A Parent's Guide to Preventing Homosexuality: New Book on Prevention Released in October 2002

Q: Many people think that homosexuality is part of a person's natural identity. Is homosexuality really something that can be prevented?

Joseph Nicolosi: Homosexuality is understood by the majority of mental health practitioners working in this field to result from the interaction of biological, social and psychological factors. The social and psychological factors can be modified. What parents can do to make a homosexual outcome unlikely is to lay the best possible foundation for their child's secure gender identity.

Q: Homosexuality as a developmental disorder has been taken out of the American Psychiatric Association's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual. Why do you still say that it is a developmental disorder?

Linda Nicolosi: Psychiatry says a disorder is characterized by distress and disability. We see a lot of subjective distress in homosexually oriented people which cannot be attributed solely to social discrimination. We also believe there is evidence of a "disability" in the homosexually-oriented person's feeling of not being comfortable with members of their own sex, of feeling "different" and inadequate, and of course, in not being able to function according to their biologically mandated sexual design.

Furthermore, the gay world is very destructive to our communal understanding of healthy gender identity and gender roles, to the stability of the traditional family, and to our integrity as persons who are designed to live in accordance with our created natures.

Q: Some may think that an idea like preventing homosexuality will only create more tension toward the homosexual community. How do you see A Parent's Guide to Preventing Homosexuality fitting into the bigger picture of understanding sexual identity?

Joseph and Linda Nicolosi: We think it fits in by showing parents that they can do something to influence their child's gender identity and future sexual orientation, even though there are no guarantees of the outcome. But they can certainly lay the foundation for a secure gender identity and thus provide what hundreds of dissatisfied homosexual strugglers have told us over and over was painfully absent in their own childhoods. And so there is very good reason for hope.

What are some of the strongest studies and pieces of evidence that homosexuality can be prevented?

Joseph: There is suggestive evidence, particularly from the research of Dr. George Rekers, that we can reduce the incidence of adult homosexuality if we support the gender-identity development of the child. But perhaps the best evidence to date comes from listening to the stories of adult homosexuals who have told us, over and over, what was missing in their own childhoods, and then working backward to fill those unmet needs and correct those misconceptions.

Time and again we hear such men say, "I never felt close to my father." "I always felt 'on the outs' with the other boys." "I never thought I could live up to my dad's expectations; so I was sure I was a failure." "My mother and I were best friends, and my father was the outsider in the family." "My brothers teased, abused and ridiculed me and my Dad called me a sissy." "An older guy molested me and I liked the closeness, the hugging, and the attention, and so I came to the conclusion I must be a homosexual." "My Project 10 counselor at school said this confusion I'm feeling means that 'gay is who I really am'."

What about parents who do the best they can--and their child grows up and says he is gay?

Joseph and Linda: Parents can make it clear, lovingly, that they're grieved by their child's lifestyle choices. They can also clarify that they don't believe that that gay is ultimately "who a person is," in the deepest sense. But we must love and stay close to all our children, even those who later make lifestyle choices of which we strongly disapprove. They are, of course, always our children.

How would you summarize your advice to parents who suspect their young son, for example, may be prehomosexual?

Joseph: I would tell fathers to go after your sons--push through the resistance and the estrangement, and don't let them reject you. Encourage them to find healthy same-sex peer relationships. Mothers, don't make your sons into your best friends; emphasize their differentness from you. Make it clear to your son that being a boy is good and desirable.

And listen closely to the many personal stories in our book--told by both gay and former homosexual men--about what was painfully absent in their own boyhoods.

If you employ the insights these stories provide, there is much that you can do to help your sons and daughters grow up to be secure, confident and happy in their gender.

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What the author of Homosexuality and the Politics of Truth says about A Parent's Guide to Preventing Homosexuality:

"After years of indifference from the professional rank-and-file, most people have been trained to no longer see the exit from homosexuality--nor even the need for one. A Parent's Guide to Preventing Homosexuality, therefore, is an inoculation for our future.

"Or it can be: if enough of us take up the work he and a few of his fellows began--and then persisted in, through these decades of bigotry and ignorance--to learn that the power of homosexuality comes not from its innateness or intractability (however much it feels that way), but from the fears and uncertainties that plague every human being with a heart.

"The prevention of homosexuality, like its treatment, is no more difficult, nor more easy, than the re-shaping of any other human foible...and just as important."

--Jeffrey B. Satinover, M.D. former Fellow in Child Psychiatry at Yale University

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A Parent's Guide to Preventing Homosexuality is now available from InterVarsity Press at www.ivpress.org. Paperback, $15.00.

"This resource will be valuable to many parents who do not want their children to grow up homosexual."

WHAT THE HELL KIND OF COMMENT IS THAT? I mean, take away the fact of those who want this to be normal and accepted by everyone, regardless of the moral and ethical problems..

All this book does is prey upon those morons who think they can mold someone into a desired personality. THE EXACT SAME THING THE HOMOSEXUAL AGENDA IS BEING ACCUSED OF! I guess I just didn't think about getting rich this way, I should write a book HOW TO KEEP YOUR CHILDREN FROM GROWING UP DEMOCRAT..

Pookie & Me

Mega bumps. The Nicolosi's are incredibly brave to release a book like this. They will be slandered up the east coast and down the west. They will receive hate mail, death threats, and be confronted by frothing angry members of the gaystapo for the rest of their lives.

Yet this book has the potential to be a great boon to parents and to society in general. Based on what the homo-promo crowd is attempting to do in the Boy Scouts, schools, our churches and synagogues, the Big Brothers/Big Sisters, is there any doubt that they are after our children? We must NOT let our children be homosexualized. is in

Explain contraception and abortion.

These are the expected results when the sins of sloth and vanity overwhelm and counteract the natural urges. Raising a family used to be the most important thing a person could do. Now-a-days, we've traded child-rearing for more pressing concerns -- like career, golf, skiing, watching TV, casual sex, parties, gambling, etc.

I don't normally involve myself in these threads (at least not since a long long time ago) but I would like to at least point out a bothersome flaw in the article.

Nowhere does the author present any info supporting his claim. Now before you accuse me a being a PC liberal or something - I'm not debating whether or not homosexuality is biological or environmental based (It's probably a mixture of both) but the article essentially presents his hypothesis without any clinical evidence. Even if his method does "work", how well does it work vs. doing nothing or doing something other method? Doesn't seem to be answered.

I am so very sorry for the losses your famly has gone through.

I don't know what specifically about your post made me think about this but I remember when was living in San Francisco finding out how very hard it seemed for a straight girl to find a guy who was interested in girls (and of course not already taken). I remember at a party one time realizing that it wasn't just the grown ups tht were gay but a MUCH higher than normal percentage of teenagers too. In other words I knew plenty of adults who had moved to SF from just about everywhere else because they were gay and wanted to be in an accepting atmosphere. But the children (if you can call teenagers that still) hadn't moved there out of choice but had been raised there by circumstance.

I guess it was the first time I thought about the possibility that homosexuality could be a learned behavior. Which of course led me to "if it can be learned it can be unlearned."

All this book does is prey upon those morons who think they can mold someone into a desired personality. THE EXACT SAME THING THE HOMOSEXUAL AGENDA IS BEING ACCUSED OF! I guess I just didn't think about getting rich this way, I should write a book HOW TO KEEP YOUR CHILDREN FROM GROWING UP DEMOCRAT..

Hey there, Pookie - Homosexuality is NOT a personality. It's a serious and abnormal psychological disorder. There are strong correlations between homosexuality (esp. male homosexuality) and lack of love from a father or older brother, lack of same-sex friendships in childhood and homosexual molestation while a teenager. What the authors of this book are pointing out is that it is very likely that avoiding such will help kids develop a normal sexuality. And even if they're wrong - what would be wrong with encouraging the love of a father for a son, encouraging (normal) same-sex friendships and protecting kids from homosexual molestation? I believe there's a great deal of truth to what this books says.

Nowhere does the author present any info supporting his claim.

Did you not read the part where they interviewed hundreds and hundreds of gay people and asked them what influenced them into this lifestyle? Then they took the common threads from these interviews to work backwards on how to prevent it.

Are you looking for a controlled, double-blind research project to substantiate this? Ain't gonna happen, because there are too many variables and it would be abuse to try to experiment with something like this. But there are plenty of studies about abused and molested children which draw conclusions about gender-identity.

What the authors are trying to do is to explain how to strengthen relationships in the family to prevent the abundant negative influences from shaping children. This is a good idea in general because it will help kids become more well-adjusted and able to deal with their peer group much better growing up.

Yes - but this isn't evidence that his "treatment" works. This is junk science at its worst - there doesn't seem to be any control group here so I can't compare the responses of the subjects to the population at large. Even if the results are significant (a big assumption) he provides no evidence that the information from the "common threads" work in the manner he suggests. For example, if he'd found that gay people like to eat fondue, he presents no evidence that preventing people from eating fondue would alter their sexual orientation.

Are you looking for a controlled, double-blind research project to substantiate this?

Yes.

This is how real scientists work - but pseudoscientists like to skip the boring "experiment" and "research" parts and go straight to the conclusion. Protocols exist for examining these issues and no abuse is needed. Any researcher who complains about "too many variables" in a study needs to find another line of work because he wasn't paying attention in his classes on statistics and analysis. Simply compare families who use this technique to families who use no special technique. It's used all the time in various studies. But that would require work and it might not give the researcher above the results he wanted.

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