Yes, Mothers Do Know Best

A Quick Guide to Helping Your Child Desist

Being Proactive is the Only Way

Helping your child desist is not easy or quick but becoming proactive and trusting your intuition is crucial. Don’t wait for your child to come out of this phase on their own—they don’t have emotional or cognitive resources to do it without your help.

You Do Have a Good Relationship with your Child

You know your child best. If you feel that the recent months or years have weakened your good relationship with your child, drop everything and work on rebuilding it—it requires a focused effort, but it is not as difficult as you think. Remember that despite appearances, your child still needs his or her mom more than you think. Having an upset teen doesn’t mean that the core of your relationship is broken.

The Good News (and the Bad News)

Your child is going through a normal unhappy adolescence and is attempting to individuate. The good thing is that this is all normal and healthy and thus will pass when this developmental phase evolves into the next. The bad thing is that the individuation via transgender identity is a maladaptive coping strategy and the entire world seems to affirm the delusion. This complicates things. Don’t get discouraged when your child doesn’t listen to facts and calls you transphobic. Teens all think that they know better, and while incredibly annoying, this is developmentally normal.

Do Talk About the Facts

For goodness sake, do talk to your child about the facts. Yes, they will cry, yell, storm out, shut down, call your names—at first. This doesn’t mean that you should be tiptoeing around those big feelings and waiting until your child will magically realize they have been misled by a cult. They need the facts about biological reality like they need air. Their initial emotional reaction is entirely normal and this doesn’t mean that sharing facts is ineffective, unproductive, and should be avoided. Remember that your child still implicitly trusts you. They are still subconsciously immersed in the feeling that you are their Entire Universe. Your child will not change his or her mind based on a single video that you might share, but without this video or that article there will be no growth and no foundation on which to build their path to desistance.

Do Talk about Gender

If you won’t talk about gender because it is uncomfortable and scary, who will? Your child’s non-affirming therapist? When a therapist tells you not to talk about gender and not to talk about the facts this therapist is telling you not to parent. No matter how non-affirming, any therapist was trained in the context and with the modalities of centering on their client above all else. In their training they were taught that it is the therapist who knows best, not the mother. An emotionally and cognitively immature teen will absolutely take therapist’s validation of his or her feelings as a validation of his or her gender identity. Only mothers know their child well enough to balance validation of feelings with the presentations of facts. Treasure your bond with your child, learn how to strengthen it through conflict and don’t outsource important conversations to those who are getting paid to have those conversations.

Do Not be Afraid of Big Emotions

Adolescence is the awkward time of big awkward emotions. It is normal for your child to be upset when their narrative is contradicted with the truth. Being upset and unregulated is the only way they can learn to regulate their emotions. If you are afraid to upset your child or you are afraid of being upset yourself, your child will be struggling to learn how to regulate their emotions at 30.

Do Not be Afraid of Conflict

Modeling to your child that you can have a fight and make up without affecting the core of your relationship is the best gift you can give to your child. Words are not violence. We grow through conflict. We grow closer through conflict and resolution.

Do Change One Thing about Yourself

None of us is perfect. We don’t have to be perfect. But we are good enough, and that’s plenty. This said, we each have one thing that we can change about ourselves and our parenting. Put your effort into changing one thing—this exercise will help you AND, indirectly, your child.

Do Not Expect Instant Results

It takes a while to change one’s mind, especially when you are a stubborn adolescent. No one ever changes their mind based on a single presentation of facts, especially if we are emotionally attached to the issue at hand. However, no one ever will change their mind without any facts at all. Desistance is a process. Conflict, big emotions, and uncomfortable conversations are a part of this process, and not a sign of failure. Be gentle with your child and with yourself—that one thing that you need to change about yourself won’t happen overnight either, and that’s okay too.

Do Fearlessly Expect Desistance

There are no guarantees in life. However, the chances of your child desisting are incomparably greater than the chances of your child being stuck in the maladaptive identity search, especially if their mother continues to parent with love, resilience, and a healthy dose of reality.

Also by this author:

Not a Desistance Story

The Many Months to Desistance

There are Two Phases

What Have I Changed My Mind About?

ROGD, AGP, Mothers, and Sons—Common Sense Thoughts by Not a Psychologist