Welcome to the Upside-Down Parenting podcast from Summit Ministries! Parenting today can feel disorienting, like the world’s been flipped upside down. But you’re not alone. In a culture that often pushes against biblical truth, this podcast is here to equip and encourage you with practical insight and Christ-centered wisdom for the parenting journey.
At Summit, we believe parents are the single greatest influence on a child’s faith. Together, we’ll explore what it means to raise kids who thrive, embrace God’s truth, live out a biblical worldview, and follow Jesus in his beautifully counter-cultural way of life.
In our very first episode, we’ll dive into what it means to raise gender-confident kids and why this conversation is essential for every parent today. Our guests are Dr. Jeff Myers, president of Summit Ministries, and Dr. Kathy Koch, president of Celebrate Kids. Let’s journey together!
For more practical, biblically based resources for parents, check out Summit.org/parents.
Episode 1: Summary & Transcript
Disclaimer: Please note that this is an automatically generated transcript. Although the transcription is largely accurate, it may be incomplete or inaccurate in some cases due to inaudible passages or transcription errors.
Episode Summary
In this episode of the podcast, Dr. Kathy Koch and Dr. Jeff Myers speak about their book Raising Gender-Confident Kids: Helping Kids Embrace Their God-Given Design. The conversation explores how parents can navigate gender issues with their children from a biblical perspective. Kathy shares a personal story about how her parents helped her embrace her height through dance classes rather than viewing it as a problem to be fixed. The guests discuss how rigid gender stereotypes contribute to gender confusion, with Jeff introducing the concept of “imago types” – focusing on who we are as image bearers of God rather than conforming to cultural stereotypes. They emphasize that children don’t need to “become” male or female but should be encouraged to embrace how God designed them. The episode concludes with compassionate advice for families with children considering gender transition, encouraging parents to listen with empathy, maintain open communication, and place their hope in God rather than in themselves or their children.
Episode Transcript
Aaron Atwood (00:00):
Welcome to the Upside Down Parenting podcast from Summit Ministries. We’re so excited to have you joining us. We know that parenting can sometimes leave you feeling disoriented, like you’re spinning out of control upside down, but you’re not alone. We’re here to journey with you as we discuss what it looks like to parent our kids with practical insight and biblical wisdom. We all want our kids to flourish and to live out that counter-cultural mission of Jesus. This is where you come in. You are the single greatest influence on your child’s faith as parents. So together, let’s learn what it looks like to raise kids who embrace God’s truth and champion a biblical worldview.
In this first episode, we’re going to start discussing what it looks like to raise gender confident kids and why this conversation is so important. My guests are Dr. Jeff Myers, president of Summit Ministries, and Dr. Kathy Koch, the founder of Celebrate Kids. Let’s get to the discussion now. Dr. Jeff Myers, president of Summit Ministries, and Kathy Koch, one of our favorites here at Summit, a faculty member and the founder of Celebrate Kids. I want to welcome you to the Upside Down Parenting podcast. Thanks for being here with us.
Dr. Kathy Koch (01:21):
Of course.
Aaron Atwood (01:22):
Dr. Jeff, why don’t you give folks who may not be familiar with Summit just a quick introduction. What is Summit? And then Kathy, I’ll kick it over to you to do the same for Celebrate Kids.
Dr. Jeff Myers (01:32):
Since 1962, summit Ministries has had the mission to equip and support this rising generation to embrace God’s truth and to champion a biblical worldview. For many years, it was a program for students who were on their way to a college or university. Now it’s more generally a program for young adults who are asking big questions about life and who are even planning to go into a vocation where they could emerge as leaders if they are people who understand the times and know what America ought to do. So this program reaches young adults through in-person programs and through curriculum courses. We work intensively with about 70,000 young people every year.
Aaron Atwood (02:16):
I love it here, working here as Vice President at Summit. It’s fun to work with you and in this mission together, Jeff. Dr. Kathy, every student I talk to who comes to Summit and has seen you says, “She’s one of my favorites.” So talk about the work that you do at Celebrate Kids and why it’s so important.
Dr. Kathy Koch (02:34):
Yeah, thank you so much, Aaron. First of all, I love being on the faculty at Summit. It’s been a real honor for the last, I think nine or ten years, and they’re my favorites. Why do I keep coming? Because it’s so much fun to impact these young adults who are asked the hard questions and they’re teachable here. We pray them in and they’re so ready to learn. So it’s a real honor to be here.
So I am a public speaker/author by profession, which is why I love coming here. Celebrate Kids is only 34 years old, so we don’t have quite the history of Summit, and we are passionate. What we champion is that we should celebrate kids the way Jesus did and still does. When he walked on earth, he paid attention to kids. He called them up, he blessed them and held them, and he didn’t tell them to be quiet in the temple when they were praising him.
(03:17):
He wanted them to be fully children, and I think our culture has not done kids justice in a lot of ways, and we want to help people celebrate kids and what does that look like and what does that feel like? So we’re excited to do that and so we podcast. I’m a speaker, I’m an author, we work on curriculum projects. We love to advise, and we’re just so privileged to do what we do that God would call us into. This work is remarkable, and partnering with Jeff and Summit on this new project has been such a delight. Really, really, really happy to be a part of it.
Aaron Atwood (03:45):
Yeah, I’m excited to talk about this project because our first series of episodes will be focused on gender, and so you’re the perfect couple to have here to start things off with us because you’ve just written a book entitled Raising Gender Confident Kids. So I want to talk about gender today and what it means to raise up confident kids around the topic of gender. Kathy, why this topic and why now?
Dr. Kathy Koch (04:15):
Well, yeah, good question. I think Jeff and I have joked that we should have written the book 10 years ago if we would’ve only known, right? It’s been a damaging decision that so many people have made for such a long time. Parents who are overwhelmed, parents who are scared, angry, confused. Sometimes the kids know more than the parents because the kids have either been indoctrinated in a public school system or have followed somebody on a social media platform, parents don’t even know they’re following who says, oh, be whatever you want. Go with your feelings, and all these things are lies.
We’re involved because it’s killing our kids. It’s destroying families. The suicide rate is high. The transgenderism, the change of gender, will not do what children think it will do for them, and now they’re stuck. Now they don’t have an option. They thought if they changed their body, it would solve all of their mental health problems, and so they start to change the body. It doesn’t change them the way they thought it would, and now they’re done. What do they do now?
So we’re solution focused here, Summit and Celebrate Kids and this book, we’re about solutions. We’re about helping parents move beyond fear, doubt, and the overwhelmedness of all of it into a place of compassion and hope and truth and relationship. Jeff and I have always been about, stay present and have conversations that will direct children to truth, and that’s why I’m involved.
Aaron Atwood (05:35):
Right. Dr. Jeff, do you have a sense of why this issue has become one of the most damaging issues of this day? Why is it rising up?
Dr. Jeff Myers (05:48):
Yes, and I think by this issue you mean people who orient their identity around being a sexual minority. So people who are transgender, non-binary people use the L-G-B-T-Q acronym that encompasses 39% of young adults today, 30% in the church we’re specifically focused on those who think of themselves as transgender or non-binary. They either believe that being male or female is irrelevant to who they really are, or they believe that they may actually be born in the wrong body. Maybe they’re a girl who’s actually a girl trapped in a boy’s body or a boy trapped in a girl’s body, and this ideology has risen. It’s come about.
There are I think seven different causes. Kathy and I talk about in the book, sort of a perfect storm coming from seven different directions all at one time, and I don’t want to take the time to go through all seven of them, but I think just to acknowledge right up front that we human beings are fallen creatures. We are people who were born into sin and we are ignorant of God’s best and even people who are very knowledgeable about a lot of things who regularly attend church aren’t knowledgeable about how the Bible applies to things outside of their worship experience. And so I think that’s a significant issue.
But complicating that there has been an ideological drift primarily in colleges and universities in the last several decades. This ideological drift has said that the biggest problem in all of the world is the patriarchy, capitalism, colonialism, imperialism, all of these things. It’s kind of a Marxist mindset to be honest, and the patriarchy then is male dominated society, and that has to be overthrown in order for people to really be free. Well, how do you overthrow the patriarchy? You look at the patriarchal distinctions like male and female, if you can tear those distinctions down, then you don’t have a patriarchy anymore.
(07:49):
So there’s a kind of a class of feminists who start with this and say, that’s what we’re going to do. That’s why some feminists have no problem with a boy running in a girl’s race because what they want is the subversion. They want the categories of male and female to be overthrown because they believe that will ultimately benefit women even if a handful of women along the way lose their trophies. So that is going on.
Then you have what’s happening in public schools and not to just throw more fire onto the flame here, but half the public schools in this country are teaching gender ideology in some form or another, not because the teachers like it. They don’t. Two thirds of the teachers say they hate it. Only 4% of teachers say they think gender ideology is a helpful addition to the curriculum. 4% and 80% of the parents hate it, but there’s kind of a new administrator class that has come in.
(08:42):
The number of administrators in public schools has doubled in the last 20 years, far, far faster than the growth in the number of teachers and the number of students. And these are not people who we need more of them to keep attendance or whatever. They’re there because they have an ideology that they want to figure out how to impose on the children. So when you take all these things and then add social media to it and then you add the medical profit motive to it for transgender procedures, all of a sudden you have a super complicated issue. That’s one of the most difficult things I think the church has ever faced.
Aaron Atwood (09:18):
Yeah. Kathy, I want to focus. You mentioned being solution focused. There may be a lot of parents out there who are saying, well, my kid’s not struggling with this, so this isn’t really my issue. But there are things that we can do as parents to not just respond to the problem when it happens, but get ahead of the problem. Talk a little bit about the needs that kids have. Just, I’m a dad, I’m raising four girls. I want it every day. Ensure that my kids are getting those needs met. Can you just give a parent a foundation for where they would start raising up kids who are confident, not just in their gender, but in everything,
Dr. Kathy Koch (10:02):
In everything, right. I love that. Appreciate the question. Kids need to be seen. Kids need to know that they matter and that they’re important. I’ve interviewed so many children. The children have come up to me and said, Dr. Kathy, I know that I’m important. The scripture teaches me that I matter. God chose to make me, me, and Jesus died for me, so I know that I have value, but Dr. Kathy, I don’t feel important at home. And when a child doesn’t feel important at home, then why be there? Right? Why would I talk to my mom if she doesn’t appear to value me?
I know of some children who have said, my mom loves her phone more than she loves me. Well, how do you know that she spends all her time with her phone and this again, this is not the majority, the majority of people listening to us today are really making the effort to do the right job, and we’re so proud of them because it isn’t easy today.
(10:48):
Parents are busy with their own stuff and overwhelmed and the stuff is real. But what do kids need? To be present to people, to be valued, to be seen, to be known in their own home. They crave being known. Why? Because God, God creates them known. He knows how many hairs we have on our head. Jesus knows our name. He created us in his image for His glory, for such a time as this and children, all of us crave being known. And so they need that at home.
What turns you on and what ticks you off and what’s your delight and what’s your fear and what do you hope about tomorrow and which friend at school concerns you the most? And how do you pray and how do you view God? We got to get to know them well and connect with them deeply. Unconditional love, quick forgiveness.
(11:33):
I could go on and on. Nothing matters. And I’ll say one more thing, Aaron. Let me say one more thing. Kids need to be liked. Kids tell me on a regular basis, my mom and dad have to love me. They don’t have a choice and to God, me the glory. There’s some truth in that. I remember teaching second graders and I was so glad that I didn’t have to like all of them because sometimes it was really hard, but they have to be loved.
But kids are like, but Dr. Kathy, I want them to like me. I want them to want to go on a bike ride with me and want to play checkers with me, and I want them to read to me. Sometimes it feels like an obligation. So do we do that for our kids? And all of that is preventative, all of that is preventative to every social mess that you can think of, not just gender.
Aaron Atwood (12:17):
Sure. I know one of my daughters is talking to me about how hard I work to get her to clean a room and, well, dad, I’m just not neat. You are. I’m just not neat like you are. Oh man, you’re really challenging me right now. And I let her know I like her, I like her, I like her even if she isn’t neat like me. But Jeff, I think there are several different ways that this gender confusion sounds in the cultural conversation we’re Ed. I want to just maybe touch on a couple. Somebody might say, I feel like I’m a girl trapped in a boy’s body. That’s not a new concept. We’ve been struggling with this body issue for a really long time. Talk about the roots of that problem and how we engage with that.
Dr. Jeff Myers (13:13):
As far as I can tell, every adolescent in history has felt uncomfortable in his or her body. So this is not new.
Aaron Atwood (13:21):
Can I get an amen?
Dr. Jeff Myers (13:23):
You grow up and you’re awkward, your body starts to change and it changes in the weirdest ways. If you’re a girl, you go straight up first, so now you’re taller than the boys. And if you’re a boy, all of a sudden your voice starts sounding very strange and it doesn’t work the way it used to. And people feel insecure about this, and if there are other stressors in their life, they might think there is something terribly, terribly wrong with me right now and I’m looking for answers.
What is it that’s wrong with me? So where do you turn for information? In the past, you might’ve asked your parents or you at least might’ve asked a trusted aunt or uncle, what is going on with me? And because I feel uncomfortable, all of a sudden the boys started to make fun of me because of my body that is changing, or the girls started to make fun of me because of my voice or whatever it happens to be.
(14:18):
Well, where do you go now? You go to Google. Let’s say you hear something about transgender, so you Google the word transgender. The first five pages of results are, here is what transgender is, here are the facts. These are not facts. They’re giving lies and calling them facts. Then there are things like, you can actually change this. You can take medicine for this. You know, you can take medicine. If you’re a boy and you think you’re actually a girl, you can take medicine to change from one to the other, and that’s all information that’s advertised on the internet.
You have to go probably five pages deep into the search results, which no young person ever does before you find any information that questions the transgender agenda at all. So I think that’s probably why it’s happening right now, what’s actually taking place, but why is it so effective for young people?
(15:13):
Because I don’t think most young people have really thought that what it means to be male or female is essential to who they are. Why would they think that? Because there’s this idea of a gender spectrum that has come into vogue that you have essentially Barbie on one side and GI Joe on the other, and nobody’s either GI Joe or Barbie. So most of us are somewhere in the middle and the middle is called transgender.
If you wonder what kind of gender you are, you can go online, you can take a test, and at the end of it they will tell you which of 68 genders you are. That’s the idea of the gender spectrum. So it promotes transgenderism, it makes transgender seem like it’s now the new center of reality that this is the base position for just about everybody and that the only people who don’t fit with us, the new transgender group are those who are the outliers, the practically perfect girl or the practically perfect guy or whatever, and we don’t like them.
(16:15):
Those are cisgender individuals. So this is a rhetorical strategy trying to gain power and place itself in the center of an issue, but it’s bringing about tremendous confusion. I mean, some of the kids that we’ve worked with and talked to are seven years of age and they’re questioning whether they’ve been born in the wrong body, which by the way is a wicked thing to tell a child. I’m just going to go ahead and get that right out front.
You’re not just telling them there’s something wrong with your body. You’re telling them that their very body in and of itself is wrong and cannot be fixed. That is a wicked, wicked thing to tell a child, and shame on any school or teacher or therapist who ever does such a thing.
Dr. Kathy Koch (17:01):
If I could just suggest that, Jeff, I’d love that you said that because it’s wicked, because they’re denying God’s intentional goodness. When you say that to a child, you’re saying God made a mistake, and when you plant in a young child the idea that God was wrong, God didn’t make you uniquely good because he loves you.
Well, it messes with everything that they’ve believed in everything going forward that they could be taught. God is strategic, intentional, loving, and personal in his creation of us, in his image for His glory, and that includes that I’m supposed to be female because God shows that for me, and you’re supposed to be male because God shows that view. We plant that seed and they can begin to doubt everything and it makes me nuts. That’s the reason that saying yes to this project with you was so easy.
Aaron Atwood (17:47):
Dr. Kathy mean grew up feeling a little bit insecure about your body. Talk about how your parents helped you navigate that.
Dr. Kathy Koch (17:58):
Yeah, I love that you asked that question. So I’m 6’ 1”. I am tall and just as Jeff said earlier, I did grow straight up. So all the way through ninth grade, I was the tallest in my class and back in the day, a tall girl could not date a man shorter than her. Now I revel when I see a taller woman who loves a shorter man. I just think that’s phenomenal because what a ridiculous stereotype that tall girls can’t love shorter men. Oh, I could go on and on with that.
So I’m about six years old. I walk home from school and I sit down in the middle of my mom and dad’s big double bed and I’m like, mommy, I don’t want to be tall anymore. I’m six years old and I’m already feeling that insecurity. I stood out in a crowd and those listeners who remember back in the old days, the desks, the chair was attached to the desk part and the custodian would’ve to come in with a wrench and lower the chair or raise the desk so that we could fit in it.
(18:47):
Well, the custodian in my school knew my name. No custodian should know any girl’s name because he had to be called to the room a lot because I was going so fast and he’d come in, oh, it’s you again. So I was feeling like, noticed and insecure and clumsy. I would trip over things that weren’t even there because if you grow fast, the tendons mean it’s medically there’s an excuse, but of course that doesn’t help my heart as a little girl.
I just didn’t feel good in my body, and what’s so interesting about it guys, is that when I said to my mom, I mean, praise God, my mom was available and I praise God still today that I knew she was safe and she didn’t say, well, get over it. You’re going to be tall. Look at your dad and me. I’m not going to understand that at the age of six, but what’s so amazing is she knew and she talked to my dad right away that night.
(19:29):
They knew they had to change my attitude. They needed to change my belief about heights because they knew I’d be tall. They didn’t think, oh, let’s cut six inches off between the ankle and the knees so she’ll be shorter. No, back in the day, the parent, the solution focused problem solving parent always looked at attitude and belief, and so they enrolled me in tap dance class at the end of the week like no joke, and I got to be the center of the back row of position of high honor that only the tallest girl was allowed to have and my dance friends wanted me. All of a sudden, my height was okay and I learned to not be clumsy.
So my parents problem-solved without making me feel like the problem to be solved because they heard my heart and they were wise, and you know what, you guys, they didn’t go to the quick solution, like maybe the quickest solution would be let’s schedule surgery. There would’ve been a time to recover, but it would’ve been quicker than years of dance and years of conversations about helping me understand that it was okay, not even okay to be tall.
My dad’s mom, my grandmother, she was so good at my cousins and I saying, you’re so beautiful. Look how straight up you stand. It’s just I have the best memories of being affirmed for my height and I ache for the kids today who don’t have that.
Aaron Atwood (20:48):
Great. You mentioned stereotypes. This seems to me as a dad to be, one of the things that’s driving a lot of the conversation around gender confusion is we’ve owned stereotypes so strongly in our culture now, how does that play into the problem with kids struggling with their gender and also the solution for kids who struggle with their gender? Jeff, do you want to talk about that a bit?
Dr. Jeff Myers (21:16):
Yeah, I’m happy to. The stereotypes are, every culture has stereotypes. Certain things happen in nature and in the nature of a society that cause people to expect that people will be a certain way. In the academic world, they call them norms, but when we talk about stereotypes in terms of gender, we were talking about things like, oh, well boys are the ideal is GI Joe, a boy is going to be active outdoors, hunting, killing, that kind of a thing.
A girl’s going to be at home nesting, but there are some biological aspects to those things, but in the hands of a culture that’s wayward, those stereotypes end up getting enshrined. So if you are a girl and you’re not that cheerleader, nurturer, bubbly type, then there’s something wrong with you. I had a student who was female going to engineering school. She was immediately told, if you’re a girl and you are interested in engineering, you are a boy trapped in a girl’s body.
(22:28):
What a horrible thing to tell a child. I mean, why can’t we say, it’s so cool that God designed you to be an engineer? This is amazing and you’re going to do great. Why can’t we just say that because there’s so much of the agenda that has to build itself, build up these stereotypes in order to pretend to tear them down in order to gain power. So we decided we’re going to replace it.
We’re going to use the term imago types. Who are you as an image bearer of God? If you start with the fatherhood of God, then you realize male and female is not just a biological category, it’s also brother and sister, it’s husband and wife, it’s friend, it is son and daughter. All of those kinds of relationships are better at explaining how human beings should interact and the purpose of male and female from God’s perspective is to have harmony to do things that either males or females alone in a society could never accomplish.
Aaron Atwood (23:34):
That’s great. Kathy, when you’re talking with parents, you talk with thousands of parents throughout the year, speaking, writing, consulting. How do you see the struggle in this stereotype sort of playing itself out, and how would you tell parents to sort of engage that with a kid who may not fit the typical, a typical girl, typical boy.
Dr. Kathy Koch (24:02):
No, thanks for asking. Maybe we should just do away with typical altogether. I love the air quotes for typical because is there really such a thing? So we write in the book about, boys can like musicals. There’s nothing wrong with a boy who wants to sit on the couch and watch a musical with a grandmother, a mom or a dad or a grandfather, and there’s nothing wrong with a girl wanting to watch westerns with a grandfather. That’s the way that she bonds with her grandfather and she enjoys the cowboy kind of a thing, if you will, and boys can be in the kitchen and girls can be in the garage helping the dad. This isn’t abnormal. Let’s look at it that way.
Now what’s important is back when we were younger, maybe those things were abnormal. I think there was a stricter coherence to what we might say would be a stereotype. I don’t think there were many role models out there for us, being able to be different. I think it was very hurtful. I can’t imagine what it was like for a man when younger who enjoyed musicals and color and design and doodled and was maybe teased for that.
Now the adults in the room, we’ve got to get that out of our head and we have to raise the children we were given, not the children we wish we had. We have to understand that if a boy likes coloring and music, that that’s fine. Jeff has two brothers who are very much into music and he honors them. Jeff, you do a beautiful job of talking about their music, smart abilities, their emotional intelligence and how dangerous it would’ve been for your parents to force them into a math and science mold, if you will. It would’ve broken them.
(25:33):
Aaron, we’re breaking children by not allowing them to be who they were created to be. And dads who want a rough and tumble boy, dads who want someone to go fishing with, find a neighbor boy and take him or introduce your son to fishing. Maybe he’ll like it and if he doesn’t, it’s okay. You’re not a failure as a dad if your son doesn’t like fishing. Let’s get that in our head.
And if a mom takes a little girl to Hobby Lobby and expects her to go nuts in the fabric section and that doesn’t happen, it’s okay. You haven’t failed As a mom, I think this is the message we want to get across. The pink and blue boxes are just extremely damaging and let’s just be honest about that and we want to give freedom to the adult.
I mean, Jeff, you and I haven’t talked about this, but I’m going to guess there are going to be adult readers who find freedom for their own life as they read our book where they were forced into a mold and they were damaged by false expectations or you need to like this because you’re female, and they’ve always questioned themselves, am I female enough or I could never please my dad because I didn’t like hunting and camping. I wonder if there’s going to be freedom even for the adult reader when they find out that the imago type, what did God create you for? And yeah, I just think that’s such an exciting term that God gave you, Jeff. I just think it’s a brilliant way of looking at who we are.
Dr. Jeff Myers (26:56):
And this is not to say that there are no differences between males and females. There are created differences. God made us to be different. Biologically, there are 6,500 catalog differences between males and females.
Dr. Kathy Koch (27:09):
Amazing.
Dr. Jeff Myers (27:09):
But we don’t have to enforce cultural stereotypes on them. Kathy was mentioning my two brothers, they’re highly emotionally intelligent. They might be told, if they were in school now, maybe you’re actually girls trapped in a boy’s body. My daughter, who’s a helicopter pilot, she would undoubtedly be told You’re actually a boy trapped in a girl’s body because you like helicopters and almost all pilots are males. But as those things begin to change, I think it’s giving us an opportunity to realize what we should have realized all along.
With the Imago type understanding, you don’t have to become a male or a female. You are designed by God to be a male or a female. What you do is just cooperate with God in becoming the man or the woman that he’s designed you to be. Somebody with character, someone who points the way not to themselves, but to God and brings flourishing and blessing to other people, and then we can relax from feeling like there’s something wrong with us. If we’re a guy and we don’t like smoking cigars or it’s a girl who doesn’t like going out for the wine and painting girlfriend date.
Dr. Kathy Koch (28:24):
Those are classic examples. Those are, of the gender stereotype.
Dr. Jeff Myers (28:28):
I love that. If you’re going to talk about stereotypes, you might as well just go for it.
Aaron Atwood (28:32):
If we can throw in cigars and rosé for our conversation here, we have really, really nailed it. I want to take the last couple of minutes in all seriousness and speak to the family who’s hurting in this conversation because they have a child who’s come to them and said, listen, I’ve decided that I’m going to start a transition process. How would you speak to them? Kathy, I’ll start with you.
Dr. Kathy Koch (29:03):
Oh, thanks. Yes. Well, we would certainly speak with great compassion. Parents don’t need to feel guilt or shame over this. I think there’s very few parents, grandparents, people raising children who have done intentionally wrong things. And if we feel that, then we ask for forgiveness and we go to God and we say, man, help me here, and I think that’s a whole nother 30 minutes. But I think in most cases we would have compassion. Certainly we would have ears to hear, we would’ve hearts to beat with theirs. We would ask them to have no shame or guilt for yesterday, but hope for tomorrow we would teach them.
In fact, our book has over 200 questions that are designed for discussion starters because we have to have the conversation about hard things. I would say to these moms and dads, you don’t have to have all the answers to have the conversation. You can search for truth together. You can have your pastor on speed dial. If you believe your pastor is well-informed, you go to summit.org every time you have a question. Stop going to Google and just come to an organization like Summit that’s going to teach you the truth.
So I think we have hope for them. We have compassion for them. I think we teach them truth. I think we listen long. I think we comfort and we encourage them to not give up on themselves. And I would also say, Aaron, they have to have hope in God, not in their children. They must have hope in God, not in themselves. It is God who is our warrior.
So we pray, and Jeff, somebody who’s had a chance to read the book in advance told me that the way that we end the book with seven days of prayer brought her to tears because she recognized that she needed to be doing that even though there was no evidence in her family yet that this was an issue. She saw that strategic praying for specific reasons is going to be the answer here. So Aaron, I think we would encourage a really solid relationship with the God of the Bible, and we would encourage them to be in the word for instruction and for encouragement, and we would say, don’t give up.
Dr. Jeff Myers (31:06):
That’s a really great answer. I think, in the opening of the book, we talk about four postures toward culture. How do you lean into these situations rather than lean away from them? The environment I was growing up in, if people didn’t say this aloud, you could certainly tell them their facial expressions, that their response to everything that you would admit was you should be ashamed of yourself. You know better than that. You were raised better than that. That’s an unhelpful posture toward these situations, and if you found yourself blurting that out in a very tense moment, don’t be hard on yourself about it. We all just do the best we can and with the information that we have.
But if we think of having a posture of compassion, a posture of truth, a posture of hope that leads to a posture of confidence, then the conversations can be very different. You can enter into it. If your child says, I think I was actually born in the wrong body, then you can begin by saying, I just want to pause for a second and say, thank you for taking time to tell me this because I can’t imagine how hard it would be. When you were thinking about sharing that with me, how did you think I might react?
(32:26):
Were you expecting me to do a certain thing or say a certain thing? Were you hoping that I would say a certain thing or wouldn’t say a certain thing? And then I want to get to, would you be willing to share with me what happened to you that causes you to see yourself the way you do? Eventually through time, you’re going to get to those conversations of, well, maybe this is not going to be something that’s easily resolved just by a conversation, and we’re going to have to live with this for a while.
How do we do that with each other? You’ve got to talk about the talk. Your conscience is telling you this. My conscience is telling me this. It almost seems like it’s going to be very difficult for us to even relate. How do we keep the lines of communication open between us?
(33:13):
Just make all of those kinds of things that are sort of the unspoken issues, make them spoken and do it with a heart of compassion that’s focused on the truth that as Kathy was talking about, hope that does continue to hope for what is the best. That’s what leads to confidence, and that’s how we pray. And we work at some ministries. Somebody said, God’s not really doing miracles today. And I said, are you kidding me? I see hundreds of them, hundreds of miracles every year. I see minds completely changed, hearts changed, life habits changed. Whole new life trajectory, set miracles, miracles, miracles. So we never give up praying for those kinds of things in the lives of those we love.
Aaron Atwood (33:58):
That’s great. I want to encourage our listeners, go to genderconfidentkids.com. You can get your free copy of the book and like you mentioned Kathy, throughout the book, there are conversation starters. There are discussion starters that will help. I think everyone, regardless of where they’re at in this discussion around gender in this moment and time, really navigate well a biblical worldview of gender.
Thank you both so much for writing this important book. I can’t wait for our family to embrace it and use it and begin to raise gender confident kids. So again, that’s genderconfidentkids.com for your copy of the book. I’ve just been really encouraged today, Kathy, to think about, okay, I’m raising the kids that God gave me, not the kids that I wish I had. Not that I wish I had different kids, but it’s not about me, it’s about God.
(34:54):
And I’m stewarding that really well. And Jeff, that idea that we are image bearers of God, not image bearers of a stereotype. We’re not aiming for some target that culture has put out there as the mark of what it means to be a man or a woman. We are aiming for what God has woven into us to be. So thank you both. I hope our listeners will share and subscribe to this podcast so that more people can hear this important information and get a copy of your book. So thank you both for being here. Bless you both. Thank you.
Dr. Jeff Myers (35:26):
Thank you, Aaron.
Dr. Kathy Koch (35:27):
You’re welcome.