Parent Evolution

Embracing the idea that our children deserve our honesty, vulnerability, and leadership, you’ll discover a powerful framework for raising your family with integrity and confidence. Giving and receiving the trust, communication, cooperation, respect, and joy that every parent and child deserves ultimately allows our children to become the leaders our future so desperately needs.

What do you do when, just before Thanksgiving at your mother's, your 14-year-old son asks you to iron the dress he recently purchased and plans to wear? Listeners learn the answer and much more in this wonderfully frank, loving, and practical account of parenting a transgender teen. Hassouri chronicles what amounts to a dual transition: as her child transitions from male to female, she navigates through anger, denial, and grief to eventual acceptance. Despite her experience advising other parents in her work as a pediatrician, she was blindsided by her child's gender identity.

As a child, author Olivia S. Benson was puzzled by her relationship with her father and his absence in her life. It took many years and much soul searching for her to understand her life experiences and how profoundly his absence affected her. Benson finally solved the puzzle, when she began to understand the nature of the Universe: what GEFS—God, Energy, Force, Spirit—really was and how her suffering could serve for good in her life.

I had a crazy uncle, like most everyone does. Many of his stories were about a big hairy monster that lived in the woods behind his cabin in the woods. He called the monster Bigfoot, a name I thought he made up when I was eight years old because I hadn’t heard the word before that. He had a Bigfoot encounter and was worried about abduction and attack all the time. My story takes place while I was in college, but it started way before that when Uncle Chip was still alive.