387: Mission Eligibility Age Dropped to 18 for LDS Young Women: A Conversation with Dr. Julie Hanks

Latter Day Struggles

Valerie Hamaker

Spirituality, Health & Fitness, Religion & Spirituality, Religion, Mental Health

4.5 • 859 Ratings

🗓️ 1 December 2025

⏱️ 55 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Send us a Positive Review! Join Valerie and therapist colleague Dr. Julie Hanks in this recording of a recent “Instagram Live” where they explored the recent breaking news from LDS Newsroom decreasing the eligibility age from 19 to 18 for young women interested in serving full-time missions. In this conversation Val and Julie tackle possible as variety of topics, including short term and long term social, cultural, and mental health drawbacks and benefits that might follow this policy c...

Transcript

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0:00.0	The Latter Day Struggles Black Friday sale is happening November 25th through December 2nd.
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0:33.6	Hello, friends.
0:35.5	I'm so happy to be with you today.
0:39.7	I am going to be joined by Valerie Holmacher of Latter Day Struggles Podcast, one of my dear friends and also fellow therapists
0:46.4	who specializes in working with the Latter-day Saint population. And we are going to be talking
0:53.7	about the lowering of the mission age for women.
0:58.8	Let me get Valerie on here and we will get this going.
1:03.9	And lowering of the mission age for women.
1:07.6	Let me get Valerie on here and we will get this going. Lowering of the Mission Age for
1:13.4	women to 18. All right. Hopefully we'll get. Oh, there she is. Hi. Hello. Good morning. How are you?
1:22.6	I'm so good. So good. Okay. This is speech news in Mormon circles, right? Lowering the missionary age. Hold on. Let me get this so I can, okay. Lowering the missionary age. So women and men can go at the same time. Why hasn't this happened sooner? What do you think?
1:57.3	Yeah, you know, I think that whether it's conscious or unconscious, what is changing is, well, let me put it, let me say it differently.
2:02.9	There is a one-up, one- down status between men and women, I think,
2:08.0	because we are a formalized institutional patriarchy, and I think in order to sort of keep a division between what men do and what their responsibilities are and what women do,
2:13.5	there have been these little arbitrary changes or differences, right?
2:18.7	And so now that we've tweaked one a couple of times now, it went from 21 to 19, now we're down to 18.
2:26.1	I think that's fantastic.
2:27.9	And also, it is interesting that in the news release itself, there was an emphasis on obligatory service for boys still and
2:38.0	optional service for girls still. So I think that's a big piece. And also one other like
	...

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