Parenting Teens with Trust and Connection (plus labels suck and identity is boring!)-with Jenny Cyphers

(There’s a volume discrepancy between my voice and Jenny’s. You may want to listen to this episode in a place with little background noise or you’ll need to turn it up loud to hear Jenny and my voice will hurt your ears.)

I was very excited to reach out to Jenny Cyphers and have her agree to this conversation with me! Jenny is one of the founders of ReIME (Rethink Identity Medicine Ethics at rethinkime.org) and is a veteran of the trenches, a pioneer of the weirdness that is parenting a transID-ed teen—back in 2016! In this episode, we describe the radical and misunderstood lifestyle of unschooling and parenting from a place of influence rather than control, as well as how we’ve both leaned on unschooling philosophy to navigate the “big idea” of gender identity with our children. Jenny’s daughter is long desisted, but as anyone who’s been following me for very long knows, my 18 yo daughter is still trans-identified.

We drop some names from the Unschooling world including Sandra Dodd who created the Facebook page: Transgender Questions; and Pam Larrichia of the Exploring Unschooling podcast and creator of the Living Joyfully website. We also bring up the books:

Hold Onto Your Kids by Gordon Neufeld and Gabor Mate

Unconditional Parenting by Alfie Kohn

Parent/Teen Breakthrough: The Relationship Approach by Charles Foster and Mira Kirshenbaum

Jenny was interviewed for the four part documentary that, if you haven’t watched it, you can check it out on YouTube: Dysphoric: Feeling Womanhood like a House on Fire (part one). Personally, I think this is the best documentary I’ve seen on what’s happening with our girls and is a good share to help others understand.

And here’s a link to Jenny’s article for 4th Wave Now:

A Careful Step into a Field of Landmines

You can find my article: Control vs. Influence on my SM’s Essential Concepts substack.

I welcome comments and questions! Please, if we were unclear on anything or you want to learn more about this approach, I encourage you to use the comment section. I would caution against just diving into this approach without some guidance. I executed rather poorly as we were transitioning from traditional school to this new philosophy, and it’s had lasting effects.