Pied Pipers & All That Jazz

Permissive Parenting & Childhood Confusion

Stand-up comic Sebastian Maniscalco recently hit the nail on the head in his 2022 Netflix special, Is It Me?,when he illustrated what’s wrong with American parenting.

One of his son’s classmates “identifies as a lion,” the comic wryly stated. The leonine child insists on roaming the back of the classroom, roaring and grooming himself, and distracting the younger Maniscalco from learning to read. This, the comic continued, isn’t the lion-child’s fault. The problem is the “stupid parents.” If his own kid were to come down the stairs dressed as a panda for school, Maniscalco said, he would tell him to “get the [bleep] back upstairs and get dressed.” Instead, this kid’s parents fawn all over their child’s new identity—tail, mane, and classroom roaring included.

Is it a true story? Who knows? It certainly could be. In his recent documentary, What Is a Woman?, conservative columnist Matt Walsh interviewed Sara Stockton, a New York-based family therapist. “So now we are seeing kids that are identifying as animals going to school,” she said, “and they are purring instead of answering questions. And they meow, and the teachers are not allowed to question it because it’s considered a queer identity.” (A bevy of news sources have since “fact checked” Stockton’s claim and said they found it lacking. So again, we don’t know for sure.)

But children certainly are allowed to identify as members of the opposite sex, as queer, or as gender-nonconforming, which, one might argue, is rather worse than parading around dressed as a lion. Recent guidelines from the gay activist organization Human Rights Campaign outline precisely how administrators and teachers should “support” students as young as elementary-school age who want to “transition.” This guidance includes recommending “best practices for working with parents who may be unsupportive, or who disagree about how to respond to their child’s gender identity.”

Many school districts are taking note and dutifully marching to the piper’s tune. The Daily Wire reported on a February 25, 2022 professional training session for staff at Eau Claire (Wisconsin) Area School District. During the training, teachers were told that their job was to keep their students safe, and that this included hiding students’ gender identities from the prying, malicious eyes of the people who brought them into the world. “Parents are not entitled to know their kids’ identities,” read a slide from the presentation. “That knowledge must be earned.”

Upending Wonderland

In addition to the blatant usurpation of parental authority, the obvious problem in all of this is that it allows children to choose things that cause emotional and physical damage, and this is even more true as they approach adolescence and opt for puberty blockers, hormone therapy, or going under the knife to conform to their chosen identity. But a less obvious problem, and one that perhaps runs deeper than even gender confusion, is that we are permitting and even encouraging the wholesale destruction of childhood.

A 2012 essay in The Guardian pointed out the drastic changes in children’s literature over the past decades. While it used to be that the children in stories were often on quests to get home (Alice in Wonderlandor Dorothy in Oz, for example), now the characters in children’s stories are increasingly put in the driver’s seat of their own troubled lives. “Modern books,” says Professor Kathy Short, “are more likely to feature children who are abandoned, alienated and have no home to return to, than characters who voluntarily set off on adventures.” Children in modern children’s literature are struggling with divorced parents (Two Homes, Dinosaurs Divorce), new stepfamilies (When Otis Courted Mama, The Ring Bearer), or sexual identity (In Our Mothers’ House, Prince and Knight).

As commentators on children’s literature have pointed out, the children themselves don’t write these books. Rather, they are written by adults who are attempting to explain—or form—new moral guidelines. Adults writing and distributing these stories have chosen to make their adult lives, their adult sexual desires, and their adult understanding of the world the guiding principles for children. So instead of daydreaming about becoming an astronaut, or studying pretty pictures of ballerinas, five- and six-year-olds are thrust into worlds that cause them to wrestle with who they are, why they are here, and whether they might, in fact, have been born in “the wrong body.”

Parents Needed

True personal development does require safe spaces, but contrary to fashionable opinion, that doesn’t mean a place where a boy is allowed to use the girls’ restroom. Decades of research into childhood development has shown that both permissive and authoritarian parenting prove damaging, while “authoritative parenting”—the right mix of firmness and kindness—is best for children’s emotional, physical, and mental health. Children need boundaries to grow into adults capable of healthy decision-making. They also need boundaries in which they are safe to enjoy play and healthy, imaginative literature.

Instead, American children are treated to the likes of I Am Jazz. Jazz Jennings, a Florida boy who “came out” as a transgender girl at the age of four, has been in the spotlight since being interviewed by Barbara Walters at age six in 2007. Jazz has since cowritten a children’s book, launched a foundation, and entered adolescence as the star of a reality TV show. Or, rather, the adults around Jazz have made these things come about. Even if Jazz had wanted to change identities and revert to living life as a male, how does one stop that freight train of fawning publicity?

Books like I Am Jazz—and the activism and politics that go with them—remove all boundaries from children’s lives, and in doing so, actually make childhood harder. Such ideologies impose upon our kids the expectation that there is a “gender identity” they must figure out, and they make childhood a place of confusion instead of a place of wonder.

We need more Alices exploring Wonderland. To make that happen, parents must start acting like adults—which may include telling their children to change their clothes, get to school, and stop pretending to be animals in inappropriate places.