Over the past several years, it seems like the transgender movement came out of nowhere. Almost overnight, the commonly accepted definition of “gender” went from male and female to however one chooses to identify on a particular day. Part of the reason for this rapid change was the strategy that transgender proponents utilized, many of which are noticeably similar to the tactics used by cult-like organizations.

This week on Family Policy Matters, host Traci DeVette Griggs welcomes Maria Keffler, author of the book Desist, Detrans & Detox: Getting Your Child Out of the Gender Cult and co-founder of Advocates Protecting Children, to discuss how to protect your children from the cult-like tactics that the transgender movement has utilized.

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Family Policy Matters

Protecting Your Child from the “Gender Cult”: Part 2 (with Maria Keffler)

TRACI DEVETTE GRIGGS: Thanks for joining us this week for Family Policy Matters. Today we are joined for part two of an interview with Maria Keffler, who is author of two important books for parents, Desist, Detrans, Detox: Getting Your Children Out of the Gender Cult, and her new book, Time Tested Parenting: Raising Healthy Children in a Hostile World. We spent a lot of time talking about her first book last week, but today we’re going to talk about her second book, Time Tested Parenting. Maria is co-founder of Advocates Protecting Children and the Arlington Parent Coalition in Virginia. Maria Keffler, welcome to Family Policy Matters.

MARIA KEFFLER: Thank you so much. It’s good to be here again, Traci.

TRACI DEVETTE GRIGGS: A lot of sobering things that we had to talk about last week, but you said that this week, your new book, Time Tested Parenting is a happier book.

MARIA KEFFLER: It is. It’s mainly a manual of what we know about raising children. What are the good practices that have been time tested and come out of parenting experience, out of educational psychology, out of psychology, out of family studies. What do we know are the good things that parents should do to raise healthy children? Now the second part of the book, there’s a part two that has some parenting that’s related specifically to what’s going on in the culture today, dealing with the transgender ideology issue, if your kids are in the public schools, how can you navigate that? So, there’s that part in the back that deals with that, but the first two thirds to three quarters of the book is just what’s good parenting.

TRACI DEVETTE GRIGGS: So, talk about some of the things. What are the key points you make in your book that parents need to do to raise these healthy, happy children?

MARIA KEFFLER: Parents need to understand how kids develop. You know, a two-year-old is very different from a five-year-old, which is not at all the same character as an 11-year-old or an 18-year-old. And children have different needs at different stages in life, but throughout life, they need to know that they’re loved. They need to know that they’re protected. One of the things that I see in our culture that’s been very disheartening to me is this idea that you’re a helpless victim of everything that’s going on around you. When I was coming through school, when I came through my teacher training, it was impressed upon us that we should teach kids to have an internal locus of control. Locus of control means where’s the power. And if you have an internal locus of control, you believe that your decisions and choices drive your outcomes. So, if I study hard, I will get good grades. If I work hard at my job, I will get a promotion. Today, I see kids being taught that there’s an external locus of control, which means all the power is outside of you. If you get a poor grade on a test, that’s because you have a mean teacher or the test wasn’t fair. If you don’t get promoted at your job, it’s because your boss is discriminating against you. And kids are no longer taught that what I do matters. They’re being taught that what other people do to me is what matters, and I need to control all these other people. And we know people with an internal locus of control make better husbands and wives, better friends, better workers, just better civic participants than people who think, Oh, I just got a raw deal because nobody’s treating me fair. So that’s one of the main points of the book is helping children to develop a good ethic of, I control many aspects of my life.

TRACI DEVETTE GRIGGS: Wow, let’s talk a little bit more about that, because I think we all see that.

MARIA KEFFLER: I want to give kids the benefit of the doubt. The financial situation in this country is much different now than it was in the 80s. It is hard for kids to establish themselves on their own, but I think as parents, we’re not really doing them any favors if we don’t kind of push them out of the nest a little bit. I see a lot of kids coming out of college and then coming back home and living at home again, and that used to be the way it was. You know, it used to be multiple generations all lived under the same house, but that was when we were farming, and we were an agrarian community that really needed all of the manpower there. But what I’m seeing now is kids coming back because, yes, it’s more comfortable in mom and dad’s house. I get free Wi Fi, and I get meals made for me, and we’re really undermining their autonomy. Yeah, my husband and me too. You know, our first place was a rental and our second place was a tiny little townhouse, and we just kept working to get to a more financially stable place. But if we were allowed to just live at home and live off mom and dad, I think that really undermines kids’ sense of autonomy and ability to become productive members of society.

TRACI DEVETTE GRIGGS: What else besides this internal locus of control that you suggest parents and even grandparents would help to instill in their kids and grandkids? What else do you find in your book?

TRACI DEVETTE GRIGGS: Right. And I’m sure with your son, that you probably celebrated the fact that he wanted to push the boundaries. As an adult, that’s actually a really good thing, right?

MARIA KEFFLER: Well, I talk a bit about discipline, and discipline often is seen as a dirty word. You know, people are equating discipline with abuse and oh, I don’t want to hold my kids back. I want them to, you know, have freedom to explore. Well, there’s a balance there. Discipline is not a dirty word. Discipline just means training, and the younger a child is, the more discipline parents need to enact because, you know, a two-year-old will run across the street if mom doesn’t have hold of that child’s arm. That’s discipline. It’s protection. It’s putting a boundary around the child. Boundaries are not bad things. You know, when we’re exercising our muscles, we have resistance, right? We have weights, and that resistance is what helps us develop and become stronger. Boundaries are like that. We’re putting resistance up to protect our children, and they have freedom within those boundaries, but they can’t go outside of them. And I think about my son, my first born, when I would take him to the playground, most kids, when you take them to the playground, they run to a piece of equipment and start swinging or sliding or whatever. Not my child. My child, when I set him down, he would run the perimeter of the playground trying to find a way out. I could only take him to playgrounds that had fences because he would do that every time, he’d run the perimeter to see if he could get out. And then once he realized he couldn’t get out, then he’d be like, Okay, I guess I’ll go swing or play. He’s always been pushing the boundaries, but those were there for his safety. There’s plenty of great things to do inside the boundary. And as he got older, the boundaries got wider. He’s an adult now, but when he was younger, I needed to put those boundaries in place, and so that’s something I talk about quite a bit in the book. Is that training children starts with safety and with teaching them what they need to know to have self-control, because the goal of parenting should be to work ourselves out of a job. We should get to the place where our children exert their own self-control, make good decisions, and at that point we can be their friends. But when they’re growing up, we’re not their friends, we’re not their buddies. We’re their counselors, we’re their managers, we’re their parole officers, we’re their cheerleaders, we’re their backup, but we don’t become their friends until they are fully autonomous and self-controlled. And that’s the goal that we want to achieve with them.

MARIA KEFFLER: Yeah.

TRACI DEVETTE GRIGGS: But as a child, I’m sure that was a difficult thing to manage.

MARIA KEFFLER: Yeah, it could be. Well, my mother-in-law, when he was little, she said, “that boy is going to do more for your sanctification in Christ than anything in your life so far.” Yeah, I think he did.

TRACI DEVETTE GRIGGS: Well, great. Okay, so we’ve got this internal locus of control. Discipline means training and boundaries, which is good way to look at that. What are some other things that you discuss in your book?

MARIA KEFFLER: There’s a section where I just go through different topics. And we talk about dating. We talk about, how do you teach your kids that abstinence is a good and healthy thing when they’re being told in society that abstinence is bad for you, which it’s not. Abstinence is actually really good for you. Things like etiquette, you know, why do we do thank you notes? Family issues, sibling rivalry, dealing with all of those little things. One of my happiest parts of the book, though, that I really enjoyed writing, and I think, I hope, is very helpful, is troubleshooting. So, if you’re having a problem with your child, how do you troubleshoot that? And the first thing to do is, with your husband, wife, with the other parent. Hopefully you’re still married, but even if you’re not talking with that other parent and discerning, is this childishness or disobedience? Is the child doing the wrong thing because he or she is not developmentally able to do the right thing yet? Like you can’t ask a six-year-old to do derivative equations in calculus, they’re not developmentally able. Is that what’s going on with this child? Or is this child being willfully disobedient? Because the treatment for dealing with the disobedience is going to be very different in those two cases. I tell a story about also my son when he was little, if he woke up early from a nap, or if he got woke up before he woke up naturally, he would be in this altered state of consciousness that it looked like he was throwing a temper fit. So, if he was asleep in the car seat, we got home and I woke him up, he would flail and scream and just throw a fit. Well, we realized he does that for like 15 or 20 seconds until he actually wakes up. That’s not disobedience. That’s a physiological issue. And so, my mother-in-law witnessed it one time, and she thought he needed discipline for behaving like that. All we were asking was for him to get out of the car. I said, No, he’s not at himself yet. Just give him a few seconds. And then once he woke up, got out of the car, all was well. But we knew that about him, punishing that would have been wrong. It would have been ineffective. There’s nothing he could do about it. So, walking through that, what is actually happening, and then how do I address the actual need that’s underlying that?

TRACI DEVETTE GRIGGS: Right, great. So of course, this book is Time Tested Parenting: Raising Healthy Children in a Hostile World. And of course, you said you have a section that you really treat in depth in your first book, Desist, Detrans, Detox. So, of all the things, though, that you could talk about that are kind of the pitfalls for parents, why choose the trans issue? Because there’s a lot of other things, right, other pitfalls. Is that one, though, that you see as the most dangerous for our kids today?

MARIA KEFFLER: At the moment, yes. I see this particular thing as an insidious trap, and it’s going to go away. I think it’s a cultural fad that has been created because it’s a money maker. It’s going to go away. We already are seeing a decrease in Gen Z identifying as something other than their birth sex. So that’s something to be celebrated. But it has come out of left field for lots of parents. Every parent I’ve talked to, who their kid has fallen into this, has said this came out of nowhere. It just, one day they were fine. The next day they announced this. And so, at this moment, I do think this is the most insidious thing. I talk to parents who say, Oh my gosh. I remember when I was worried about my daughter getting pregnant out of wedlock. Now that seems like such a quaint non-problem, considering what’s happening with kids. This has become a youth subculture. It’s really been a point of rebellion, but because it has been seeded into the mental health profession, into doctors and education, all of the so-called experts are agreeing with this. They’re putting kids on this path of medicalization that damages their bodies. It damages their fertility. If they have these surgeries, young girls, girls as young as 12 and 13 are having their healthy breasts cut off because they say, I’m not actually a girl, I’m a man. Now we’re seeing young women who are mourning and horrified, they can’t nurse their own babies because they cut their breasts off when they were teenagers. This is an insidious, widespread, worldwide phenomenon that parents need to know that it’s out there.

TRACI DEVETTE GRIGGS: Okay. And of course, they can go back and listen to our radio show from last week or get your books. So, tell us where people can go to get these two books that we’ve been discussing.

MARIA KEFFLER: Desist, Detrans, and Detox: Getting Your Child Out of the Gender Cult is published by Sophia Institute Press. So, it’s sold at Sophia. It’s sold, of course, at Amazon and on our website, AdvocatesProtectingChildren.org. The Time Tested Parenting: Raising Healthy Kids in a Hostile World, you can get that on Amazon or also at our website, AdvocatesProtectingChildren.org.

TRACI DEVETTE GRIGGS: All right. Well, Maria Keffler, what a pleasure. Thank you so much for being with us today on Family Policy Matters.

MARIA KEFFLER: Thank you. It’s been a pleasure to talk with you.

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