42 Comments

Parenting is one of the hardest jobs on the planet... and one we have no training in... other than wanting to do better than some of what our own parents did when they themselves didn't know how to do better. Seems like this is why our species takes sooooooooo long to grow and change. Each generation we move forward tiny increments. One thing I DO know for sure, is that most moms are determined to offer the best parenting they can and not repeat some of the hard things that happened in their own childhoods. Thing is, as we now see, no one can even BEGIN to guess what life and times will throw at us that was unheard of before. So maybe we can start by forgiving ourselves for our mistakes, honor ourselves for the heartfelt effort we put in even though in retrospect we wish we could have done better. And just give ourselves a break. And keep aiming for improvement... give ourselves as much love as we give to our children. Our "best" is different from year to year. Yet still we aim for it. That is an honorable thing and worthy of acknowledgement and some praise. It is also worth modeling.

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The pain we feel is real & should not be dismissed but acted on. I don’t want to learn how to cope with rejection. The whole thing rings alarm bells. This ideology is wrong, what it does to us is wrong. We mustn’t shy away from our instinctive feelings. Our kids are hurting themselves

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Please don't beat yourself up over this. My wife was a loving stay-at-home mom and I was a very involved father... yet I lost BOTH my kids to the trans contagion. I've resolved simply to be the best parent that I can be, and to trust that sanity may yet return to our damaged nation.

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Thank you for this wish list and brutal truths.

We all have our version of wishes, truths, regrets, time machine fantasies--and that's okay.

Every parent makes mistakes. Perhaps we are incorrect in what went wrong. Will we ever know? Perhaps not.

Sure, it's the culture. Sure, it's the internet. Sure, it's a social contagion.

Yet, we can all think back to do-overs we wish we had done.

Honest reflection is a good thing.

Dwelling on what we cannot change is not.

Visiting the regrets part of our brains is healthy, as long as we don't get stuck there.

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Don't over think it, or blame yourself. Keep it simple, fight for truth, reason, sanity, flourishing, biology, families, women, all children, marriage, long term meaningful relationships. The damage done is amazing. Friends, coworkers, family members, neighbors, clergy, experts, teachers, people in positions of power, entire organizations dedicated to wellbeing of children and women, in the US Title 9 - too many failed spectacularly defining what a woman/man is. We must continue to push back, there is no other choice. This is an attack on everything. Stand strong and do not waiver on truth.

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Don't beat yourself up too much. I quit good professional brain work to be 100% present raising my kids and it still happened. Who expected the trans cult? And, that it would be pushed so hard by all of our institutions including at high school?

The AAP and the APA, and the Federal and State governments never promoted Heaven's Gate.

“Why ‘Gender Dysphoria’ is a lie”

https://dionneinlondon.substack.com/p/why-gender-dysphoria-is-a-lie

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I hope that you too, mom, can forgive yourself for the things you didn’t know. We all do the best we can. Truly.

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Maybe you're putting too much blame on your parenting? Don't underestimate the power of social media to mislead our kids and allow bad ideas to flourish. This gender ideology is pervasive right now, and teens are immersed in it.

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What about when you have a daughter that is soo much smarter than you, who never got the intellectual stimulation she needed from school, so totally disengaged with her education & instead turned to the internet & reveled in every single radical idea so she could be as outrageous & as shocking as she could be to get a reaction from people, & now hates you bc you weren't the "mom" the internet said you should be? And everything is bc of what you did wrong or just didn't do according to the "experts"? And everything you've ever done is "abusive"?!? I think one of the worst things we as a society have done is let the schools push us to diagnose & label our children & drag them to shrinks & therapists & put them on drugs. We were sheep, thinking we were doing what was best. All it did was make my kid feel broken. I have learned the educators are anything but the experts.

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100% this.

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I got the bad, abusive mom thing, too. Mine tried to convince me when she was still in high school that she needed medication for anxiety. At lease I was smart enough to realize that she only wanted meds because a large amount of kids she went to HS with were already on meds (anxiety, sleep, ADHD etc) and it would give her "cred". I wouldn't dare send her to a psychologist since I knew of the past schemes some of the quacks had unleashed upon society. I know it came to from her high school (when she took AP psych), but I think it was pushed more within friend groups than by teachers.

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First I want to say that this ideology is more pervasive than any parenting style. I was the polar opposite parent and even homeschooled, and my child still was trapped in this cult for two years. No point in wishing things were different--we all did what we thought was right at that time.

My second point that this poignant and painful piece of writing is such a clear illustration of the general cultural shift that has weakened families by convincing mothers that motherhood is boring and unfulfilling and that in order to parent well one needed an expert opinion. From pregnancy and onward, our instincts are undermined by "experts" and instead of listening to our intuitions we follow ideologies and thus lose our confidence. So when 15 years later our child is struggling we have already been trained to think of ourselves as incapable, and we listen, open mouthed, to the next "expert." Thus the subtle and implicit destruction of the family becomes blatant and physical. There must be ways for parents to stop accepting this alienation and detachment as normal, and to parent for connection and attachment, including parenting teens and young adults in the same involved and empowered way. It was Douglas Murray who said that we owe our children more hand-holding nowadays because the world has become entirely crazy. Young adults need to be hearing their parents' values, opinions, and arguments. Families are not built on detachment.

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I wish I could "like" this comment a million times. Thank you, Paranoid Mother.

If you haven't read it, see Abigail Shrier's latest book, Bad Therapy. Another brilliant critique from a true warrior woman.

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You are the only mother your daughter has, and your worries made sense, make sense. Please don't beat yourself up, as you likely know, some parents did the opposite to what you did and their kids fell in, also.

This post always comes to mind for me: https://www.pittparents.com/p/sorry

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the National Organization of School Nurses stated about 1.5 years ago that nurses should not inform parents if a child came to them with gender dysphoria issues? This seems very negligent to me as it appears to be a cry for help and if a gender dysphoric child threatens to hurt him/herself then the parent, counselor, principal, teacher, nurse all need to know and have a meeting to implement a plan of care to prevent self harm.

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Wow! Thank you for your brutal honesty and sharing your bared soul with the world. Sending hope for strength, inner peace with self love and acceptance. You are not alone in this pain, and the truth will eventually be revealed. Hoping we can be a part of the healing that will be needed. We did our best as parents, with the knowledge that we had at the time, as our parents did with us. We are human and worthy of love. We are so much more than our mistakes.

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It is only natural for us parents to look to ourselves to find some fault, some mistake, something we must have done to make this happen in our kids. Don’t. There is a point in our kids’ lives where our influence recedes and the influence of their peers becomes everything. And that is the age at which the trans idea takes hold.

I don’t think there is anything we as parents could have done to prevent this, short of taking away the electronic devices and moving the family to a farm in the middle of nowhere for the duration of their puberty.

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So well said!

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THank you for putting into words what so many of us feel, the re-hashing of every mistake that we made that maybe was the straw that broke the camel's back, or just the accumulation of years of mistakes, the second-guessing, the guilt, the yearning. I think it's good for all of us to be self-aware and reflect on how we could have done better. But I hope that OP is giving herself some grace. You are a good mom. We are all good parents. If we weren't, we wouldn't be here, doing the hard thing.

We don't get playbooks for parenting, and our cohort is WRITING the playbook on parenting trans as we live through it. It hurts my heart to feel so much regret from you, but it's also a good reminder for me to not let guilt or shame overshadow the life we still have to live and the people we can still serve. Over these holidays, let's all promise to give ourselves a break. We did our best.

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To the author. I was one of those who stayed at home and parented my kids with self confidence and plenty of mistakes (nobody lost an eye!) and with some doubts that I was doing the "right" thing. My kid still turned to this "trans" nightmare and she hasn't spoken to me in 2 1/2 yrs....and very rarely speaks to her father or sibling. Were you (or I) a perfect parent?.....Nope (they don't exist), but we were perfectly decent parents! You are beating yourself up because the holidays make us focus on family and the "before" times. Cut yourself some slack......you were a perfectly decent parent!

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I too was a stay at home mom. Baked cookies, on days off school took trips to the zoo, park, etc, involved in their school and at church with Sunday school. We’ve got a daughter that subscribes to queer theory and a son (not yet medicalized) but goes by a girls name with friends. I guess I should have done more to shelter them from society and social media. It’s t is a situation I never could have imagined myself in.

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Nothing you could have done! At some point their peers become the people that they listen to and admire.....and that's normal. We can't pick our children's friends! It is a social contagion that has taken over in society (like Emo or Goth), but it has a medical side that makes it extremely dangerous.

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Ann & MLisa: you need to see the Heretics/Andrew Gold interview/podcast with Dr. Az Hakeem. He says at one point about watching the trans craze something like, "we're not mad. It's the whole world colluding in this madness that's mad." That's the part that individual parents and families can't combat--the madness of the world affirming this nonsense, all in the name of "kindness."

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