What the Hell is Wrong with Parents?

Isn’t the first responsibility to safeguard children from harm?

Speaking as a mother myself and from what I’ve observed working as a midwife, one of the most overwhelming feelings when taking home that first baby is fear. “I don’t know what I’m doing!” is so common that parents make jokes about it. I have been asked where the instruction manual is and asked if I am sure the hospital knows what’s it’s doing. The sudden realization that you and you alone (even if you are with a partner) are fully responsible for the fate of a brand-new human being can be totally overwhelming. There is very little that looks more vulnerable than a baby mammal.

When my first child was about eight years old, in another city there was a tragic event. A young girl was abducted walking to school and was never seen alive again. The drama lasted for months and brought fear into the heart of every parent. For it turned out that in a classic true crime story, she had been lured into a stranger’s vehicle and had been eventually murdered by a man who dumped her body in an obscure spot that was overlooked in the search for her for several days.

Every school went on a massive “stranger danger” campaign to enforce to children the importance of not only not getting into a vehicle with a stranger, but to in general, be a bit picky about which strange adults children should be listening to at all.

When I was growing up the message was clear; if I got myself into trouble or found myself in a sticky situation, I should approach an adult to help me out. The message to my children’s generation was basically the same, but with a subtle twist. Not all adults are trustworthy so find someone in uniform (like a policeman) or a woman (which is fair enough; how many women make the news for randomly abducting and murdering children?).

In today’s world, the biggest danger to children’s physical and psychological wellbeing is still adults, but not the ones driving around in vans looking for little girls walking to school on their own. No, today’s children are in severe danger every time they go to school, or present to their doctors or therapists, not to mention their very own parents if they fail to conform to some idealized version of gender that matches their sex.

Because now it would seem that every boy who loves to wear glittery nail polish and every girl who uses her dolls for target practice is asked to consider if they are “really” the gender that matches their sex. Adults caring for them may suggest that there is something wrong with them, but they can be “fixed” so that their bodies match our adult ideals.

How did we get here from there?

Parenting and what is regarded as acceptable behavior are cultural artifacts. That is, there is no immutable ‘rule’ about when children are allowed to do things on their own and or at what age certain activities become acceptable. When I was growing up, we were expected to walk to and from school by ourselves nearly from the commencement of formal education. If it was really raining, sometimes our mother would relent as we whined for a ride, but it was not a certainty. We were expected to figure stuff out as we grew and only expect parental assistance if we asked for it; I don’t remember either of my parents being invested in my homework or play activities. When I read Bill Bryson’s memoir “The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid” I loved the bit about his mother’s instructions that he was to go outside and play and only come in if someone was bleeding uncontrollably or their hair was on fire.

Well over time that spirit of ‘leave those kids alone’ clearly changed and by 2008, when Lenore Skenazy wrote an article about letting her nine-year-old son ride the New York subway system by himself, she was publicly excoriated and earned the title of “America’s Worst Mom”. Rather than admit she’d endangered her son, she wrote a book and founded the Free Range Kids movement, which has grown to become the Let Grow website.

Reading through this website it is apparent that something has gone seriously awry with modern parenting practices.

I am not a million years old, but applying modern day, contemporary Western parenting rules to my own childhood, my mother would be in hot water for:

• Allowing me and my siblings to walk to school (up to and including high school) on my own with no adult supervision

• Leaving us home alone for short periods of time with age-appropriate instructions

• Leaving us in the car, happily reading books while she ran into a store to buy a few items

• Going to the public library by ourselves

• Riding public buses by ourselves

• Going outside to play with neighboring children, without a prior discussion with any other parents

• Allowing us to feel bored and not filling up our schedules 24/7 with enriching activities

In short, from the days when I was a child, parenting has gone from active non-involvement to a place where some parents are not comfortable with their kids playing outside in their own (fenced and safe) back yards unless an adult is available to supervise them.

“Helicopter parents” is a term that has come to sum up the dangers of over-involved parents who hover constantly just inside their children’s orbits, ready to swoop in at the first sign of “danger” (which includes the occasional normal hurt feelings that occur when interacting with others) and protecting them from any sort of failure, big or small.

This phenomenon has some real disadvantages for children. Turning 18 now means that young adults can legally do anything that adults are allowed to do, without any prior practice in exercising responsibility. Rather than gradually moving towards independence, having risk tested their own abilities, these no longer children can be overcome with the giddy freedoms that earlier generations had taken 18 years to acquire, and this can lead to some very bad decision making on their part.

Unintended consequences of “too much” parenting

Childhood obesity is reaching epic proportions and one reason is that unlike previous generations, today’s children are not spending their time playing outside with their friends or the other kids in their neighborhood. Children are being inadvertently infantilized by their parents so that even if they move away from home for higher education, their children are totally dependent on them for most decisions, large and small. No wonder today’s generation of 20-year-olds have rocketing rates of mental health distress, requiring constant “trigger warnings” and “safe spaces” on campuses to spare them from the vagaries of real “adulting”.

We now appear to be living in a time when children are believed to need protection against actually growing up at all. With one major exception: gender “identification”. Which is really code for the sexualization of children.

Indoctrination starts here.

Why do I talk about sexualizing children, rather than follow the queer theory playbook around a constructed gender identity? Because the transgender agenda is built on deliberately conflating sex and gender with the aim of commodifying childhood to serve predominantly the sexual fetishes of men.

But wait, this is OK now?

Over a decade ago, this article warned of the perils of the TV show “Toddlers and Tiaras” because of its blatant sexualizing of three-year-old girls. If you don’t consider there’s something wrong in dressing toddlers and preschoolers as hookers and strippers (in some cases wearing padded bras and butts), then I suggest there is something wrong with your cognitive functioning.

Imbuing children with adult sexuality causes harm. It is being imposed on children, rather than being chosen by them.

“It’s not gonna lick itself!” is not referring to ice cream cones.

Unfortunately, the children there weren’t able to blur the fact that this guy forgot to put on any underwear.

What’s the real lesson this little girl is being taught?

These practices don’t just cause grave harms to girls, but to boys as well. Making anyone to be no more than the sum of their body parts objectifies and dehumanizes everyone. It teaches little girls that to be “sexy” is the way to succeed in life and it teaches boys that girls are there for using, not to be regarded as actual people.

This is not about children exploring their own bodies or a bit of (as it used to be called) “playing doctor” with the neighborhood kids (who are all roughly the same age). This is grooming children, preparing them to have no boundaries when it comes to adult commands.

School is where you send your kid to be brainwashed

As governments, corporations and well everywhere became captured by queer theory, there is now no guaranteed environment where you can know that your children will be spared the indoctrination required to support the false idea that transgenderism is a normal, healthy state for human beings, that everyone has a gender identity, and this doesn’t always match your sexed body.

It used to be easy to withdraw children from a class or a session that you didn’t believe in or agree with. Parents have taken children out of for example, both religious education and sex education classes. That is now impossible as gender ideology is woven through the entire curriculum. Here, in their own words, is a primer for promoting a cause by stealth and bamboozling parents who wouldn't approve if they understood what their children were really being taught. How many parents would think that it is appropriate to teach children who are eight and nine years old that a sign of sexual arousal is that your nipples become erect? How many children of this age need to know about the quantity of seminal fluid produced per ejaculation? Why do five-year-olds need to be taught about adult sexuality?

Catch ‘em early for greater effectiveness.

When schools are inundated with rainbow flags you can be sure that the bit of the alphabet soup that is being celebrated and promoted is the one letter that is “T”. Lesbians and gays are so yesterday. Today’s children need to be at least nonbinary (sic) to get any special attention from the school community.

A key part of this strategy is teaching children to keep secrets from their parents. Children are told to live a double life. They can be a boy at school, but remain a girl at home (or vice versa). So children are being taught that the people who have invested (in every possible meaning of this word) everything in their well-being don’t know as much about or care about them than some adult who spends a few hours a day in their proximity is the clear message this sends. Imagine how unsettling this is for children.

How many teachers do you know who have special training in child psychology, pediatrics, endocrinology and pharmacology? So, if not, why are they telling children they can change their sex and if parents don’t agree the parents are wrong?

Minor Attracted Person please. Pedophile is such an unpleasant word!

In previous generations, deviant men who sexually abused children were met with united societal opprobrium. Now that they have been re-branded as just one more aspect of ‘normal’ sexuality (on that you know, that spectrumy thing), even serious academics are promoting the validity of men getting off on sexually abusing children. And when you are talking about children who have been deliberately confused by trusted adults to not believe in their own bodily autonomy, it’s not hard to go the next step in convincing them that “this is our special secret”.

Would any other time in history be full of prepubescent children “coming out” as “demisexual” or “pansexual” without being instructed in sexuality by an adult?

Munchausen by Proxy parents/transing away the gay

The modern day poster child for the happy transgender kid is probably Jazz Jennings. His career as a professional “trans child” commenced when he was six years old; by that time with the active promotion of his mother and the participation of his family, he had already been living as a girl for two years.

Now 22 years old and having grown up largely in front of the public via his TV show I am Jazz, this is hopefully increasingly being seen as not the “reality” show it is touted as, but as proof that um, no one can change their sex, not even those who have every resource geared up to this end. If “gender affirming care” did not prevent Jazz from having a severe mental health crisis that prevented him from starting the next phase of his life (going to university), why should those who haven’t got even a fraction of his family/medical system support feel that they will fare any better?

Jazz is now a medical patient for the rest of his life. He will never have any biological children. He will never have an orgasm and he will never have a truly pleasurable sex life; if he doesn’t use regularly, and keep using dilators in his neovagina, it will close up and he will not be able to have any form of penetrative sex.  

Needless to say, Jazz’s mother Jeanette Jennings is his greatest fan and promoter. None of this “transition” would have happened without her active participation. Munchausen by Proxy is the name of a psychiatric disorder characterized by parents (usually mothers) who use their children to gain attention for themselves by concocting (and often creating) illnesses in their children that can actually be life threatening.

In Jazz’s case, he is now worth about US$5 million so can comfortably support his medical needs and the rest of his family, but it would seem that the role of the ultimate “stage mother” persona around Jeanette (when Jazz was a child) is not reward enough for her motherly care for this now young adult. Would your mother wake you up every night to follow a complicated post-surgical protocol and then announce to the world details of your intimate care?

When dealing with children, nothing happens without the active participation of parents and it’s easy to see that in today’s climate, the “trans” route is being seen as the way to be seen as more than just average, to be seen as “special”.

And then we have the homophobic parents, whose worst nightmare is that their child will grow up to be gay. The poster girl for this would have to be Susie Green, who until recently was CEO of Mermaids, the charity in the UK which “helps” children by sending them breast binders without parental consent and also gives children tips on how they can outwit their parents who don’t agree that they can change sex.

In her infamous TED X talk, she admits her fear when she observed her not masculine enough son who she feared would turn out to be gay. No problem: for his 16^th birthday she took him on vacation to Thailand and had those naughty boy bits whacked off. I guess no happy sex life is better than a same sex coupling, according to her.

And although Thailand performs the most “sex change” operations per country, this is because so many foreigners go there for that purpose. Iran is runner up, but that’s not where you go if you are a Westerner wanting surgery you can’t get or afford at home, that’s because homosexuality is illegal in Iran, but if you “change” your sex, voila, it’s all good.

Whatever happened to safeguarding?

It used to be taken as a sign of sexual abuse if prepubescent children talked about sex or even body parts that normally they would have no knowledge of. But now kids are being deliberately subjected to adult sexual modes of behavior from toddler hood on. Children are being regularly and deliberately not only exposed to, but “educated” in practices and a state of eroticism well before they could possibly have any understanding of the wider ramifications around the long-term effects of these. Affirming children in developing a precocious sexualization and influencing them into erasing any embodied boundaries exposes them to unspeakable harms from nefarious adults.

To “affirm” children sounds very positive, until you realize that all you are really doing is colluding with an immature brain that has come up with a false conclusion because you can’t be born in the “wrong” body.