According to two-deep leadership rules, all Latter-day Saint (LDS) Primary classes must have two co-teachers, but a man and woman are allowed to co-teach together only if they are married to each other. It’s almost the same rule as the Law of Chastity: a Latter-day Saint man and woman are only allowed to have sex with each other if they are married to each other. But does it make sense to treat co-teaching like sex?

My local bishopric recently extended a calling to me and my spouse to co-teach a Primary class at our local Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS) ward. I love teaching (and it’s a great motivation to share my lesson plans here at Exponent II) but I had to think twice about accepting this calling. I examined the rules around teaching Primary and could see why staffing Primary is such a nightmare for Primary presidencies and bishoprics.
In this article…
Primary teachers never get a day off.
Adult and teen Sunday School classes are held only twice a month, alternating with Relief Society/Priesthood and Young Women/Young Men. That means teachers of adult and youth classes get every other week off.
Primary classes are the only church classes that meet every single week. Each week, kids attend a shorter Primary class preceded or followed by Singing Time.
That’s great for kids, who tend to have short attention spans. It’s not so great for Primary teachers, who are required to be present every Sunday, with no days off. When a teacher of an adult or youth class needs to miss church for travel or illness, there’s a 50% chance they won’t have to worry about finding a substitute because it’s already their scheduled day off. A primary teacher needs to find a substitute every single time they miss church.
Primary requires two-deep leadership.

But wait, you might ask, since you and your husband are co-teaching this class, you wouldn’t need to find a substitute if just one of you gets sick, right? The healthy spouse could teach alone.
When we co-taught adult Gospel Doctrine, that’s how we covered whenever just one of us missed church. No need to find a substitute if one of the two co-teachers was still available to teach the class.
However, unlike adult classes, Primary classes require two-deep leadership. (Church Handbook 12.3.5) That means both co-teachers must be present every week. So even when it’s my husband’s turn to teach, I’ll still need to be there or find a substitute to sit in the classroom in my place.
The two-deep rule in Primary is a reasonable precaution.
Requiring two adults in every children’s class is based on a precaution developed by the Boy Scouts of America following a series of child sex abuse scandals within their organization. [i] Requiring the presence of an extra adult seems reasonable, given the importance of preventing sexual abuse of children. I mean, it’s literally the least we could do. (What about background checks? Security cameras? Glass doors on classrooms?)
The two-deep rule in Primary began in 2019, after a series of well-publicized activist efforts calling attention to child sexual abuse in church settings. Before that time, only male Primary teachers were required to have a co-teacher. Women could teach Primary alone. Church policymakers were apparently more concerned that men might abuse children than that women would, and the statistics bear that out. Most child sex abuse offenders are male. [ii] But I think there is a strong argument to be made for taking reasonable precautions to protect children from any demographic of abuser, even if the incidence is less common among women.
Another problem with the old policy was that it created an incentive for local wards to staff primary with women and not men. Under the old rule, some bishops and stake presidents even went so far as to ban men from Primary callings altogether. Why would a bishopric choose to use up two male volunteers to staff one classroom when they could staff the same classroom with only one woman? Women are already barred from many callings because of the female priesthood ban, and so the last thing we needed was another excuse for bishoprics to confine us to Primary all the time at the exclusion of other opportunities.
Overall, requiring two teachers in every Primary classroom, regardless of the sex of the teacher, is a win for child safety and gender parity. I think it’s the right way to go, although it certainly creates staffing difficulties for Primary presidencies, who need to recruit a much larger number of teachers for their organization than any other organization in the ward.
The time commitment would be more reasonable if Primary teachers worked in teams of three.
For a time, my local ward experimented with calling three teachers to each Primary classroom. I co-taught a Primary class then with two other women. Each Sunday, one of us taught the lesson, one of us sat in the classroom to provide the mandatory two-deep leadership, and the third person had the day off. If one of us was sick or traveling, we had a built-in substitute available to us; we could trade with the co-teacher who was supposed to be off that week. It was a great way to bring Primary callings closer to the more flexible time commitment of other teaching callings.
Eventually, however, my ward had to abandon the experiment. Not only did it require more people, but assigning three rotating teachers per classroom was complicated by the gendered rules around who is allowed to co-teach with whom. It would have been easier for me to accept this new Primary calling if we could have added a third teacher to our team to lighten the load, but that would be impossible because half of the adults in our ward are forbidden by church policy from co-teaching with me, and the other half are forbidden from co-teaching with my husband.
Primary co-teachers must be married to each other or of the same sex.

The LDS Church has a longstanding ban on people of the opposite sex serving together as co-teachers unless they are married to each other. The Handbook states that co-teachers “could be two women, two men, or a married couple.” (Church Handbook 12.3.5)
When I need to miss church, I must find a male substitute because I am the only woman in the ward allowed to co-teach alongside my male spouse. If both of us will be gone, we can’t just group-text the substitute list and take the first two substitutes who say yes; we might end up with a man and a woman teaching together who are not married to each other, and that is not allowed.
This rule has nothing to do with preventing child abuse. In fact, the two-deep leadership policy of the Girl Scouts program requires the two adult leaders to be unmarried, or they need to add a third, unrelated co-teacher to the mix.
But what if everybody has sex?
Since requiring co-teachers of the opposite sex to be married doesn’t improve child safety, and may even make children less safe, why do we have such a rule?
If you thought, “But what if everybody has sex?” you’re thinking like a church policymaker.

I can’t trace exactly when these gendered co-teaching restrictions began, but it appears that some version of this rule has been in place since before the feminist revolution of the 1970s brought American women back into the workplace in droves. General Authorities who retired from secular work before the ‘70s may have never worked with women, and then they went on to serve full-time in priesthood quorums where women were banned. These men had no practical experience having professional relationships with people of the opposite sex, and invoked policies and teachings based on assumptions that if men and women worked together, adultery would be rampant.
Ironically, while there should be nothing sexy about a man and a woman spending half an hour co-teaching a group of children, the ban on co-teachers of the opposite sex makes the innocent sight of a man and woman teaching a Primary class together seem tantalizing and suspicious and lurid.
Let’s keep two-deep leadership in Primary, but let’s scrap sex-phobic co-teaching restrictions.

Before the two-deep leadership policy, following gendered co-teaching restrictions was easy. Put only one teacher in each classroom and no one will have a co-teacher of the opposite sex! But today, these outdated, gendered co-teaching rules interact with the two-deep leadership policy and make staffing Primary even more complicated. What’s the solution?
Implementing two-deep leadership in Primary requires a larger number of staff than ever before, but the safety of our children is worth it. On the other hand, when staffing Primary is already so challenging, why are we clinging to outdated rules that do nothing to protect children and make staffing even harder? It’s time to end gendered rules about who can co-teach with whom so we have maximum flexibility to fully staff our Primary programs.
[i] Here’s my interview with Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests (SNAP), an advocacy organization that helped expose these child sex abuse cases.
[ii] Ironically, although the rule in Primary suggested an awareness among church leaders of the higher risk of sexual abuse by male perpetrators, church policy also required one-on-one interviews of children by bishopric members who were required to be male due to the female priesthood ban. In 2018, this policy improved by allowing a child or youth to have a second adult in the room when the minor requests it, but this policy only allows for the minor being interviewed to request that a guardian be present, not vice versa. The guardian may not even be aware that an interview is taking place. (Church Handbook 31.1.4)
11 Responses
April, thanks so much for this post. This has bothered me for some time. I might point out that this same restriction exists in the Sunday School – see Handbook section 13.3.. (However, some years back we had a bishop who either was unaware or blew this off and assigned unmarried opposite-sex partners to team teach youth Sunday School. Worked fine.)
Anyway, I would be wholeheartedly in favor of this change. Maybe, just maybe, unmarried opposite-sex partners could restrain themselves in the Primary and Sunday School classrooms. Stranger things have happened.
It is hard to exercise restraint in a sexy environment like a church classroom surrounded by students, but I think I could pull it off! It sounds like your Sunday School teachers also managed just fine. Phew!
I’ve always been baffled by comments I’ve seen online that teachers are expected to find their own substitutes if they’re away. Is this an Utah thing? A US thing? Here in the UK primary teachers would simply be required to let the primary presidency know. We weren’t allowed to ask just anyone to cover a class. It had to be someone called and sustained as a teacher. This was a child protection measure we were told. Sorry. A bit of a tangent I know..
That is so interesting! I’ve always been required to find my own sub, but I am American. I wonder if your rule is unique to the UK, where the state may have tighter laws around child protection than in the US?
The UK Church has slightly different child protection rules than the US Church, thanks in large part to active efforts by several women. It’s a good move and one I hope the US moves toward. Here: https://news-uk.churchofjesuschrist.org/article/church-in-uk-issues-updated-guidelines-on-child-protection — and here: https://religionnews.com/2023/06/27/british-mormons-lobby-for-stricter-safeguards-against-abuse-and-succeed/
Individiul wards and stakes in the US can make stricter policies as they wish. My sister’s ward in the Seattle, WA area does not allow you to get your own substitute teacher – it has to go through the primary president who will find someone on their bishop approved list who also has to have current Child & Youth Protection Training. (Enforcement of Church policies with regards to that training is a whole other article to write.)
Yeah, the rules on who can teach predate the recent activism however.
The restriction of coed staffing of church roles reinforces the notion that the church is really about sex. To imply that even texting, chatting, calling, teaching, working with a different gendered person will be leading to or innocently implying “sexual” deviancy —just goes to show you that all roads lead to SEX in the church. Controlling it, policing it, shying away from it, talking or not talking about…fear shame and guilt…one big sex package of handbook rules, history, homophobia, patriarchy, and temples..
Whilst I do think the Church could lighten up on some aspects of this, I am aware of times when it has been a problem.
Teaching a Primary class together, for 20 minutes each week, with the two alternating weeks, seems to me to be something highly unlikely to end in an inappropriate relationship – although I know some wives who might not like it happening with their husband being with someone else.
However, I was counsellor to an EQP once who was working way too closely with the RSP (this was 35 years ago). I told him I thought they would be better meeting in places where others were around. He got quite angry about it. Not long later they got together left their spouses and were excommunicated.
I know another man and woman who committed adultery on the trip to the temple they took together, without their spouses.
So I do think that sensible suggestions and some rules are important.
I haven’t had a teaching/scouting calling in years so I can’t imagine what it would be like to co-teach a primary class with a member of the opposite sex. If my husband and I were to have such a calling, I would be the one doing all the lesson planning and presenting. He would just sit between the chatty kids. That’s just how our skills are.
Based on my latest experience in a different calling with another man who was not my husband, he pretty much treated me as clueless. He never intended to insult me, in his way of thinking, but he thought I should do everything like he did. I told the bishopric I wasn’t needed in that calling, since bro. So and So had it down pat. They released me and I haven’t had a calling since. I think something similar would happen in a co-teaching situation: either the man will want to do things his way, or let the woman do most of the work. I know it’s possible for that one person to dominate a partnership no matter what kind of gender pairing is present, so maybe I am mistaken on how unrelated opposite gender co-teaching would end up looking like.
I think you are correct, but I also think this can happen with two people of the same gender with a bit of an age difference.
Great post! Thank you! As someone currently serving in primary I stand with everything you said.
I know this wasn’t the focus of your essay, but I think there is a larger discussion to be had about the burnout rate in primary callings. It’s an every-week commitment, with no breaks, sometimes for years and years. A lot of adult-to-adult interaction is lost. And the labor of primary screws heavily towards the sisters.
Primary is so important, because our children are, but what more can be done to lift the burdens of isolation from the rest of the ward? To share the load?
Gender equality and equal time rotation across primary callings might be a good place to start.
Just something on my brain now…