"How do I explain asexuality to my 5-year old?"

There are ways to introduce queerness to the young ones in our lives that meet them where they are.

J writes:

I recently discovered I was ace (almost the instant I discovered what being ace was). I’m 40 years old and seeing content geared to a more mature life stage (I’m married, I have 2 kids) is so helpful and I haven’t seen much of it elsewhere.

I could really use some help figuring out how to talk to my five year old daughter about my asexuality, since she’s too young to learn about sex. I’ve talked to her about different kinds of families (for example, two dads), but I’m a woman married to a man and from the outside my relationship looks the same as a heterosexual couple. I’m alloromantic, so it wouldn’t make sense to just phrase it as love. Of course, I could just not tell her, but I would like to get more involved with my local queer and ace community, take her with me to pride events, and reference my identity in conversations where she might be in earshot. I’ve seen advice about coming out to lots of different types of people, but never about how to come out to your young child.

Hey J,

Thanks so much for asking this question! I know a number of aspec folks who face this tricky situation, either as parents or as adult with young ones in their lives. It’s hard enough for us to explain asexuality to other adults, much less to parse it out for someone as young as 5. But I think there are some ways to approach this conversation that meets everyone where they are.

You can begin by pointing out that there are lots of ways for us to like/love someone. There isn’t just one. It’s a door into a very basic split-attraction model. You could say, “You can like/love someone because of the things they think and what they know. You can like/love someone and think they’re very pretty or handsome. You can can like/love someone and want to hug them a lot. All of those are ways to like/love someone, but it doesn’t mean you’ll feel all those ways for someone. You feel different ways for different people.” You could even have them discuss some of those different ways they like/love people they know.

Then, you can get to the meat of the conversation. Explain how sometimes, people never feel one one of those different kinds of like/love. There’s nothing wrong with those people. They just don’t ever feel that way. You can explain that you are one of those people, and there’s a kind of liking/loving that you just don’t ever feel for anyone. You can give its name - asexual - without having to go into nitty gritty details. It just means “I don’t like/love people in one certain way.”

This is the door to explain other complicated pieces. “I can be asexual and still like/love my important people in all the other ways.” “I want to go to Pride events and spend time with other people who are asexual like me, because we understand each other and we have things in common.” And you can expand on this basic explanation as your child grows older; more complex understandings of asexuality can show up when it’s the right time for them.

I don’t think we have to shy away from introducing young people, even as young as 5, to the idea of our brand of queerness. At the heart, any conversation about an experience of queerness is rooted in explaining a difference of experience, and we can explain that difference in ways that meet people where they are, in the language of their understanding of the world. Even young children can grasp that there are different ways to connect to other people, and that sometimes, some people don’t experience one particular way. That’s asexuality in in a nutshell. We can introduce them to queerness without forcing adult complexity on them.

And it introduces very early on the idea that difference isn’t scary. it’s just part of the fabric of the world.