You're listening to the Family Discipleship Podcast.

Welcome to the Family Discipleship Podcast.

We're here to equip and encourage Christian parents to lead their families.

And we are now posting every other Monday all year long.

This is Adam Griffin, and I'm here with my lovely co-host, my wife,

Chelsea Griffin. Sadly, our friend Cassie could not join us this morning. She has a sick kid,

but good news. We are joined today by author, speaker. I'd even call her thought leader,

a leader of how we think. Dr. Kathy Cook, everybody.

Dr. Kathy, how are you today? I'm so good because I'm here with you. Thanks for the invitation to be with you. You got it. We're so excited to talk to you. For those who are less familiar with the work, you've written a lot, you've spoken broadly, you've touched on a lot of things about child development, about faith development, about generational change we're facing.

But how would you kind of describe to the listener?

This is who Kathy Cook is.

Tell us about you and your ministry.

Well, yes, the ministry is called Celebrate Kids.

We believe that we should be celebrating kids the way that Jesus did and still does.

You know, back when he walks on Earth, children with the forgotten generation except by Jesus, when the learned men said, who among us is the greatest, he called up a child. And I could just imagine those men whispering, like, did he hear the question, right? No, he heard the question, right. He just elevates kids, and that's what I want us to do. I want us to pay attention to who they are and not just what they do and to correct and not criticize them and I can go on and on. And we do that through podcasting and speaking at events for church, schools and conventions and conferences, whoever will hire us. We do a lot of pro-life work as well. And then I'm an author, as you know, and just I'm delighted that

anyone listens to me. I don't know how you guys feel about it, but that anybody listens.

It's just miraculous. Amen. Yeah. Anybody that, you know, when there's like a thousand listens

on an episode in a day, you think maybe my mom listened a thousand times, you know? But you hope it's

going broader than that. Well, you've got a brand new book. You've got a lot of things that are super helpful to parents, but you co-authored a brand new book called Raising Gender Confident Kids. And personally, we have certainly interacted with families that are struggling with how to talk about this with their kids. More often than that, though, we deal with families who are never talking to their families about this because they don't feel comfortable doing it, or maybe they don't feel the need. They haven't felt the press to do it. But I've also been in many situations where I'm kind of thrust into talking to teenagers about it, where I'm speaking at a youth event and a leader will come up and say, have this student here. I don't know. I don't feel equipped, but she's got really big questions or he's got big questions. Sometimes, honestly, this won't surprise you, Dr. Kathy, but it starts with, hey, this person is really offended by what you believe and what you think. Can you please talk to them about gender? So we're not starting always from even a place where, hey, can we just have a reasonable conversation?

And I'd love for you to maybe help us think about where is all the confusion this generation

coming from? Because I've been doing this for a long time and I didn't used to have these

kind of conversations. You know, 10, 15 years ago, this wasn't top of mind, nor was it offensive

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