THE DISSIDENT DAD DAILY – Nov. 19th - Vol.4
Stop Letting the Internet Raise Your Daughters
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1. Kansas AG Calls Out School District For Secret Gender Policies
In Kansas, the state’s Attorney General just fired a shot at a big school district over alleged covert gender transitioning of minors without telling parents.
Kris Kobach’s office sent a formal letter to Wichita’s USD 259 accusing the district of “engaging in gender transitioning of minors without parental knowledge or consent,” warning that such policies risk lawsuits, loss of federal funds, and violate parents’ constitutional rights. The letter explicitly cites Title IX, federal regs against using funds to push gender ideology, and even a recent federal case backing a teacher who refused to use preferred pronouns on religious grounds.
Board members are scrambling to respond, insisting they “believe our policies align with current law” while admitting they’re only now “looking into” the allegations. Translation: they got caught playing social engineer with other people’s kids and are suddenly very interested in what the law actually says.
2. Florida Formally Adopts An Education Freedom Declaration
Florida just became the first state in the country to officially adopt The Phoenix Declaration: An American Vision for Education as the guiding framework for its schools. The State Board of Education voted unanimously to ratify the declaration, which centers parental choice, transparency, and content-rich, pro-Western education.
The declaration states plainly that parents are the primary educators of their children, that funds should follow the child, and that schools should ground learning in objective truth and America’s Christian roots. It explicitly pushes back on ideological fads and calls for character formation, civic virtue, and transmission of the nation’s founding principles.
Is Florida perfect? No. But this is what “using the state in service of families” looks like, not the other way around. It’s a concrete example of a government saying, at least on paper: parents first, not bureaucrats.
3. New Study: Social Media Breeds Distrust And Mental Illness In Gen Z Girls
A new study out of University College London just dropped, and it’s exactly what every honest parent already senses. Researchers followed nearly 19,000 kids from age 11 to 17 and found that early social media use is linked to later bedtimes, more negative body image, and, especially in girls, greater distrust of other people.
That combination shows up later as higher rates of depression, anxiety, self-harm, and suicidal behavior. The team found that the path runs like this: start using social media at 11, end up sleeping worse, hating your own body more, and trusting people less by 14, then show more psychiatric symptoms at 17. The effect was especially strong in girls, who are more relational and more vulnerable to comparison and exclusion.
So no, your teenage daughter spending half her life on a black glass rectangle is not “just what kids do now.” It is a pipeline from girlhood to neurosis, built and tuned by people who see her as a metric on a dashboard.
4. South Carolina’s Extreme Abortion Bill Stalls – For Now
In South Carolina, a bill that would have been the harshest abortion law in America has hit a wall in committee. The proposal would ban virtually all abortions except when the mother’s life is at risk, potentially restrict some contraceptives that prevent implantation (like IUDs), and slap women who get abortions – and anyone who helps them – with prison terms of up to 30 years.
Yesterday, four of six Republicans on a key subcommittee refused to vote, letting Democrats block the measure from advancing. The bill also threatened doctors who even told patients where they could legally get an abortion elsewhere. Pro-life groups themselves were split, with South Carolina Citizens for Life opposing the idea of jailing women as perpetrators instead of seeing them as victims of the culture that normalized abortion in the first place.
I’m strongly pro-life, womb to tomb. But law that sloppy, with punishments that blunt, in the hands of this state, is a loaded gun pointed at real families and real edge cases. The goal is to defend life, not build another clumsy machine that chews through the already wounded.
5. China Starts Paying People To Marry And Have Babies
Over in China, the regime that spent 35 years crushing births with the one-child policy is now frantically trying to bribe people to have children. A report in Sri Lanka Guardian details how regions are rolling out wedding subsidies, child-rearing benefits, and home-purchase grants to fight their collapsing birth rate.
Zhejiang province is offering wedding vouchers, while so-called “baby cities” like Tianmen are giving families with three kids the equivalent of tens of thousands of dollars in subsidies and housing perks. The Chinese Communist Party once bragged that it prevented 400 million births; now it’s staring down a shrinking, aging population, a massive gender imbalance, and the slow realization that a civilization that treated children as a problem is running out of people.
You cannot wage war on fertility for decades, then slap cash on the table and expect trust, marriage, and babies to magically appear. There is no technocratic fix for a spiritual wound.
Commentary
Stop Letting The Internet Raise Your Daughters
Let’s sit with that UCL study for a minute, because buried in the academic phrasing is a story every dad of daughters needs to stare in the face.
They followed girls from age 11 to 17. The ones who were on social media early didn’t just get “a little more online.” They slept worse. They felt uglier. And, most haunting to me, they trusted other people less by 14. That cocktail showed up three years later as more depression, more anxiety, more self-harm, more suicidal behavior.
So we have a system where the average girl hits middle school and is quietly funneled into a digital environment that makes her tired, ashamed of her own body, and suspicious of the people around her. Then at 17 she’s anxious, lonely, medicated, and everyone acts confused. “Kids these days, crazy how their mental health is collapsing.” Yeah. Crazy.
None of this is accidental.
The platforms are built to encourage comparison, exposure, and performance. Your daughter is nudged, over and over, to put herself on display, to scroll through an endless feed of curated faces and bodies and lifestyles, to internalize the idea that she is always on stage and always behind. Girls, being more relational and more tuned to inclusion and exclusion, take the heaviest hit. The study basically says that out loud.
Now layer that on top of everything else.
Schools where the state wants a say in your child’s “gender identity” before you do. A culture that treats abortion as basic self-care and kids as optional accessories. Lawmakers who can barely define what a woman is writing bills that swing wildly between “kill the child” and “lock the mother up for 30 years.” A global system that views fertility as a variable to tune, like China flailing from forced abortions to baby bonuses.
What does that world teach a girl, if no one steps in?
It teaches her that her body is a problem to be managed, either by chemicals, or laws, or algorithms, or procedures. It teaches her that relationships are fragile and weaponized, that other people are potential threats or competitors. It teaches her that children are either burdens to be avoided or political symbols to be manipulated. It teaches her nothing about being a future mother in a long generational line; everything about being a lone consumer in a crowded, hostile marketplace.
So what do you do as a dad?
You do not fix this by “having more conversations about social media.” You fix it by taking jurisdiction back. Your home is not a neutral space. It is a little kingdom. You set the rules of that kingdom.
That might mean your daughter does not get social media at 11. Or 13. Or at all while she’s under your roof. It might mean her phone sleeps in the kitchen, not under her pillow. It might mean her primary community is siblings, cousins, church friends, teammates, not anonymous faces in a never-ending scroll.
It means you speak positively and specifically about motherhood, about large families, about the beauty of giving your life away to your own people. You do not outsource that vision to TikTok and hope for the best.
And it means you stand in front of her as a man who is not ruled by screens yourself. A father who is present, who looks her in the eye, who prays with her, who takes her outside into the real world where gravity and dirt and chickens and neighbors still exist.
The internet will gladly raise your daughter for you. It will make her tired, distrustful, and broken, then hand her off to therapists and pharmaceutical companies to manage the fallout.
A dissident dad says no. He raises his daughters in the light of Christ, inside a real family, inside a story that runs forward a hundred years. And he treats her heart as something he is personally responsible for guarding, not something to be surrendered to a feed.
Thanks for reading and God Bless,
Greg @ The Dissident Dad
