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Posts tagged ‘TEENS’

COMMENTARY: How I Lovingly Guided My Child Away from Transgenderism — And How You Can Too


BY: ANONYMOUS | DECEMBER 02, 2022

Read more at https://thefederalist.com/2022/12/02/how-i-lovingly-guided-my-child-away-from-transgenderism-and-how-you-can-too/

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I had to accept my limits, but that didn’t mean I was helpless. Parents are still the most important influence on their kids.

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About a year and a half ago, I noticed that my son — let’s call him Andy — was putting rainbow stickers on his phone. And a friend alerted me that Andy rebuked her daughter in a group chat for being “so cisgender.” I did some delicate digging, and it became clear: My child, then 13, was flirting with going “trans.”

He’s not alone. The number of transgender-identifying kids is up 20 to 40 times since a decade ago, to 1.5 percent of all teens. And the gender facilities that say they are the experts have been unmasked. Videos and statements have revealed that doctors in these so-called clinics are willing to give 15-year-old girls double mastectomies and call it treatment.

I wasn’t about to send my son off for experimental medical interventions that didn’t treat any underlying psychological issues. In this, I think I’m representative of the silent (and bullied) majority. Still, what could I do?

The first thing I had to do was to realize that the gender cult is powerful, and I can’t control the choices and feelings of my kid. I had to accept my limits, but that didn’t mean I was helpless. Parents are still the most important influence on their kids.

Finding a New School

I was lucky: My son was at a private school that did not push kids, behind their parents’ backs, into exploring alternate sexualities and getting “treated” by lifetime medicalization. If my son had been at a trans-affirming school — which means just about any public school — I would have been undermined at every turn.

At this school, however, he did have a cohort of “rebel” friends who all seemed to identify themselves as gender-questioning. And the school itself was not academically challenging enough for Andy. So I focused on academics, and we looked for a new school that would be a better fit on that score — and still supportive of my values. Finding one gave him a fresh start and a new peer group.

Building Real Identity

Next, I decided I would not provoke Andy by debating gender and trans issues. Maria Keffler in her book “Desist, Detrans, and Detox” reminds parents that transgenderism in adolescents is less about sex and more about identity, identity, and identity. A few decades ago, Andy probably would have worked through his teenage crises by going goth or arguing with me about religion. These days, becoming one of the letters in LGTB is the shortcut to being interesting, not “basic.”

Well, I didn’t want to make gender-bending the way he was going to differentiate himself from his parents. If he had been openly claiming a different so-called gender identity, maybe I would have been more confrontational about it. But since he was just flirting with being trans, not yet eloping, I decided not to make the topic of the sexes even more important than it already was. Instead, I focused on helping him build an identity in a healthy way.

I made it a priority to compliment him, every day, praising him for all the good things he is. Every time I “caught him” being funny, smart, helpful, generous, thoughtful, or kind, I noted it out loud. Every day, multiple times a day. I tried to help him see that these things are more important to his identity than some exotic “gender.” I also tried to help him feel more at home in his skin. He was given lessons in a sport he enjoys, so he could experience his body being strong and agile. Whatever reduced his alienation from his body, I encouraged.

Open-Ended Questioning

Next, I focused on building our relationship. I asked a lot of open-ended questions, and I made goofy jokes. We laughed a lot. I learned about him and signaled that I was interested in learning more. De-escalating tension and increasing the joy between us was key.

If Andy wanted to wear a vintage shirt that looked like it belonged on a French aristocrat from a few centuries ago, I just shrugged and let it pass. As long as what he chose was somewhere within the boundaries of socially acceptable male clothing, I didn’t make a fuss. After all, being a man (or a woman) is large enough to encompass differences in style, personality, and interest. It’s the trans movement that stereotypes the sexes, telling us that a sensitive, artistic boy must actually be a girl. Nonsense! My son could be a man and wear pastels.

When opportunities arose in everyday life, I pointed out the differences between men and women. In talking about school athletics, I would casually observe, “Oh, in high school, the athletic teams are divided by sex, because by puberty, boys develop more muscles and have more lung capacity than girls.” I never made these into arguments, just objective remarks.

In fact, we didn’t talk about so-called gender much, although I was prepared to. I coached myself on how to respond with neutrality and interest. I was determined only to ask questions. “I’m not clear how, if gender is socially constructed, that it is also an infallible identity deep inside the person?” “Help me understand. If gender is fluid and changeable, why should people get surgeries to alter their bodies permanently?” Books and essays pointing out transgenderism’s inconsistencies helped me clarify my thoughts. Still, I vowed I would only provide my own answers when Andy asked me a question — only, that is, when he was truly curious about my thinking.

I did take Andy to one talk on gender by a speaker who was calm and sympathetic but still supportive of my values. When he asked why he had to go, I simply said, “It’s an important topic, and this point of view is not well-represented in the culture.” Afterward, when I asked him what he thought, he said, “It was fine,” in a tone of voice that indicated the opposite. I dropped it; the talk still gave him a lot to chew on, even if he didn’t want to admit it.

Limiting Technology

One other piece was key: technology. Much trans proselytizing happens online, with anonymous adults love-bombing vulnerable kids. These adults sell the idea that acceptance can be found only in their new trans family and not in their real home. Some parents need to take drastic steps regarding their kids’ online presence. Fortunately, the screen problem was one I had been addressing for a long time, so I could be more moderate.

Andy did not have a smartphone, although even flip phones these days have internet browsers. I gave him a new phone designed for kids, one that had some carefully curated apps but no internet browser. For computer time, he was limited to an hour a day, and I trusted the internet filters I managed on his computer to keep him off the porn sites and the sexually explicit forums that cater to trans-questioning kids. All that limited (but didn’t eliminate) his exposure to pro-trans pressure. As a bonus, I got a much more cheerful kid at home who wasn’t always in front of a screen.

The point of all of this was threefold: to be the good guy, to distract him from all gender talk all the time, and to provide other identity options than the trans one.

Upping My Parenting

Lastly, I played the long game. Even when I didn’t believe it, I kept repeating to myself that the universe wouldn’t give me a kid that I couldn’t care for. That I had his best interests at heart — and online trans gurus didn’t — and I could wait this out with patience. I prioritized him when we had downtime in the evenings, not my phone. And I did the things I needed to, like sleeping enough and getting my own support system, so I could be available to him. Should I have been doing all of this all along as a parent? Well, of course, and in fact, it’s not like I had to do a total 180 when this emergency happened. Some of these things I was already doing, sort of. But I still needed to level up my parenting.

This summer, when he decorated a new phone, there were no rainbow stickers on it.

I wouldn’t say we are out of the woods, but he seems uninterested in the whole gender question. His wardrobe choices are less outrageous, and he’s not anxious, angry, and approval-seeking. Instead, he’s engaged and happy at school and at home, and he doesn’t need to be “different” according to the trans script. He’s happier being different just as himself. That makes me one happy parent.

This byline marks several different individuals, granted anonymity in cases where publishing an article on The Federalist would credibly threaten close personal relationships, their safety, or their jobs. We verify the identities of those who publish anonymously with The Federalist.

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Study: Outside of School, America’s Teens Average 70 Hours Per Week Glued to Screens


BY: JOY PULLMANN | OCTOBER 31, 2022

Read more at https://thefederalist.com/2022/10/31/study-outside-of-school-americas-teens-average-70-hours-per-week-glued-to-screens/

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America’s young people are wasting almost all of their waking free time on entertainment instead of personal development or service to others.

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Americans ages 11 to 18 play online for an average of 10 hours per day, according to a study out today by a research team that includes psychologist Jean Twenge, author of “iGen” and “Generation Me.”

The researchers surveyed 1,600 Americans ages 11 to 18 in May 2022. On average, the study participants reported using digital media an average of 10 hours and four minutes per day, on such entertainment activities as social media, video chat, texting, shopping, and gaming.

That’s a total of 70 hours per week spent online, approximately double the average time spent in school. If teens were suddenly banned from screen time, they could use the time freed from solely that to instead hold down both a full-time and a part-time job. Some of this average may include multitasking, such as texting while scrolling Instagram, the study said, but this total of 70 hours per week spent on screens also did not include time spent watching TV.

Low-Class Behavior Rampant in Middle Class

The researchers say their Institute for Family Studies and Wheatley Institute study is the first to examine the effects of family structure on young people’s screen time. They found that teens living with their own biological and married parents still spent an astonishing amount of time on screens, at an average of nine hours per day. Still, that was nearly two hours fewer per day, on average, than children living without a biological parent, who spent an average of 11 hours per day online.

“The adolescents most likely to be depressed, lonely, and dissatisfied with life are heavy digital media users in stepparent, single-parent, or other non-intact families,” write study authors Twenge, Wendy Wang, Jenet Erickson, and Brad Wilcox. “The link between excessive technology use and poor mental health is larger for youth in non-intact families compared to those in intact families.”

So, according to this study’s findings, children in intact families spend an average of 63 hours per week amusing themselves online, while children in broken families spend an average of 77 hours per week amusing themselves online. The study discovered “especially large differences by family structure in youth time spent on gaming and texting. For example, youth in stepfamilies report spending about 50 minutes a day more texting than youth in intact families.”

Other studies on children’s screen use reinforce this finding — that America’s young people are wasting almost all of their waking free time on entertainment instead of personal growth or service to others. As this IFS/Wheatley study points out, this shift has happened extremely quickly, and it’s not all because of the 2020-2022 Covid lockdowns that also arrested American children’s development. Between 2009 and 2017, “the time high school students spent online doubled.”

The study points out that high screen time for adolescents is correlated with depression, loneliness, lack of sleep, and negative body image. It does not mention the opportunity cost of diverting young people’s free time to entertainment consumption instead of personal development that benefits others, such as learning to repair bicycles, playing outside, testing out jobs through work and internships, or working to save for college or marriage.

The study recommends that parents keep electronic devices out of kids’ bedrooms at night, limit screen time to a few hours per day, delay smartphone access to age 16 or 18, keep kids off social media as long as possible, and arrange for their kids to make friends with kids in families with similar boundaries about tech use to help their children socialize with people instead of robots.

Unchallenged mass tech addiction is one more way our morally bankrupt ruling class incentivizes destructive lower-class behaviors instead of encouraging lower classes to raise their standards. This works to erase the middle class by indulging laziness, like the shameful “quiet quitting” PR campaign. This is another form of societal suicide. Laziness cannot maintain, let alone keep advancing, the United States’ world-class level of scientific and cultural advancement.

Nothing worth having comes without strenuous and sustained effort. Internet addictions erase not only willpower but also self-discipline, excellence, and the communication skills needed to work with others and sustain key relationships such as marriages, as Twenge and others’ academic work shows.

This Is a National Crisis

If a child played with Legos for 10 hours a day, every day, his parents or teacher would have him screened for autism and developmental delays. If a child played pretend for 10 hours a day, at any age, he’d be sent to the school psychologist.

If your child did anything for 10 hours a day, you’d be worried about him and work strenuously to bring some balance to his life, for his own good. Parents need to man up and do the hard work of tightly restricting the addictive side of the internet from their kids, for not only their own good but for the sake of our country. Even 30 hours of screen time a week is obviously excessive for kids. Seventy hours of screen time a week is completely out of control, the willful destruction of our future.

“If an unfriendly foreign power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre educational performance that exists today, we might well have viewed it as an act of war,” wrote the National Commission on Excellence in Education in the famous 1983 report, “A Nation At Risk.” “As it stands, we have allowed this to happen to ourselves.”

The same sentiment applies to today’s American youth, but in a far more advanced condition. If a foreign nation had imposed on Americans the destruction of our mental and moral capacity that results from such rampant internet addiction as this study explores, we’d consider it an act of war. In fact, it’s pretty clear that our top foreign adversary created an addictive social media app for the same reason it helps Mexican drug cartels ship fentanyl across our border: because China knows that if they destroy America’s future, they rule the world.

The only thing standing between them and your kids is you, parents. Maybe a few elected officials could stand with us and take down these internet monopolies that make bank strip-mining our future, or at least require real proof of parental consent for children to use addictive tech products, such as a tiny credit card payment. But don’t wait for others to do your job for you. Put down your phone, grab your kids, and make your family motto the title of one of my childhood books: “Do Something Besides Watching TV.”

If your children enter adulthood having done nothing with 25,000 hours of their lives they can never get back, and with their brains destroyed by internet slot machines, that’s on you. You’re the one paying for their phone and letting them self-destruct. Tell them to get a job or read some books or do anything but sabotage themselves and our society. If you don’t, you deserve to be judged the same way as moms who put Mountain Dew in their babies’ bottles.

Joy Pullmann is executive editor of The Federalist, a happy wife, and the mother of six children. Here’s her printable household organizer for faith-centered holidays. Sign up here to get early access to her next ebook, “101 Strategies For Living Well Amid Inflation.” Her bestselling ebook is “Classic Books for Young Children.” Mrs. Pullmann identifies as native American and gender natural. She is the author of several books, including “The Education Invasion: How Common Core Fights Parents for Control of American Kids,” from Encounter Books. Joy is also a grateful graduate of the Hillsdale College honors and journalism programs.

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School board member to teach sexual ‘pleasure’ classes at her sex shop for kids as young as 9


Reported By Samantha Kamman, Christian Post Reporter | July 12, 2022

Read more at https://www.christianpost.com/news/school-board-member-host-sex-shop-classes-kids-ages-9-to-17.html/

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A member of the Bellingham School Board in Washington state who’s also the owner of a sex shop is offering sexual education classes to children and teens as part of a workshop series on a variety of topics, including gender and sexual identity and sexual anatomy for pleasure. 

The “Uncringe Academy” workshop series is scheduled to take place at the Wink Wink Boutique, a sex toy shop in downtown Bellingham, in August for children ages 9 to 12 and 13- to 17-year-olds. Shop owner Jenn Mason is teaching the lessons, which are described as “sex education that’s based in empowerment and information, rather than shame, fear, and judgment.”

Mason adds that the classes offer “honest, supportive, and inclusive sex education classes to help young people of all genders and sexual identities understand this important part of their life.” 

The workshops will divide children and teens by age. The topics covered during the two-day workshop range from “The science of puberty” to “Sexual anatomy for pleasure and reproduction.” 

Other topics listed include “Safer sex practices for all kinds of sexual activities” and “What IS sex? Kinds of solo and partnered sexual activities.” 

“We use an accepting, informing, and affirming framework,” the workshop’s event page reads. “Our focus is helping young people to feel comfortable around these topics so that they can advocate for their own bodies, health, and well-being.”

As KGMI reported, Mason has been a school board member since 2017. She claims that “it’s possible and important” to talk about sex with kids in “age-appropriate and healthy ways.”

The Bellingham School Board did not immediately respond to The Christian Post’s request for comment, but a spokesperson for Bellingham Schools said in a statement to KGMI that Mason’s sex shop and the classes she’s offering are not connected to the district or its schools. 

Debates regarding children’s exposure to sexually explicit materials also arose last year at a Virginia school district. During a Sept. 23 school board meeting last year, a parent of a student in Fairfax County Public Schools, one of the largest school districts in the U.S., read and shared images from two books available in the district’s high school libraries.

“After seeing a Sept. 9 school board meeting in Texas on pornography in the schools, I decided to check the titles at my child’s school, Fairfax High School,” the parent, Stacy Langton, told board members. She discovered that the same books are available in public school libraries in her school district.  

According to Langton, the books Gender Queer and Lawn Boy depict men and boys having sex and contain graphic sexual descriptions. As she began reading the curse words and sexual acts featured in both books, a school board member interrupted her, noting that “there are children in the audience here.” 

In May, a Loudoun County, Virginia, teacher contacted police after a school librarian allegedly defended the presence of a book containing information about prostitution by claiming that some middle school students are involved in sex work. 

As The Daily Wire reported, the teacher recounted the exchange in a recorded conversation with the police. The exchange reportedly started after the teacher asked the librarian if the school had a copy of the book Seeing Gender by Iris Gottlieb, which includes a chapter titled “‘Sex Work’ Is Not a Bad Term.”

The librarian confirmed the library had the book and asserted it was beneficial to students engaged in sex work. She did not provide the names of any current students, however, only pointing to one that graduated six years before that had allegedly been involved in the practice. 

“She started talking about how there’s kids who come to the library who do sex work, and this makes them feel validated,” the teacher said in the interview. “As a teacher, if you get an individual student coming to you because you’re abused, you have to go [to] the police immediately.”

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Democrats Think Teens Can Kill Babies And Sterilize Themselves But 18 Is Too Young For Self Defense


REPORTED BY: ELLE REYNOLDS | JUNE 09, 2022

Read more at https://thefederalist.com/2022/06/09/democrats-think-teens-can-kill-babies-and-sterilize-themselves-but-18-is-too-young-for-self-defense/

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Unlike committing an abortion or pumping your child full of hormones, the legal purchase or ownership of a gun does not cause anyone harm.

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The same party that wants to raise the legal age for rifle purchases to 21 is also pushing to let minors kill preborn babies and mutilate their own genitals. American adults aged 18-20 already aren’t allowed to purchase handguns (and many states don’t allow them to obtain a concealed carry permit), more or less blocking them from practicing the basic self-defense precaution of stowing a defensive weapon to stop a bad guy with a gun. Now, Second Amendment deniers also want to bar these Americans from owning a rifle, a popular choice for home defense.

But while Democrats want to punish millions of law-abiding, prospective young gun owners for the evil, disturbed actions of a few of their peers, they’re also demanding that kids far younger be allowed to commit infanticide and mutilate their own bodies.

Letting Teens Commit Baby Murder

The radical abortion bill that Democrats renewed after the leak of a draft Supreme Court opinion overturning Roe v. Wade sought to virtually eliminate any restrictions on abortion up to the point of birth. Minors are already allowed to obtain abortions, but the legislation would also nuke state laws mandating parental notification for such young girls. Lest you think this is an incidental inclusion, Democrats have specifically attacked state parental notification laws.

Planned Parenthood’s website doesn’t even try not to sound like a pervert offering kids candy: “If you’re under 18, you may or may not have to tell a parent in order to get an abortion,” it teases.

The ACLU estimates that 350,000 girls younger than 18 get pregnant in America every year, and that 31 percent (or roughly 108,500) of them choose to terminate their babies’ lives. There were 652,639 abortions reported to the Centers for Disease Control in 2014; in the same year, the Guttmacher Institute found that 0.2 percent of abortions — or roughly 1,300 — were executed on girls 14 years old or younger.

Fighting for these young, impressionable girls to get abortions doesn’t just push them into the commission of murder, with the likely accompaniment of lifelong guilt, it also subjects them to trauma themselves. Sarah Eubanks, a former abortion facility employee, described one 12-year-old girl whose grandmother brought her in for an abortion:

I remember that look on her face that she just didn’t understand what was going on. She didn’t want to be there. She started moving around and the doctor said, ‘You need to hold her down.’ I did put my hands on her and said ‘You have to settle down, you gotta be still, you’re gonna hurt yourself. You have to be still.’ And within an instant, she pushed her feet out of the stirrups and started running down the hall with the speculum in her vagina with blood running down her legs. The doctor said, ‘I’m not touching this.’ She was that upset. She just didn’t want to be there. She was screaming.

The hundreds of thousands of preborn babies’ lives lost to the abortionist’s scalpel every year haven’t dampened Democrats’ desires to let adolescent girls (or any women) make the decision to take a human life. But at the same time, the left will throw gun death numbers in your face to push their anti-gun agenda, even when firearm-related homicides are a fraction of abortion numbers, and are far outpaced by defensive gun use. Pew reported 19,384 murders involving a firearm in 2020, compared to up to 3 million “defensive gun uses by victims” per year, according to a CDC study.

Not only do Democrats want to let children kill their babies, they want to let children make damaging and irreversible changes to their own bodies.

Letting Children Sterilize Themselves

A report from Florida Medicaid found that “Available medical literature provides insufficient evidence that sex reassignment through medical intervention is a safe and effective treatment for gender dysphoria,” and “the available evidence demonstrates that these treatments cause irreversible physical changes and side effects that can affect long-term health.” As a result, Florida Medicaid found that experimental procedures like cross-sex hormones or surgeries were insufficiently safe for coverage.

The report also listed the irreversible or potentially irreversible effects of cross-sex hormones, including facial and body hair growth, male pattern baldness, a deepening voice, and an enlarged clitoris for females taking male hormones, and breast growth, infertility, and sexual dysfunction for males taking female hormones. The irreversible effects of surgical interventions, such as elective mastectomies or genital amputations, are obviously far higher.

But those concerning effects didn’t stop the Biden administration’s Justice Department from sending an ominous memo to state attorneys general, threatening legal violations for states that don’t offer various damaging interventions to children.

“A ban on gender-affirming procedures, therapy, or medication may be a form of discrimination against transgender persons,” the memo stated. It also had the arrogance to claim that “it is well established within the medical community that gender-affirming care for transgender youth is not only appropriate but often necessary for their physical and mental health.”

The Biden Department of Health and Human Services’ Office of Population Affairs further spelled out just what is meant by “gender-affirming care,” including social treatment of a child as the opposite sex, puberty blockers, artificial pumps of hormones like testosterone or estrogen, or surgeries like elective mastectomies and amputation of reproductive body parts. OPA recommends “social affirmation” for “any age,” puberty blockers at any time during puberty, hormones beginning in early adolescence, and surgeries for adults or “case-by-case in adolescence.” Some parents try to claim their children “came out as trans” as toddlers.

But No Guns for Law-Abiding Young Adults!

These procedures threaten lifelong damage to children who undergo them, yet the Biden administration and other Democrats want unfettered access to them and punishments for health professionals and parents who question them. They also celebrate the idea of teenage girls taking the lives of their preborn babies, with no parental consent and with no consideration of whether a child has the mental maturity to make such a decision — never mind the fact that it’s an act of murder.

But Democrats are all too happy to further erode Americans’ Second Amendment rights by arbitrarily raising the minimum purchase age for a rifle from one adult age to another. Unlike committing an abortion or pumping your child full of hormones, the legal purchase or ownership of a gun does not cause anyone harm. On the contrary, it often protects against it.

Yet Democrats support letting pubescent children abuse themselves and adolescents kill their children, while insisting that an 18-year-old who passes a federal background check can be denied the constitutional right to self-defense. Are 18-year-olds too immature for constitutional rights? Are children and teenagers old enough for a concocted right to harm themselves and others? I would argue it’s neither — but it can’t be both.

Elle Reynolds is an assistant editor at The Federalist and received her B.A. in government from Patrick Henry College with a minor in journalism. You can follow her work on Twitter at @_etreynolds.

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