By Laura Haynes
What is making so many children vulnerable to the cult doctrine of gender ideology, and how can we raise children who are less susceptible?
Early-childhood practices that fail to meet the developmental needs of small children likely explain the number of struggling young people today, and why they are so vulnerable to the marketing and indoctrination of the gender cult, promising selfhood, euphoria and belonging.
The ‘typical’ modern childhood is nowhere near species-specific norms. Too-early group day care of babies (c. 1985), overuse of screens in lieu of needed relational experiences, and a house-bound adolescence engulfed by smartphones and porn are leaving children functionally impaired
Concurrently, gross diminishment in baseline “adult” knowledge of kids’ capacities and needs (fading as ‘time spent with kids’ fades) has left parents ill-equipped and at sea. We’ve dipped below primal thresholds of nurture needed to develop proper neuropsychological function in little kids, stunting them developmentally. We have also plummeted below primal thresholds of time spent with babies needed for parents to develop credibility, intuition, bondedness, and skill.
Unable to learn self-regulation, because enough adult modeling and ‘external co-regulation’ are not supplied, dysregulated children grow up alternating between numb dissociation (“freeze”) and overwhelm (“fight or flight”). Without the capacity for relaxed alertness, especially under stress, it is hard to focus or learn in school. They can feel despair, frustration and self-loathing.
Consider the purple haired young TQs we see on social media, usually melting down: sobbing on TikTok, cataloging self-harm; chanting, screaming or blowing whistles to drown out dissent. Bad self-regulation means being easily overwhelmed—unable to remain calm, think, make a counterargument. Emotionally stuck in toddlerhood, they can only tantrum.
Children with a ‘shaky sense of self’ are acutely vulnerable to others’ influence, like being told by a teacher or doctor that ‘gender identity’ can explain and solve their multiple complex problems. Clearly, teens declaring counterfactual identities lack a sense of self.
From 0-3, a baby learns how to operate a delicate, sensitive instrument: his own neuro-somatic awareness. He must sort physical sensations (wet, cold, tired, hungry) from feelings (happy, scared, sad, angry), each signaled by discrete somatic cues. This happens naturally, with good care. As Mom intuits, names, and solves discrete feeling states, she teaches the baby what they are (“Oh, honey you’re wet, let’s get you a dry diaper”), and shows him that “bad” feelings are readily managed and resolved. Through responsiveness and “external co-regulation,” aka soothing, a mother gradually imbues her baby with self-regulation, as well as basic trust--“when I need help or comfort, someone comes”—and an internal locus of control--“I can make things happen.” These precepts are foundational to mental health.
Held, swung around, rocked, and carried, the loved baby is keenly aware of his balance, edges, momentum and other physical capacities too-- he is embodied. He’s mostly kept content, so need not guard against awareness, but can instead relish his full physicality.
By contrast, neglected babies get few positive shaping experiences. Feeling unremittingly bad, they begin to assume “I am bad,” and often try to avoid feeling at all. As a Court Appointed Special Advocate, I was trained to support foster youth, kids catastrophically failed in early development, with multiple traumas by the time they enter care (on average, before age three). Lately, many have begun to reject their sexed bodies—some 15x the current incidence in the general population. Foster kids are perfect exemplars for how developmental lack undermines embodiment and thwarts a sense of self.
Besides too-early group care, other dysregulating practices common in infancy include “cry it out” sleep training, lack of carrying (a neuro-developmental need in primates), corporal punishments, extreme scheduling, and divorce. By middle school most kids have been exposed to adult themes/ violence/ pornography, smart phones, social media, chat rooms-- all massive changes since my 1960’s childhood.
Even back then, infant formula, strollers, cribs, and mechanized birthing had already displaced natural practices, and male-dominated ‘expertise’ like Dr Spock had overwritten primal maternal norms. But we still had a critical mass of well-mothered moms: modeling self-regulation, soothing us to co-regulate us, and giving us a solid sense of self. Indeed, some corporate practices got beaten back by my peer group, with a resurgence of natural birth and breastfeeding, and fewer cesareans.
Today, most functions expertly and naturally provided by mothers have been taken over by corporations-- poached, downsized, monetized, then sold back to women. Biophysical things like breastmilk, eggs, ovulation, embryos, gestation, and birth, as well as long-standing maternal practices built around child thriving rather than efficiency, such as co-regulating, on-body care of babies, with support from a village of helpers.
While economic emancipation of women is a major social good with many stabilizing advantages for children, too much distance between ‘women’ and ‘babies’-- like making “mother” unsayable, or considering the mother extraneous– blurs and calls into question both women’s inherent primacy vis-a-vis children, and our human rights as mothers. It disrupts species-natural patterns, with unconsidered downstream effects.
The surrogacy industry erases the gestational mother, while giving primacy to the woman whose eggs are used (though sometimes she too is absented). Babies may now have male ‘mothers’ and female ‘fathers,’ or “throuples” as parents. What will this complete untethering from reality and norms do to children’s “sense of self” in the future? What happens when a little girl realizes that her two dads have paid, exploited, and ‘disappeared’ both her genetic mother and her birth mother? How does she begin to process her own commodification? Legal ambiguity and deniability placed between babies and their mothers has devastating effects: surrendered-at-birth children with chronic attachment problems, babies commissioned by pedophiles to be abused, and un-collected infants with birth defects, growing up as orphans.
Just as immunity-rich breastmilk can’t be duplicated except very roughly, “breastfeeding” itself is much more than “getting milk.” Breastfeeding connotes presence, comfort, and relationship. It synchronizes a mother’s body with her baby’s hunger. It provides pheromones and a well-known heartbeat. As oxytocin and endorphins flow, it imbues satiation and calm in both parties, strengthening bonds through mutual pleasure. It shrinks the uterus back to normal size and delays fertility, spacing children farther apart. Clearly formula takes more away than we can easily buy back.
Treating babies as a new opportunity for economic optimization has led to the worst child mental health we’ve ever seen. And it isn’t even saving money: dysregulated, disembodied kids are far more costly over their lifetimes, and never reach full potential.
There is a better paradigm we can return to. We can ‘re-wild’ early life practices, and again create mentally-sturdy, self-aware, regulated children. We can step forward as grandmothers and alloparents in this mission. We can push back on the corporatization of babyhood and the pressure on mothers for rapid return to paid employment. This is a critical way back to our humanity.
Children deserve normally embodied and comfortable self-awareness, imbued by enough one-on-one nurture from beloveds. Women deserve credit for the millennia of reliably robust child mental health we heretofore invisibly inculcated. Young parents deserve social and financial support (mentoring, parental leave, UBI) to provide developmental “best practices” to babies during key early years, which profoundly affect mental health over the lifespan.
We need to reclaim our place in the early lives of children so they can grow up nurtured, embodied, and whole.
Laura Wiley Haynes is a writer based in Santa Barbara, CA. She is a mother of three adult children and grandmother of twins. When her children were young, Laura was a Bradley Natural Childbirth teacher, and she volunteered as a La Leche League Leader for over 25 years. Laura became accredited as a Court Appointed Special Advocate in 2015. “CASAs" mentor foster youth one on one, and, as officers of the Court, provide written recommendations to the judge twice a year, outlining what actions are in the best interests of the child.
Laura Haynes' work can be found on Linktr.ee
Author and Journalist, Jennifer Bilek, has been researching the money and power behind the gender industry for over a decade. Her work can be found in myriad publications, on this blog, on Twitter, Gettr, LinkedIn, Spinster.xyz, at her Substack, and in her new book: Transsexual Transgender Transhuman/Dispatches from the 11th Hour.
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exactly! thank you!