Isn’t my child too young to know about gender?

Our number one job as parents is to keep our kids safe. Safety can look a lot of different ways. Safety can mean not letting your toddler use a sharp knife, even though she really wants to cut the carrots. Or it can mean watching your eight-year old from the kitchen window as he plays football with his friends — giving him autonomy and space, while keeping an eye out for traffic or scraped knees. Sometimes the balance between hand-holding and autonomy is very clear, and other times it’s not. So much depends on you, your child, where you live, your environment, etc.

So where does gender fit in? This one can be complicated because as parents we inevitably have to negotiate our children’s self-knowledge with the responsibility to keep them safe.

Research tells us that children understand gender starting at a very early age.  Between three and five years old, children start to identify with a particular gender (they develop a “gender identity”), which may or may not change over time.  Their gender identity may or may not align with the gender marker on their birth certificate.  There is no such thing as an incorrect gender identity.

In this context, safety means honoring your child’s self-understanding of their own gender.

Trans and gender-creative kids need their parents' trust and support.  According to the 2024 Trevor Project U.S. National Survey on the Mental Health of LGBTQ+ Young People, 88% of respondents said that people can show support and acceptance by “trusting that I know who I am.”  The report also noted that transgender and nonbinary youth had lower rates of attempting suicide when they had access to gender-affirming spaces at school and their pronouns were respected by the people they live with. In fact, LGBTQ+ young people who lived in “very accepting communities reported attempting suicide at less than half the rate of those living in very unaccepting communities.”

Your feelings of confusion and fear are real and valid, and you should be thinking deeply about how best to parent your child. Regardless of whether your child’s gender identity is stable or not, whether it aligns with their birth certificate sometimes or never, a great starting point for protecting your child is by trusting their internal understanding of their own gender.