You Must Be Some Kind of Therapist

Swell AI Transcript: 145. Katy Faust.mp3
Katy Faust:
I can look at this from the perspective of Republicans who want small government and low taxes and personal responsibility and say, well, then you want mothers and fathers to be raising their children in a married household for life. Or I can look at my friends on the left who are bleeding heart, wonderful, compassionate people who are devastated over the achievement gap with black students or high school dropout rates or teen suicide or drug use or teen pregnancies or high incarceration rates. And they just go, how do we fix these problems? And the answer is you don't, unless you also think that children should be raised by their married biological mother and father in a lifelong union in both of these different areas. You won't get any social justice unless you secure individual justice for children in the area of the family.

Stephanie Winn: You must be some kind of therapist. Today, I have the pleasure of speaking with Katie Faust. She is the founder and president of Them Before Us, a global movement defending children's right to their mother and father. And she's also an author of the book by the same name, as well as two other books, Raising Conservative Kids in a Woke City and Pro-Child Politics. Katie, welcome. It's so good to have you here today.

Katy Faust: It's really great to be with you. I'm a fan. Love following you on The X and a real joy to speak with you today.

Stephanie Winn: Oh, thank you. So I'm going to kind of frame this up for our listeners because I knew I wanted to speak with you as soon as I saw that you'd written a book called Raising Conservative Kids in a Woke City. Only in the day leading up to this interview did I start listening to Them Before Us as an audiobook. And I'm about halfway through now. And as we were saying, you know, discussing before we started recording, it brought up so much emotion for me. So I think one of the things that it's brought up for me is an issue that's come up a lot since I've been in the public eye. And I want to sort of frame it this way. that I believe that we need to know which direction our compass is pointing in order to make intelligent decisions as a society. We need to have a sense of what is the ideal that we are striving for. And I think that there's no better way to think about what that should be than prioritizing the needs of children in a way that's intelligent, that reflects an understanding of children's psychological needs, their developmental stages, and so on. I think that's a great framing. And I periodically run into conflict on the internet when I voice opinions in that way that some people take as a threat. So I wanted to first and foremost frame this discussion by offering my audience and you as my guest what I can put on the line, which is that I believe many of the same things you believe about what's ideal for children. And that doesn't mean that my family system structure is ideal. So I'm a stepparent, right? And I've said that on this show before. Do I think that it's ideal for children to split their time between two households, one in which they have a single divorced mom and one in which they have a remarried dad and stepmom? No, that's not the ideal, but it's the best that we can do in our circumstances. And I don't take it personally. When children's rights advocates like you come along and say, you know, here's what we should really be striving for if we're centering the needs of children. Will there be exceptions? Will people have to make decisions in flawed circumstances? Absolutely. But we still have to be able to talk about those things. So I just want to kind of put that out there from my audience that Katie says some things in her book that are hard for me to hear as a stepparent. And, you know, it's easier for me to hear the things where my own the way I was raised is criticized because I was, you know, brought up by a single parent. But I hope that that offering on my part sort of put certain listeners at ease because, you know, my intent isn't to put people on the defensive or make them feel like They're not being seen for their efforts to do the best they can in their flawed circumstances with the knowledge and resources they have at the time. But it's to say we can all evolve and be a little less defensive and a little more broad-minded in thinking about what is best for children, even when sometimes it stings our own feelings. But as you articulate very eloquently in your book, Them Before Us, we adults should be doing the emotional heavy lifting so that children don't have to.

Katy Faust: Well, that's a pretty fantastic kickoff and, obviously, very self-aware and humble. And like I often say on pretty much every interview I do, give me enough time and I will trigger you too. Like this world of saying children actually have concrete rights, needs, desires. If we believe that that is true and they are vulnerable and they're weak and they're not able to defend themselves, that means that all adults at some point are going to have to prioritize what children need above what the adults themselves want. And it's not just the marriage and family world. You know, we at Them Before Us often talk about how Pretty much every culture war issue comes down to either protecting or violating children's life, family, mind, and body. Like, you can look at any major area where we are, you know, going to battle against one another on X or even, you know, the hackles are going up at Thanksgiving dinner, and you can look at those sort of culture war issues and isolated, in my opinion, down to, are we making kids do hard things or adults doing hard things on behalf of children? And then we took it to the next level in our book, Pro-Child Politics, where we said, you know, beyond the cultural issues, things like immigration and taxation and education and pornography and policing. All of those different things ultimately come down to if we get these questions wrong because we are prioritizing our own comfort, our own pocketbook, our own ideology, children are the victims. So really there's no area of life, in my opinion, that you're going to come across where you say we will prioritize the rights and well-being of children where at some point we the adults have to do hard things. And that absolutely goes against the grain of most of the dominant narratives in 2025, which elevates adult desire, adult comfort, adult identity to the highest level, to the highest good, almost to a godlike status. And so really this world of prioritizing kids is a confrontational message and so I understand that most of us at some point, I mean I have been as well, confronted by the are you gonna put kids first question and then am I going to reorient my life to put the kids first and doing so means pretty steep sacrifices and probably some very honest reflection about why exactly I don't want to do that and it's convicting, you know, to say the least. So that's a pretty killer kickoff for a podcast, especially where we're probably going to be wading into a lot of areas where people will go, hell yeah, and then wait a second, except here. So yeah, I'm honored that you would have me on the show and that we'd be able to talk this through and I pray, you know, come away all of us going, I want a just society. I want that in policy. I want that in culture. I want that in law. I want that in technology. But that also means that in whatever way I can, I also have to advance that in my own personal life as well.

Stephanie Winn: Yeah, I very much relate to the sense of, you know, if you stick around long enough, there's something to piss off everybody, you know, with my podcast and worldview. And I just appreciate you being a truth teller. And with regard to those statements about, you know, adults doing the heavy lifting so children don't have to, this is one thing where I want to clarify sort of the distinction between wants and needs because I think what you're saying could easily be misinterpreted either by someone not very intelligent or by a bad faith actor as children should have whatever they want, which is not what I hear. I hear you saying we need to be intelligent about what children truly need, whether or not they have the verbal skills to articulate that to us. And then when it comes to doing the heavy lifting, I think this is one thing where things get inverted because I think children should do hard things, but I think they should do things that challenge them physically and mentally and equip them with skills that are going to build their identity, confidence, and competence in the world. I think in many ways, children are not expected to do enough around the house, outside, with their bodies, with animals, with nature. I'm all for raising the bar in terms of their independence and their skills, But I feel like whereas we've made the world soft for them with regard to many of those types of responsibilities, we have still made the world hard for them when we're not doing the emotional heavy lifting, when we're not, when we don't have the strength to acknowledge the impact of our shortcomings and our choices on their emotional well-being and on their, as you would say, like emotional nutrition.

Katy Faust: Yeah. very regularly sort of shoot down that cultural lie that kids are resilient because obviously we want children to be resilient. It's actually a pretty critical aspect of human health is resilience. But the way that we have said and used resilience is I can do anything I want to this kid and they're going to be fine. It sort of functioned as a cultural permission slip to upend and deny and ignore their fundamental rights and needs so that adults can live as they please. And so we do think that children should do hard things, but not to the exclusion of the things that we, according to decades of social science research, know that they need. in order to thrive. And, you know, as you and I were talking about a little bit before we started, there's all kinds of non-ideal situations produced by tragedy or produced by one or both parent who refuses to do hard things on behalf of the child. And so the child finds themselves in a difficult situation with a single parent or in need of adoption or looking at joining a blended family where now the adults, the responsible adults in the child's life say, okay, now, How do we do hard things on behalf of this child who has already lost something that they have a fundamental right to? What can we now do to bear their burden? We're not going to live as we please and additionally burden them. What do we do to bear their burden? And so what we always say at Them Before Us is we are four adults doing hard things on behalf of children. Right? We are going to champion and cheer for adults who are adopting a load on behalf of kids, but we are always going to challenge the ideas that says, actually, you can offload some of your burden onto the child so that you can have an exit ramp or, you know, whatever kind of household or identity best validates you. So, yes, we are talking about the concrete fundamental rights and needs of children. We are not talking about indulging every whim. You went in a couple really important directions. Number one, I would say, obviously, there is a misunderstanding about who children are and what they need in terms of they do have these fundamentals. I would say a right to life, a right to be known and loved by the two people responsible for their existence. Those are sort of the primary, natural, non-negotiable rights of children recognized both in natural law as well as in things like the most widely ratified treaty in the world, the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child. These are things that don't go away based on cultural changes, technological innovations, and legal decisions. These are fundamental realities. Those are the truths. Now, a child saying, give me this pony, or I want to transition my gender, those are not fundamental natural rights of the child. I would actually say that in those cases, the adults have a fundamental right to put down appropriate boundaries so the child can grow and thrive and, for example, not have in their mind that anything that they say they get to materialize as a fundamental reality, like materialistically, but also to the detriment of their mind or their body as so many of the cultural trends are advancing related to transgenderism or the encroaching pornographic content that's finding its way into our children's lives in a variety of different means and methods. Like I, before I was doing child advocacy, I was an Asian Studies major, I had a Fulbright scholarship in Taiwan, so I was very familiar with the Chinese culture, I speak Chinese, and in the rise of the one-child policy, they had a new term that they deemed for these children who had a set of parents and two sets of grandparents, and they were the only child that was the focus of those six adults. And they would call those children xiao huang di, little emperors or little empresses, because they could have anything they wanted. And even if two of the adults in their life said no, four of the adults would say yes. Or even if five of the adults said no, one of them would say, well, I'll get that for you. You know, Grandma will get that for you. And it did not bode well for children. Those children did not grow up to be kids that took responsibility for themselves, that understood that they had duties and obligations. They just consumed. They just believed that they had a right to anything that they wanted. And so it is important for adults to put appropriate limits on children, but not limits to what they have fundamental natural rights to. So this is sort of the meeting of the minds between book number one of Them Before Us what children have a fundamental right to, especially as it relates to family structure. But then book number two is about how is it that you raise healthy, thriving kids, especially with a right-side-up worldview about, you know, historical, biological, and economic reality in ways that fortify them and strengthen them, which does not mean either indulging them completely nor sheltering them from everything. We want kids that are resilient and that thrive, and that means appropriate exposure, pushing them towards age-appropriate risk, but also making sure that they feast upon all of those socio-emotional staples that children need so that they can be resilient and thrive.

Stephanie Winn: And in your book, well, in your first book, in the early chapters of Them Before Us, you make a couple of points really compellingly. So one is the concept of natural rights, and you define that so beautifully. Another is you make the case for why conservative values actually address the root cause of the problems that liberals are concerned about. So can we go through each of those? Can you first of all explain what you mean when you say natural rights?

Katy Faust: Yeah. So natural rights is actually derived from a philosophical system of natural law. And I'm not a natural lawyer. This is like very, very deep. not complex, but just it's been around for a long time and people get PhDs in this kind of stuff. So that's, I'm not at that level. I do have a natural lawyer that wrote the foreword for the book, Robert George, but my co-authors, Stacy Manning and I, we kind of talk about like, what does this look like on the application level. And what natural law is, sort of for the layperson, is really a system of discovering what you ought to do, sort of a moral code based not on special revelation, not based on some kind of spiritual authority, but based on natural authority. What you can know about how we ought to live based on looking at the natural world. It's a lot of, you know, what Christians would call teleology. Like, based on looking at the design of male or female, for example, what do we know about how those two should go together? Based on looking at children and their vulnerability, what do we know about who and how children should be raised? Not the how in terms of like how much ice cream to give them, but really the how of what is it that they need to thrive from the two people responsible for their existence? So natural law is a pretty durable system to point to universal truths that apply to everybody, not just people that are Muslims or Christians or atheists. But because it is based on natural realities, its application and its conclusions really can be applied globally and worldwide. This is the basis on which Martin Luther King Jr. appealed when he was trying to say these unjust laws are no laws at all. if you have a law that goes against natural law, in his case the idea that all men were created equal, it's not a civil law cannot override natural law. So right now we've got several civil laws that reject or override natural law. We have a lot of areas, technologically especially, that are rejecting natural law, such as you know, mass-producing children in laboratories and sex-selecting them out of existence and cryogenically freezing 1.5 million or so on ice. I mean, we have all kinds of technological advances that are victimizing and violating the natural rights of children. So just because something happens, just because something is codified in law, just because we make something technologically possible, it does not necessarily mean that it should be enshrined in civil law or that it should be something that should be accepted as normative. So we are looking at a system of natural law that takes very clearly, very seriously the design of the human person and then extrapolates from there into the system of ought, what we ought to do. So you describe that as conservative. And I would say it's only recently conservative. These used to be conclusions that everybody on the right and left agreed with. I mean, you had Patrick Moynihan in the 1960s who created a report that said it's an absolute shocking travesty that 25% of the black population is now being born outside of the married mother father unit. And he was virtually run out of the Democrat party because he was recognizing something that was fundamentally true. that was unpopular at the time. So the only reason why these are supposed conservative conclusions is because the right has not wholly rejected natural reality as it relates to the biological design of male and female and what happens when they come together. So the thing about natural law is it's timeless, it's universal, it's not going to change, and it doesn't get nullified just because five Supreme Court justices deem it so.

Stephanie Winn: I believe when it came to the idea of natural rights or natural law that you had three screening criteria you articulated in the book. Could you remind us what those are?

Katy Faust: Yeah, this is just for, like, dummies like me and, you know, Stacey, you helped kind of really hammer out what we call the three rules that make it a right test. Just because it has become so sexy to just say that anything an adult really, really, really, really wants is a right, you think that that gives you a little more moral authority to say, you need to pay for my government-funded birth control, or I have a right to undress you know as I as a 40 year old man have a right to have somebody wax my genitals in you know an Asian spa or whatever it is right you think if you say I have a right to this and what they mean is I want it or it validates me that that gives you a little more credibility in making your case but when you look from a natural law perspective rights are actually pretty rare. There's all kinds of things that we may need to survive. There's all kinds of things that may validate us or even lead to our happiness that are not necessarily rights. So we give, we sort of offer the three rules that make it a right test to help you sniff out whether or not something really is a right. So the first right is that it exists pre-government. And you can see this reflected in the language of the founders, you know, when they issued the Bill of Rights, like they're saying, the government doesn't give us these rights. They exist so the government must protect them. So a true natural right exists pre-government. It's not something the government gives to you. So you are alive. humans had life before whatever government they live under was formed. You have a right to defend yourself, right? That actually existed and has existed prior to, you know, the advent of communism. And so, like, fundamental natural rights exist before government, pre-government. So that's number one. Number two, nobody has to provide it for you. If somebody has to dredge it up from the ground, purify it, bottle it, label it, ship it, and put it on a shelf. It's not a natural right. You might even need it to survive. You know, you need to drink water. Nobody should prohibit you from having access to water. But providing it with water is not a natural right. That's a commodity. And some commodities, obviously, are very important, things like shelter. But you don't have a right to housing. That would make the contractor and the sheet rocker your slave. So nobody has to provide it for you. That's rule number two. And number three, if it's a natural right, it's distributed equally. Everybody has the same natural access to the natural right. So your ability to speak is the same as everyone else's. Nobody gets more ability or less ability to speak. You may choose to use it differently. Some may be more courageous. Some may be more timid. But you all have the same ability to speak. If you look at your right to life, you get one, I get one, everybody gets exactly one. When you look at your right to your mother and father, everybody has the same amount no matter how we tinker with children in laboratories. Everybody comes from exactly one man and one woman. It is a fundamental natural right to be known and loved by the two people responsible for your existence. So that's sort of the three rules that make it a right test. You can apply it to all kinds of rights claims. And what you will find is there's a lot of wants, there's a lot of desires, but there's not a lot of natural rights.

Stephanie Winn: Beautifully put. And so I mentioned the case for a conservative approach to liberal issues, and you sort of began to reframe that. But I really want to revisit that kind of moment in your book. where you name all the issues that liberals are concerned with and how the focus on the family, the focus on really orienting our decision making and our policies around what supports the well-being of children and families gets to the root of those problems. Could you articulate that for us?

Katy Faust: Well, let me know if this is a direction you wanted me to go in. But we kind of talk in the first chapter of the book about how I can look at this from the perspective of Republicans who want small government and low taxes and personal responsibility and say, well, then you want mothers and fathers to be raising their children in a married household for life. Or I can look at my friends on the left who are bleeding heart, wonderful, compassionate people who are devastated over the achievement gap with black students, or high school dropout rates, or teen suicide, or drug use, or teen pregnancies, or high incarceration rates. And they just go, how do we fix these problems? And the answer is, you don't, unless you also think that children should be raised by their married biological mother and father in a lifelong union. Because in both of these different areas, you won't get any social justice unless you secure individual justice for children in the area of the family. You can look at teen homelessness, right, which, you know, I'm in Seattle, and so homelessness is everywhere. Well, 90% of teens on the street grew up without a father. You want to look at high incarceration rates, which is stunning, shocking, sickening. 70 to 85% of kids that are in institutions now, state-run institutions, grew up in a broken home. You can look at the 63% of teens that commit suicide who didn't have a father. You can look at the 71% of girls that get pregnant as teenagers and they also didn't have a dad in the home. Family breakdown is at the root of all major social issues. And so if the honest progressives, the ones that are not just driving at sort of an ideological utopia, the ones that really would say, I'm on the left because I care about people, You can continue to man the suicide prevention lines, and I hope that you do, but don't ever think that you're going to actually help teens struggling with suicide until you first get the family right. And so to me, this is the issue that should unite left and right. Unfortunately, I think that the radical wing of the Democrat Party is running the table. And so this is absolutely It's off the table in terms of a discussion point at this point, but anybody who genuinely wants to work towards solution, whether it is Republicans who want to lower taxes, which one of the main sources of, for example, welfare spending increase since the 1980s has been the rise of single mother households. Or if you want to have responsible citizens who are going out and filling in the workforce and not committing crimes, then you have to do the family too. Nobody gets anything they want until you focus not just on defending children's right to life, but children's right to their mother and father and fortify strong families everywhere. I don't know if that's where you wanted me to go. So if not, we can try that again.

Stephanie Winn: That's exactly it, right? That all of these social issues that bleeding heart liberals are concerned with, and I count myself as a former bleeding heart liberal with still many of those traits, are downstream of family breakdown. And the data is there to support it, as well as the anecdotes. I guess there's many ways we could go from here, but I kind of want to venture into the unknown because I haven't heard your thoughts yet on raising conservative kids in a woke city. That's a book that you've written. And again, you know, as soon as I knew that you'd written that a book by that title, I knew I wanted to speak with you, but I actually don't know what your thoughts are on this.

Katy Faust: Again, Stacey co-authored that with me, and we both have raised our kids in Seattle, largely in public school. There's seven kids between us. We've got boys and girls, a variety of different personalities, and we are in a place where everything is lying to them, not just the schools, but a lot of what they're seeing on social media, even some of our extended family, our neighbors, the kids that they're running around with outside in the street. I know that a lot of people, especially in my conservative Christian world, are like, why do you still live there? Go to Idaho like every other Christian in Seattle. And I'm like, OK, I understand that. And if you need to go, then go. But there's a lot of Christians that are in, a lot of Christians, a lot of conservatives, a lot of just sane parents that are in these incredibly woke areas. And then a lot of the ones that have gone to the conservative areas and the woke have found that their children anyway. And so like what Stacey and I have said is it does not matter if you're in a red state or blue state, if your kids are in public school, private school, or homeschooled, like you have got to fortify your kids against these body, mind, and identity-destroying concepts that your kids are being exposed to through a fire hose of ideology everywhere that they turn. So really it was just like we've got seven kids, many of them, let me think about this, I guess only three. Three of them are now out of high school. The rest of them are in high school, except her youngest, who is a middle schooler. And so it's not like we're totally done. It's not like we can be like, oh, look, we've got all of our children are now happily married, and they've got eight kids each. I mean, we're just telling you what's worked for us so far, to the point where our kids have felt like they can stand firm. They don't bend with the crowd. They're not taken captive by the lies of their teacher. posting screeds online of horrible content, or even being cruel to people that disagree with them. We're just like, let me just tell you the system that we have followed to get us to the point where our kids could embrace, understand what they believe, do it in a way that's compassionate, and not bend one inch. regardless of whether or not they are standing with friends or standing alone. So in that book, we outline sort of an age-appropriate trifecta, like three different stages of child development and what it is that you need to address with each kid at each stage. We begin with the concept of conservatism, like We didn't say raising kids on the right or raising Christian kids or raising Trump kids. We want to raise conservative kids. And what we mean by that is there's not a lot of good ideas that are new. The best ideas, the truest ideas are old ideas. And so we want to teach them to conserve the best ideas, the best ideas from biology, from economics, from history. And so we're not reinventing the wheel here in terms of what it is that you need to be inculcating in your children. You need to understand what are the best ideas that need to be conserved, and then you need to pass it on to your kids. So we sort of follow the trivium breakdown of human development, which is the grammar logic rhetoric. They employ this in classical schools across the country. And the idea is the grammar phase of learning where children are sort of wired, most all the way up through elementary school. That's the phase of childhood where they sponge everything up. They're not able to think critically. They can't process through competing ideas. If an adult they like tells them something, they adopt it, they memorize it, they regurgitate it. Okay? And that's actually a really awesome phase of childhood. It is the phase where you capitalize on the fact that they will sponge everything up and you expose them to as much good, true, and beautiful as possible. Because they cannot filter out damaging and distorted ideas, you have to filter out a huge chunk of the world's distortions in those early years, up until they're age 10 or 11. But then in middle school, their development literally shifts. Their brains start to prepare for the next stage of development, and they go away from the grammar, sponging, memorization, to the logic phase, where they are now able to process through competing ideas. So this is probably the area where I think especially Christians and conservatives would take issue with our approach. And they're like, oh, yes, we love it. Give them the good, true and beautiful. Send them to Awana. Make them memorize verses. Keep away all, you know, make sure that they're not reading. You know, Harry Potter, I don't know what it is, the current thing that's hot to not let your kids read these days. Harry Potter's awesome, by the way. But, like, it's that phase in middle school where we say, you need to stop sheltering your kids and you need to expose them purposefully. So you've already told them the truth about marriage or the truth about male and female or the truth about the sanctity of life from the moment of conception all the way until natural death. Now, you, mom or dad, in 6th grade, maybe the summer before 6th grade, you are going to teach them about abortion. They're going to know the difference between a chemical and a surgical abortion. You're going to teach them about transgenderism. You're going to study the four different phases of transition, and you're going to know exactly… Your kids are going to know more about what purity blockers do to bone density than their teachers do. You are going to expose your child to the supposed death with dignity acts, and really what that is is just euthanasia for the elderly and infirmed. And who else did those kinds of things? What other regimes throughout history also collaborated, copied on those kinds of ideas? So it's the middle school time for, we say, you introduce them to the distortions. And a lot of parents would say, whoa, girl, whoa, that's way too soon. But another huge part of effectively transmitting your worldview is getting to your kids first. We talk about this principle of the founder's principle. Whoever gets to a child first, the child will automatically consider the expert. So if the first time you hear about porn is when a fourth grader sticks a smartphone in their face on the playground, and they had no idea pornography existed before that, three weeks later, when they have questions about that video, they won't come and ask you. They will ask the fourth grader. So you have to get to them first about all this. And then in high school, we're like, you're done. I mean, you're done in the sense of worldview equipping. Now you downshift in terms of teaching and preaching and equipping, and you put into fifth gear connection. Your job in high school is to be as emotionally connected with your kids as possible so that when they hit that rhetoric phase and they're articulating it for themselves, they can come back to you again and again as a trusted consultant who they know wants to hear everything they have to say.

Stephanie Winn: Many of you listening to this show are concerned about an adolescent or young adult you care about who's caught up in the gender insanity and therefore at risk of medical self-destruction. I developed ROGD Repair as a resource for parents just like you. It's a self-paced online course and community that will teach you the psychology concept and communication tools the families I've consulted with have found most helpful in understanding and getting through to their children, even when they're adults. Visit ROGDRepair.com to learn more about the program and use promo code SUMTHERAPIST2025 at checkout to take 50% off your first month. That's ROGDRepair.com. Brilliant. Let me sort of break this down and relate to it as my way of integrating. So we're raising a fifth and seventh grader right now. And I recently had the honor of hosting my friend Laura Becker. a detrans woman. And she got to meet the kids and they got to meet her. And, you know, we mostly just shared food and played games and played with balloons. But there was a moment where our fifth grader was just kind of nearby playing his little handheld video game while we were just, you know, the three of us adults still sitting around the table, Laura talking very honestly about her experience as a detransitioner. And, you know, every now and then it would head into something a little adult and I would look at my fiancé and he would look at my stepson and be like, you okay over there, bud? And he'd be like, yeah. And I can just tell how healthy it was to have him be able to absorb because I told them about detransitioners before. They know the type of work that I do. They know that I advocate for people who are victims of medical harm and that I'm concerned about the ideology they're being exposed to in their schools because it leads to this medical harm. I've also empathized With how hard it is for them as children who just want to have an innocent childhood to have to hear about such heavy things happening to their peers, there's a natural tendency, of course, for kids to want to resist anything that would mean having to think about their friends and classmates as potential victims. So, of course, those natural walls are there, but it felt actually really healthy and appropriate to just let the 10-year-old sort of absorb an adult conversation with someone who is a survivor of these medical malpractice issues that are so prevalent in our society. So I'm thinking of, you know, him as being on that cusp from what you describe as the grammar phase to the logic phase. And of course, in our situation, as I mentioned, being a step-parent complicates my role and the negotiation between households of how much we expose children to certain ideas and things like that. And then I'm thinking about what you said of the rhetoric phase, that ideally, Parents have really laid a lot of the groundwork during early adolescence so that by the time their kids get to that phase where they're more likely to play push-pull and really need to test their independence, that there's a good foundation that's been laid. And rather than potentially getting into ideological power struggles, it's more about the connection and the child experiences the parent as respecting and supporting their developing intellect. That's very much in alignment with what I teach parents in my course, ROGD Repair, because it's so tempting to try to get into these power struggles. And what I'm realizing, even though I'm just hearing these ideas for the first time, so I haven't read this book, so I'm really extrapolating a lot, but I think, you know, parents are still trying to logic and to have control over their kids worldview at a stage where the kid is already departed and where they're really need, you know, at this point, you know, later adolescence. Developmentally, what's happening is that kids need to affirm to themselves that they're going to be able to make it on their own because they're just a few short years away from adulthood. So if the parent's trying to say, I know better than you, you're wrong, I'm right, any of that, they're going to threaten that fragile ego. Really, kids need to feel like their parents are in their core when it comes to their own ability to navigate the world as they see it. So it seems like you've really articulated that in a way that makes a lot of sense to me and actually connects some dots. And I'm curious what advice you would give to parents who, let's say their kids are 14, 15, 16, and so they're in that phase where you would emphasize the rhetoric approach. But they're realizing they failed to lay some of that groundwork. Either they didn't know what they really needed to prepare their kids for, or they were engaging in some wishful thinking that, I'll cross that bridge when I come to it. I'm not going to push anything on them before they're ready. And then the next thing the parent knows, the kid has been exposed to so much in school and online and through their peers. So parents feel like, oh, I missed out on being the first to introduce these societal dilemmas. I missed out on logicing and reasoning with them when they were 11, 12, 13, and now they believe some really dangerous things and they're pushing me away. Help, what do I do? How do I prioritize the connection when I really want to argue the logic?

Katy Faust: Yeah, it's hard. And the reason why we, my husband and I, are able to lean out so much in high school, which, let me just say, even though we went all in on grammar and logic, like, too soon? Possibly. Like, we went all in. But the reason we were able to lean out in high school is because we're like, we can't say anything new. They've heard everything that we have to say. if you are able to lay the foundation with the grammar and then introduce the distortions in the logic phase to the point where they know what communism is and they understand what socialism is and they've got a pretty good understanding of things like critical theory. I'm not saying they're experts but you know like they've got enough to be when their teacher says something they'll be like, oh they're lying. I don't exactly know why but I know that's a lie. So It is easier to pull back, and I say pull back in terms of training and equipping and teaching in high school if you really do hit the grammar and the logic hard. But I will say that most of the very, very good parents in my world just in the last five years woke up to, oh, crap, I gotta go hard on this worldview training. I mean, like even 10 years ago I think that people were thinking food, shelter, love, taking them to church once a week, I think we're all set. And it's really just been in the last couple years, they're like, nope, they need an education on the mortality of the free market. So this is a new world for a lot of parents. And I think there's a lot of parents, I know a lot of parents whose children have gone to high school or gone to college, and they did what they thought was right. And now their child is a Bernie bro, or is insisting that everything needs to go to carbon neutral even though it is going to devastate the poor of the earth. And so for those parents, my advice always is, if your kid is beyond that logic phase, you will go backwards if you say, let's have a conversation about why boys and girls are different. I mean, like, you are going to set yourself back. You are not going to be able to… you've missed the window of grammar and logic. So now your best bet, and I've told this to people whose kids are 15 or kids who are 25, I say maximize your emotional connection with them in whatever way you can. And I will say that it's hard to have emotional intimacy without physical proximity. So be near to them, physically near to them. If they're still in your home, dinner. My husband was so good about just taking every high schooler out once a week for breakfast, just the two of them, with no agenda. They just would know that they were going to be with their dad. For me, it's like, I would just find it wherever I could. I'm like, oh, you want to go to the gym together? Oh, you want to go grab coffee? Oh, let's go to Costco. I'm like, any time I could be in the car with them. So I had more of a pop-up kind of system, and he had more of a scheduled system, but physical proximity. So get as much physical proximity as you can, because it's in the physical proximity that you will, if it's going to happen, you will get the emotional intimacy. So maximize emotional intimacy. But then I would say, your kids probably have some issue that they're really passionate about. Maybe it's the environment. Maybe it's transgenderism. Maybe it's anti-capitalism or whatever it is. And maybe you think that those are the absolute worst ideas you have ever heard in your life. Maybe you think, I don't know what cisgender even means, OK? So my advice is pair with the emotional intimacy and expertise on what it is that they care about. Now it's time for you to know more about it than they do. Like, there is now so many incredible resources on, you know, what a carbon tax would actually do to industry and how industry supports the thriving of the lower and middle class. Like, know more about it than they do. And then my advice always is, don't start the conversation. If you are maximizing your emotional intimacy and if you are becoming an expert on socialism, then they're going to bring it up at some point and you're going to be able to say something like, Well, you know, actually Utopia, you know, that that was based on was, you know, written by Sir Thomas More and it wasn't supposed to be taken seriously. And they'll be like, damn, my dad knows what Utopia is. I mean, like, know more about it so that when they start talking about it, you're able to say something intelligent to make them go, Oh, my dad did the work and knows what non-binary means now. So you need to earn the ability to speak into the thing that they care about. You don't have to become an expert on everything that you feel like they're going wrong with. But the few things that they are really, really passionate about, dive in, dive in. And not just to refute them, but really to understand it well. You are going to be able to leverage that in all of your times where you're trying to make those emotional connections and hopefully get to the point where they would say, Well, what do you think, Dad? I didn't even know that you were interested in environmental policy, but tell me, do you feel like ocean temperatures and ocean levels are rising? What do you know? And then you can whip out a study about whatever you want, you know, about how, you know, actually the polar bears are doing great. So you're a little concerned about some of what we were fed 10 years ago in terms of like, you know, how it was going to be the demise of several species of the planet or, or whatever, that more people die from, you know, global cold than global heat. So if the temperature does rise by a degree or two, it actually could increase the, the square footage of farmland. I mean, like, just know something about it and engage with them. So I guess that's my very, very long answer of those things. And it goes for whether you've got a high schooler or a college student or you've got adult kids.

Stephanie Winn: I like that. And I'm going to drill down into a couple of details of the example you provided. One is how casual the tone is when this sort of fictional dad in the car weighed in and said, well, you know, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, right? The other is that this fictional parent used the phrase, you know. And one of the sort of tips and tricks that I offer in my course is… Tell me your tips and tricks. Like, I'm so like, is you know okay? Is it not okay? I'm like, can't wait now. Well, framing things as if your kid already knows them. Yeah, so part of what you're doing, so I'll explain the logic, right? So I specialize in educating and guiding parents of teenagers and young adults in how to communicate with kids with gender issues. what pitfalls to avoid, what strategic techniques to use instead, and so on. And so one of the sort of big things that we have to work around is the fragile ego of a developing young person. And there's many ways I can explain this. One of them is that hopefully once we reach a certain stage of adulthood, we have enough of a genuine sense of identity and confidence rooted in competence that we can let our guard down. We can be confident in what we know and what we can do and have a sense of humor about the things we're not so good at and an accurate perception of ourselves. Vulnerable young people who are still developing a sense of self don't have any of that to build off of. They're just beginning to form it. Your job is to give them as many experiences as possible to build a real sense of identity on and genuine confidence based in competence. That being said, their ego is fragile and they have a lot of what in psychology are referred to as primitive defenses. So projection, for example, being one pointing the finger telling you you're doing exactly what they're doing to you. That's just an example. Plus there's black and white thinking and there's just a whole lot of other psychological variables there. So when your young person is latched on to some kind of idea that is giving them an ego boost because they know something or because they're righteous, they're on the right side of history, the last thing you want to do is make them feel stupid or especially make them feel like you think they're stupid. or that you think they're bad, corrupt, or wrong, right? You also don't want to put yourself in a position where they can easily dismiss you as being stupid or bad or wrong, corrupt, immoral, and so on. So the techniques in my course are designed to work around these psychological traits. And so framing things as if your kid already knows them, even when you're not sure that they do, is one of these strategies. Because at least you're removing the variable of potentially triggering your kid thinking, oh, what, you think I'm stupid, right? So if you're leading into things saying, well, obviously, you're really, you know, you're so passionate about this issue. I know you spend a lot of time thinking about it. So of course, you're familiar with blah, blah, blah, right? You're almost like an offhand remark that it wouldn't have even crossed your mind that your kid didn't know this because they're so passionate and they're so knowledgeable about that topic. That way, if you happen to have said something that your kid actually did not know, They're experiencing the sense of, oh crap, I didn't know that, as coming from within them, not as coming from dad thinks I'm stupid. Totally. Good tactics.

Katy Faust: And, you know, we talk about how effective worldview transmission is conditioned on connection between you and them. And there's so many ways that – and why is that – why is it so important? Why is it so important that the kids are connected to you? And it's because they're human beings and they're going to be connected to somebody. But nobody else, not an activist, not a teacher, not even their peer group, has the same level of investment, connection, and interest in their long-term thriving as you do. And so you have to remove the barriers of communication between you and your child. Especially in a world where, and you know this so well in what you're talking about, where everybody is telling the child, your parents are the enemy. They are against you. They're the ones that are trying to thwart your thriving or the development of your true identity or whatever it is. I mean, we have so many voices telling kids, your parents are the enemy. And so part of not just like when you're trying to get to a child who's been captivated by a really damaging, dangerous ideology, but just in general, is to remove any barriers of communication. And so we talk about how, like one of our chapters is called the no-flinch rule, where if your kid says something that's really shocking to you, you have to You know, your brain might be going, what the? How the hell did that? She thought she could say that to my kid? They're in effing third grade, and they're reading that book? You know, like, your brain is freaking out. But your face has to say, oh, tell me the name of that book. Oh, well, who read it to you? Hmm, what do you think? Oh, yeah, they said a boy could wear a dress. That's really interesting. What do you think about that? Well, I'm concerned because they're really telling us a lie about what it means to be a person if they're saying that wearing a dress means that you can actually become a girl. Well, that's not true, right? I mean, but you have got to control your emotions because just that emotional explosion Or I would say, if you're in a situation with a child who's older, and you disagree, and you erupt because of something that they say, you're just erecting these barriers for communication. And they'll communicate with somebody. You don't want it to be the internet. And you don't want it to be the Trevor Project. You want it to be you. Because none of those other groups or individuals have the same level of interest in your child's long-term thriving as you do. So obviously, I don't think that you can't. You shouldn't. compromise on what is good, true, and beautiful. But in whatever way you can, you have got to demolish those barriers of communication.

Stephanie Winn: And it's so important to create the right environment for those things to emerge because kids are notorious for giving, you know, one word answers. How was your day? Fine. Right. But it's it's only with that sort of relaxed, natural unfolding of unstructured quality time, whether it's around the dinner table or the games or in the cars, you've said that, you know, that those things will just kind of naturally emerge.

Katy Faust: Yeah. Kids don't kids don't unload on a schedule. You can't be like, hi, tell me about the hardest thing to happen in your day to day. It is mile three of the mile, you know, six run where they finally go. My teacher showed us the absolute most deserving preview the other day, and you're like, oh. Tell me about that. What was that like? Whereas I can't, you know, if you went and said, what has your teacher done that pissed you off recently? Like, they'd be like, leave me alone, mom. But you do really, I mean, unstructured, like you said, is so critical. You've got to just have lots and lots of what I would think is physical proximity. And then you'll see after a while, sometimes nothing happens, but a lot of times the emotional intimacy, which is really just, you know, an opportunity for vulnerability, presents itself. And then they've given you a gift.

Stephanie Winn: So thinking about your advice for families who wish to manifest rather conservative values in places where they feel outnumbered and where they feel like the systems are stacked against them, one of the main emotions that I see in those families is fear. And you also mentioned they're overwhelmed. So, how do you fortify parents in the face of the sense that they're going to be persecuted or outnumbered or have their rights taken away?

Katy Faust: Well, there's a lot to be fearful of. I mean, so I don't want to downplay the absolute destruction of some of the ideas that are coming for your children, very often from official sources. So, I mean, the reason why people are fleeing Seattle in droves and going to North Dakota and Idaho and Tennessee is because it's ugly up here. It's war. And so we just don't have any illusions about what that is. So the only option is arm your children for war. And so once you're talking about arming your children for ideological war, obviously we're not attacking people, but we are attacking ideas, you've got to get very serious about training your kids from the moment that they can speak. So it can sound overwhelming, and it is overwhelming if you tried to do all of it for all your kids all in one year. But really what you're doing is you are doing a slow handoff, you're doing a sort of drip of exposure, especially to the distorted worldview ideas early on. And the truth is that this is over the course of, you know, 16 years, really. So we try to break it down in terms of what are the specific I say conservative ideas, but really we're just talking about reality, right? The realistic ideas about history, like the true history of, you know, the United States or the world, or genuine economic principles that we know work because we have tried them in several countries across the globe, or the biological realities that have been accepted by every society all throughout history up until like the last five minutes. And so these ideas that need to be conserved are really just ideas that are grounded in reality, as opposed to the ideologies that are being pushed. So what do you do, how do you make sure that you are advancing these in ways that properly assess the threat, because there's dangerous ideas out there, but then also where you're not being overwhelmed, where you're not going, oh my gosh, I'm absolutely paralyzed because there's too much to do. So we talk about several different tactics in the book and most of it is really just You're probably doing a lot of, I mean, you're listening to the, you must be some kind of therapist. So you care about these issues. You understand that there is a clash of ideas taking place and that, honestly, the side of reality, of biological reality must win. whether that is because you're concerned about your own child, or because you have concerns about our civilization in general. So you already are the kind of parent that is dialed in and tuned in. And my guess is this isn't the only podcast you're listening to. You're listening to Trigonometry, or you're listening to Honestly, or you're following The Daily Wire, or you're listening to Jordan Peterson, or Lex Friedman, or whatever it is. You're already dialed in to a lot of the sources that are trying to get down to issues of reality and work towards a thriving world. The good news is you don't have to do anything different or buy your kid a curriculum or send them to a camp or take them through a series of books. Just pull them into the world that you're already doing. You know, I, for the longest time, before I had a smartphone, when Ben Shapiro was on the radio locally here in Seattle. Like, I just would listen to him while I made dinner. And then when we got to the point where we had a smartphone and, you know, speakers everywhere, it was his podcast. So back then, you know, he was doing politics, but he was also doing culture and Bible time and all of that. So my kids were hearing not just from mom and dad that, hey, a really good, solid dating process with somebody whose values align with you are really important. They were hearing it from Ben Shapiro too. And so that's what you want. You want a lot of different sources that your kids are familiar with that are reinforcing these ideas. And maybe even introducing ideas. Maybe you don't know necessarily how to bridge the gap with your kids about gender ideology. But, you know, Stephanie's having a… great episode with the detransitioner and you can listen to that in front of your fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh grader and they can just hear it too. So they literally know that they're on the same page with you. You know, this is what we did with our youngest who, he was in third grade and he wasn't at the logic phase. I had not gone at him Like purposefully with now we're going to deconstruct gender ideology, but he had heard so much of it in his own world He had heard me having conversations with his older siblings. He had listens to interviews I've done or text that I was writing or whatever it was or things I was just you know streaming and in his class He was a third grader and he came home and said, hey, my teacher said that boys can't wear dresses. And I said, oh, you know, no flinch, no flinch. And I said, oh, well, what do you think about that? And he said… he thought really hard. And he goes, a boy can wear a dress. But that does not make him a girl. I said, yeah, that's right. Why not? And then he got really quiet. And he goes, mom, they would have to change every cell in their body. And I'm like, this is correct. So I didn't change anything with him. I wasn't taking him through a curriculum. He just was being exposed to all the things that I was listening to. And that actually is kind of what this looks like. You want your children to become what they are beholding. And hopefully they're beholding a mother or a father who is dialed into reality, who really wants human thriving, who is aware of all of the different issues that are tearing at the social fabric of our nation right now. So they're beholding you and you want them to become what they behold. And so you do that by just pulling them into the world that you're already living in. Hey, I'm listening to this podcast. Can I put one of my AirPods in your ear? Hey, I just read this tweet and it just blew my mind. What do you think about it? And we actually have in the book a chapter all about sort of the slow worldview handoff where we kind of show you step by step what this looks like. And it's very simple. Step one is I do, you watch. Step two is I do, you help. Step three is you do, I help. And then you do, I watch. And you can do this with anything. You know, in the book we talk about how you can do this with teaching your kids to do laundry. They're going to watch you do load after load after load after load when they're two and three and four. And then when they're five and six and seven, they're going to watch you do laundry, but then they're going to help you fold the socks and, you know, separate the colors. And then they're going to do their own laundry, you know, when they're 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, but you're going to help them know like what temperature setting to put it on and, you know, the best way to, you know, fold the slacks so you don't have to iron them when they're done. And then when they're in high school, you better just be watching them do their laundry, you know, because you've already done the slow handoff. So you can do this with any topic, whether it is like religious discipleship, or training them on matters of the sanctity of human life, or talking about the dangers of gender ideology. Like, if you are already in this, you can have them watch you and then help you, and then you can help them, and then you'll get to the point where you're just watching them because you've had this years-long slow handoff.

Stephanie Winn: It's a really beautiful way of articulating a concept I sometimes call scaffolding. Like it's so, from my vantage point, I see all these little places where it feels like there's like a missing element where a kid doesn't know how to do something. And I think part of that is that as adults, we already have mastery of so many things that could fall into the what you don't know you know. category. We know how to do things that if we had to stop and explain it, we'd really have to think about it. But we can do it on autopilot. And I think that's where a lot of parents, especially just caught in the busyness of life and the need for efficiency, can sort of miss the need to kind of slow down and scaffold the development of that skill with those two in-between phases of them helping you and then you helping them. I like the way you put that.

Katy Faust: That's a great framing.

Stephanie Winn: So I think we will leave it there. And I'd love to have you back on to discuss more of your ideas after I've read more of your books. I feel like this was just sort of getting started. And we have a lot of sort of private conversations happening before and after the recording as well. So I'm really glad to have established a connection with you and begun this conversation. Katie, thank you. So where can people find you in your work?

Katy Faust: Well, this was an absolute joy and a pleasure. And I'm so grateful that your voice exists and that you're offering these resources to parents who have so few places to turn. And it is an absolute scandal, the institutional capture that has taken place on what I think is going to be known as the greatest medical abuse that has taken place on a large scale since lobotomies. So I'm so grateful that you are a voice of sanity for parents that don't have a lot of places to turn and that you're daring to wade into these other waters too because the truth is there's a dearth of people that have the clarity and the courage to talk about these unpopular topics. So thank you for that. We would love to have you over at thembeforeus.com. Subscribe. We have tons of projects going on. We have a lot on the docket for 2025, lots of really exciting endeavors, and we'd love for you to be a part of it all. All right. Excellent. Thank you, Katie.

Stephanie Winn: Thank you for listening to You Must Be Some Kind of Therapist. If you enjoyed this episode, kindly take a moment to rate, review, share, or comment on it using your platform of choice. And of course, please remember, podcasts are not therapy, and I'm not your therapist. Special thanks to Joey Pecoraro for this awesome theme song, Half Awake, and to Pods by Nick for production. For help navigating the impact of the gender craze on your family, be sure to check out my program for parents, ROGD Repair. Any resource you heard mentioned on this show, plus how to get in touch with me, can all be found in the notes and links below. Rain or shine, I hope you will step outside to breathe the air today. In the words of Max Ehrman, with all its sham, drudgery, and broken dreams, it is still a beautiful world.