Our Current Culture Demands More Vigilance from Parents

The following article is sponsored by American Parents Coalition and authored by Alleigh Marré, its executive director.

Parenting is a constant exercise in managing chaos. Every parent knows the timeless scramble of trying to get your kids fed, dressed, and out the door on time for school, appointments, birthday parties, or anything really. In fact, the last two Sundays we’ve left the house for church forgetting shoes for our toddler.

But today, domestic chaos is the least of our concerns. Our broader culture is challenging parents in a far more serious and unsettling way: institutions that parents once trusted are now actively working to undermine their authority, presenting new dangers to our children.

Many of these challenges are designed to circumvent parental knowledge and restrict our ability to protect our children. From the flood of Big Tech’s harmful content and Hollywood’s toxic messages to teacher unions taking over schools and laws that strip parents of a say in their children’s health care, parental authority is being undermined at every turn. Where parents were once in control, they are now told to take a back seat.

Confronting this new reality requires equipping parents with new tools. This is why our organization, American Parents Coalition (APC), has introduced The Lookout, a free parental notification system that provides essential updates directly to parents via text. These updates uncover hidden threats to our children and offer practical advice for raising them in a political and cultural environment that often prioritizes ideological agendas over their welfare.

Delivered straight to parents’ phones, The Lookout is a free resource designed to deepen awareness of our most pressing challenges as parents in an easily digestible form, without distracting us from the attention parenting requires each day.

Perhaps the most pernicious challenge facing parents today is the erosion of trust in our schools. Teachers and administrators have long been seen as trustworthy custodians of our children, acting in close cooperation with parents for the best interests of impressionable minds. Yet now, entitled administrators and activist educators behave as though they should have total control over their students—often to the exclusion of parents. Administrators today hide children’s mental health issues from parents, peddle pornographic content in school libraries, and smuggle ideologically charged materials unrelated to core education in the classroom.

These institutions are pushing specific value systems on our kids, often contrary to the views of parents, instilling life-altering beliefs and morals while we aren’t there to watch over them. Parents deserve to know what is happening with their children, which is why APC launched The Lookout as a free tool to help.

Each Lookout will have a different focus, based on topics and news uniquely relevant to parents. Our first installment focuses on Scholastic and their ubiquitous book fair flyers. According to their website, Scholastic is in 115,000 schools and reaches 54 million students in the United States. We noticed firsthand in our household a handful of books featured in the flyers that promoted gender ideology and introduced sexuality concepts not appropriate for our young kids. This led to researching the Scholastic website and the discovery of their “Read with Pride Resource Guide.” This guide, which includes books aimed at children as young as preschool, highlights “LGBTQIA+ children’s and young adult literature” and includes a glossary defining gender-related terms and sexualities such as “allosexual” and “two-spirit.” It promotes books on these topics and directly markets them to our kids via the flyers.

Finally, we never want to flag a problem without offering some sort of support or guidance on how you can begin to improve the situation in a way that’s right for your family. We will always offer resources specific to the problems we are highlighting, such as conversation guides, questions to ask, how-tos, links to data and research, and much more.

As parents, we are hardwired to protect our children against anyone who seeks to harm them. At American Parents Coalition, we are determined to reclaim parental authority because we recognize that nothing should stand between a parent and their child. The Lookout will make it easy on parents to fight back against the extreme agendas plaguing our classrooms, waiting rooms, media, culture, and everything in between.

Visit the American Parents Coalition website today to sign up for The Lookout — it’s free!