The Grammar Installed Before the Question

A child of five does not experience desire the way an adolescent does. Gender identity—the sense of oneself as a boy or a girl—forms early, typically between ages three and five. But sexual attraction as an identity marker is post-pubertal in its normal developmental arc. The machinery of sexual longing does not arrive until puberty arrives. The question of what that longing means, what it is for, and how it shapes who you are belongs to adolescence.

This creates a specific problem with the frameworks being installed in elementary schools.

When a six-year-old is introduced to the idea that identity is self-defined and that sexual identity is one of its primary categories, they are not being given tools they need right now. They are being given a grammar before the vocabulary has arrived. The interpretive framework is installed in advance of the experience it is designed to interpret. When puberty comes and desire shows up, the child already has an answer waiting. The question will not feel like a question. It will feel like recognition.

Education gives a child information and asks them to think. Formation shapes the categories within which thinking happens. A six-year-old learning that some families have two mothers is encountering a fact of the world and being asked to hold it with respect for the people in it. A six-year-old receiving the framework that their own identity is fluid, self-defined, and organized around desire is being formed in something prior to information. The framework does not present itself as one option among several. It presents itself as the structure of reality.

Proverbs names this dynamic with the precision of long observation:

"Train a child in the way that he should go, and when he is old he will not turn from it." — Proverbs 22:6 (NET)

The word for "train" carries the sense of the first taste that establishes what the tongue will seek afterward. The formation of early childhood does not operate at the level of ideas. It operates at the level of grammar—the categories within which ideas are processed. You can give an adult a counter-argument. You cannot easily give them a counter-grammar.

The Christian home has a competing grammar available.

"Now this is eternal life – that they know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom you sent." — John 17:3 (NET)

Life is not desire. The self is not constructed from what you feel. Identity is received—from the God who made the child and knows the child by name. Desire exists within that design and has a purpose and a covenant frame—a context in which it is meant to flourish rather than simply be expressed. That grammar, given to a child early enough, gives them something to hold the questions against when those questions arrive.

Chapter Four