be kind to their classmates with divorced or gay parents.
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Certainly after the death of a parent, a family may not be as strong as they were before that parent died. We’re not talking about death, necessarily here. We will have to agree to disagree. I will never be convinced that families are one-size-fits-all or that one family model is better or stronger than another, as long as they are built on love.

A death in the family may weaken that family. However, a death in the family may also make a family much stronger. It is the same way with anything else that happens in a family.
 
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TC3033 said:
From my perspective that doesn’t mean that we should put down other family models either
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I have no problem putting down other models, as they are just models. At age seven, it is not that long before there can be an understanding of separating sinners and sin. In fact, the earlier such tolerance is taught, the better the lesson, in my opinion.
 
VanitasVanitatum said:
It was a joke. The emoji should have given it away.
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I hope that by the time you are going to school events that include the parents, Poe’s Law won’t apply, but I very much doubt that, LOL. (If you become the pastor at a parish that has a school, multiply that by about 100!)
 
I’m flabbergasted that you’d suggest that the death of a child’s father could “make the family stronger.” Except in those circumstances where the parent is a complete monster, the death of a parent is a hideous blow to the family.

It doesn’t mean that the family cannot find happiness again, and if the surviving parent marries a wonderful person, the family may be great, but that doesn’t change the fact that the death of a parent is a profound loss, and a wound.

People have been speaking of adoption. I think adoption’s wonderful, and I’d never say that a family with adopted children isn’t a “real” family. My adopted relatives are my relatives. However, adoption, too is built on loss. Read the stories of adult adoptees to see that they can experience some very complicated feelings because they were not raised by their biological mother and father.

Two gay men pretending to both be the father of a child can love the child dearly, and think of that child as their own, and treat the child very well, but at least one of those men is not the father of the child. And that child is, at the very least, missing a mother. This is a loss.

Single parents raising kids on their own may be doing a wonderful job and giving their kids great lives. But the missing parent is still a loss, even if there are excellent reasons for that missing parent not being in the child’s lives. A person is not living up to the responsibilities of parenthood for some reason or another is something to mourn.

God declares that families are to be formed thus: A man shall leave his father and mother and cleave to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh.

(edited to remove unnecessary “of the fact that” x 2)
 
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heidi_storage said:
I’m flabbergasted that you’d suggest that the death of a child’s father could “make the family stronger.” Except in those circumstances where the parent is a complete monster, the death of a parent is a hideous blow to the family.
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My suggestion is based on personal experience. Others may experience something else. Loss of a father has the ability to create stronger bonds between siblings, and between the mother and her children. I personally have witnessed this, particularly in families where the children are grown when the death occurs. Stronger, definitely. Better? Not necessarily. There are many metrics to measure how “good” a family is. Strength is one.
 
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I guess that is where we’ll differ. In my opinion I don’t want to put down models, especially to a 7 year old. That’s not something I want them taking to school, especially if there are “non-ideal” family unit(s) in their grade/school. I’d hate to have my son saying “my Dad said your family isn’t really a family or is lesser than ours because you don’t have a Mom and a Dad”. I’d also hate for my child to pass on a friendship or relationship because of something I told them about the “ideal” family model.

Also, in my opinion again, I don’t want to raise a child to look down on others just because they (speaking of kids again) are in a situation that may not be “ideal”.
 
Your strict definition makes the Holy Family not a family. Jesus wasn’t Joseph’s biological son. (And if we go with the Eastern tradition that Jesus’ brothers and sisters were Joseph’s kids by an earlier marriage, they were his but not Mary’s.) And that’s literally the ideal human family. I don’t think your definition is very useful.
 
First of all, any person with a y chromosome is not interchangable in the role of “father”. Children with divorced parents have a father. You can’t just stick some other man in there and call him “daddy” and suddenly the “family” is complete. Spend a lot of time with children and you will soon see that there are a great many families of single mothers with children who are far more along the spectrum of “healthy and complete” than many which attempted to fill voids in this unnatural way.

Secondly, most people don’t think of their family life as trying to achieve a “standard”. If they are, they aren’t setting that standard on such sterile a criteria as the mating and procreation of one human male and one human female. Family life, (real family life) is much more complex than that. Most people are looking to peace in the home, love, acceptance, stability, morality, and other things like that as their standard. As a result, there are situations where your ideal family model isn’t ideal any more, even for a faithful Catholic family. On top of that, some families lose members due to factors entirely outside of their control. If a mom dies in a car accident, there’s nothing her family can do to “achieve” your standard, regardless of where it’s set.
 
Whats at stake here is not about “families” but about as the OP child asks, “how can someone have two dadies?” bringing the definition of family is getting us sidetracked since a family can mean many things. I think people are distorting what we are talking about here which is the “nuclear family.” which can only have a mother and a father. But thats not the question of the child anyways. Someone cannot have two true daddies as pictured on the TV. The kid isnt stupid, he sees something that isnt right. Different kids mature differently so I cannot say how to respond to that question in your circumstance. If you child knows something about sin and right from wrong, there is nothing wrong with telling him this isnt right and is not how God planned marriage, the raising of children, and the nuclear family. THen explain to him what is Gods plan. This can of course be explained in children terms.There can be explained the idea that although people sin and do bad things we cannot mistreat them.
 
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