Listen here:

SUMMARY

Christy-Faith chats with Jennifer Strickland, a TEDx speaker and author, about the complexities of womanhood in the context of modern feminism. They explore the impact of cultural narratives on women’s self-image, the importance of motherhood, and the need for women to reclaim their identities and voices in a society that often undermines them.

TAKE-AWAYS

• Cultural narratives can devalue motherhood and femininity.
• Reclaiming the definition of womanhood is essential for empowerment.
• Love and truth must guide discussions about gender and identity.

ABOUT TODAY’S GUEST

Jennifer Strickland is a TEDx speaker, host of the I AM A WOMAN podcast, and an eight-time author including titles such as Girl Perfect, Beautiful Lies, and her most recent release, I Am a Woman: Taking Back Our Name. She teaches identity in Christ and healthy self image for women, girls, and youth. As a former model, Jennifer’s passion is exposing the lies of the media and connecting women to Christ, who gives them value, identity and purpose that lasts forever.

Find Allison here: 

• I Am a Woman book: https://amzn.to/3vM8ALF
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/jenniferstrickland_author
• X (Twitter): https://x.com/jennifer_urmore
• Website: https://URMore.org

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TRANSCRIPT

Jennifer Strickland: The feminist movement wanted to raise women up as superior to men. Well, the patriarchy wants to raise men up as superior to women, and neither one of them work. They don't work in human relationships. They don't work in marriage. They don't work in churches.

They don't work anywhere.

Christy-Faith: Welcome to the Christy Faith Show, where we share game changing ideas with intentional parents like you. I'm your host, Christy Faith, experienced educational adviser and homeschool enthusiast. Together, we'll explore ways to enrich and transform both your life and the lives of your children. Hey, parents. Just a quick heads up.

This episode includes some mature themes that might not be the best fit for younger ears. We suggest having a listen first to decide if it's right for your family. Thanks for tuning in. Welcome to the Christy Faith Show. I am thrilled to have our guest on today.

We might nerd out a little bit. As you guys know, I am a trained historian and I have always been fascinated with the waves of feminism, especially how it intersects with families and mothers who choose their children over careers. I think that this is gonna be a great episode because we are talking with Jennifer Strickland today. Jennifer Strickland is a TEDx speaker, host of the I am a woman podcast and an eight time author, including titles such as Girl Perfect, Beautiful Lies, and her most recent release, I am a woman, taking back our name. She teaches healthy identity and self image for women, girls, and youth.

As a former model, Jennifer's passion is to expose the lies of the media and connecting women to their true value, identity, and purpose that lasts forever. Thank you so much for coming on the show today, Jennifer. I think that this is gonna be a great episode because we are talking with Jennifer Strickland today who has a brand new book that just came out titled I Am a woman. And as I was preparing for this show, I had to laugh because normally, we are the ones that are bringing game changing ideas to the table. But today, we are examining how some ideas in our culture have actually changed the game on us and have complicated our parenting, but we're not going to shy away from the hard stuff.

That's not what we do as homeschooling parents. It's not what we do around here. Jennifer, thank you so much for coming on the show today. I wanna ask you first, will you share a little bit about yourself and your story and what led you to have an interest in women's studies?

Jennifer Strickland: Well, thank you so much for having me on, Christy. It's really an honor, to join you and your audience today. I have kind of an interesting story. I grew up in in San Diego in California and ended up in Hollywood as a young girl in the modeling industry. I moved up there to Hollywood when I was about 17 years old, signed a modeling contract.

I had been in the business since I was about 8 years old, and I moved off to Europe at 17 after I graduated from high school the modeling industry where I saw just all these self self image issues, you know, among women. I saw beautiful women on the outside that had very poor self esteem, that struggled with eating disorders, I began to realize that the images that women and girls see in the media and in the magazines and on TV are really not real to life. I ended up struggling with an eating disorder myself. I descended into anorexia when I was 21, 22 years old, working for Giorgio Armani on the runway over there. And I did.

I lived in several different countries, you know, from working and living in the United States, from New York and Miami and Hollywood, lived over in Germany and Paris and worked in Munich, Australia, all over the world. And I had the opportunity to to see one of the most glamorous industries in the world and what it did to young women's self esteem.

Christy-Faith: That's powerful. And, yeah, I grew up looking at the models on the magazines. And today, we're now looking at the social media influencers in the same way. And what's interesting is there was a social media influencer that I I binge watched last week because I thought I came across this person on Instagram and I was like, oh, I really like her style. I wonder where she buys her clothes.

And I was as I was going through her feed, I'm thinking, I don't think she eats. Like, this girl is so, so thin. And I want you to speak a little bit too. There's a lot of moms listening to this or watching this on YouTube right now, and I think it's a vital conversation for us to have, particularly those of us who are raising young girls about body image and how exactly to have those conversations with us. Is there any wisdom that you can speak to us regarding that?

Jennifer Strickland: Well, you know, I always tell girls the mirror is a bad friend, you know, because she's always changing her mind about you. You know, one day we look in the mirror and we love what we see, but the other day we don't. And women have a tendency to focus on their flaws. We really can't get our identity from something that's always changing. You know, the mirror is always changing.

The mirror will never be satisfied. The scale will go up and down. The sizes, you know, we wear, we know this as moms, are gonna change our entire lives. Daughters to get their value and their sense of self, from something that never changes. Like the fact that they're loved, the fact that they're gifted, that they have gifts and talents and abilities, that they can be a light to the world, they can impact the world, with their gifts and talents, and their outward appearance is always going to change.

So one of the best things you can do when a girl is obsessed with the mirror and she becomes a slave to that mirror is to get her to focus on her interior qualities, her qualities that make her different from other girls. And what is she good at? Is she a dancer? Is she a singer? Is she a writer?

Is she a good friend? Is she a leader? And getting her focused on those things. When I began when I left the modeling industry and I wrote my first book Girl Perfect, and I went back to school, I got my master's degree in writing, and I began teaching English, and I began working with young people, that's really when my eating disorder healed because I found a new reward for my brain rather than, okay, the number on the scale is gonna go down. I found that I could use my life for a good purpose and that would become a greater reward.

That's absolutely beautiful. Your book, I loved it, by

Christy-Faith: the way. You guys need to grab her book. It's absolutely incredible. Before the show, I was saying that I am going to be going through your book with my teenage girls. There are some it's definitely not appropriate for an 8 year old or a 9 year old because there are some topics in there that are graphic, but you you needed to go there.

And I'm I'm appreciative, Jennifer, that you did go there. And absolutely appropriate language for older kids, but every mom absolutely should be reading this book, especially if you have young girls and young boys as well because your book talks about identity, and it discusses how our culture degrades the value of being female. I found that so fascinating. How is this? What is our culture doing?

Jennifer Strickland: Well, they've dismantled really the meaning of what it is to be a daughter, what it is to be a mother, a wife, you know, a woman, a female. I mean, we have so many different areas that boundaries that have been crossed when it comes to women's work. You have the pornography industry, which is just 1. So the average teenage kid sees pornography at 11 years old and sees a very demeaning and demoralizing view of women. And we've seen this huge wave of gender dysphoria go over our nation in the last few years.

Well, we wonder why don't these girls want to be women? Well, all they have to do is see the images in pornography and realize that being a woman sounds scary. Okay. If I had seen those images when I was 11, 12, even 17, to tell you the truth, I would have been terrified of sex. I would have been terrified of men.

I would have been terrified of being a woman. So we have the pornification of the culture and we have the impact of the feminist movement, which demeaned motherhood, demeaned marriage, even demeaned life in the womb is valuable. And so it is a very confused and lost generation of girls. And so we really have to help them understand family. And don't bring life to you.

Take sex work is work, for example, is one of the feminist movement. Well, we have these girls going off to college and having all this sex right and some of them get into stripping and things like that. And they wonder why they feel depressed. They're cutting, suffering from eating disorders, they're going through abortion after abortion, all of it causes pain. So we have to help them understand how did our culture get here, about the meaning of the word woman, and how do we redirect them towards the definition of womanhood that is life giving and empowering and exciting to live out.

Christy-Faith: Yes. It's it's a reclamation, really, is what I feel like your book is. It was it's incredibly powerful. Oh, my goodness. What you just said there was so much because I wanna talk about the waves of feminism.

Also, I do wanna talk about the roots of the word and what it actually means to be a woman in our culture. But first, our audience may not be aware that we are kind of in there's been waves of feminism and I grew up in pretty much the 3rd wave of feminism. And I believed it to the extent that I delayed having children until my mid thirties and I delayed it so much that then I had infertility issues. And my twins, for example, are IVF twins because I was such an older mother. Now, of course, I have no I have no regrets.

But the one thing that I do wanna say that I believed that the culture definitely taught me was that children are a hindrance to your career. And the message kind of is that children aren't worthy. That only a life of only a woman who has a career has a life of meaning. And I really think that's a lie. I wish.

I wish. And you know, it wasn't my I grew up in a in a traditional household. My parents are still married. It was more of the the system and the messages and the magazines that that really led me to believe, oh no, I'm not gonna have kids. I gotta make sure I have a career first.

And and, you know, don't get me wrong. I I am a working homeschool mom now. I work full time and I homeschool, but I do it in a way with a lot of boundaries and I my priorities are with my family. And, thankfully, because my space is homeschooling, my my audience understands that and and, in fact, supports me in that because we are all in this together. But I want you to speak a little bit to this devaluing of motherhood and children.

What happened?

Jennifer Strickland: Well, it started with smash the patriarchy. It's interesting. It's not it didn't really start with devaluing women. It started with elevating women as superior to men, man. You know, these boots are made for stomping, they'll stomp all over you.

You know, the women who founded the feminist movement actually came from very troubled households. A lot of them suffered with abuse, mental illness, turned to same same sex relationships, had adulterous relationships, ended up getting into sex, drugs and alcohol, right? All of the things that we warn our kids against because a lot of them came from very troubled homes. And so they had been demeaned by men. They had been abused by men.

And so the founders of the movement thought that, okay, well, instead of them stomping on us, we're gonna stomp on men. And the truth is we can win men another way. We do not have to demean and demoralize men and raise ourselves up as superior to be esteemed. But that is what happened with the feminist movement. Men were told to sit down and shut up when it came to women's rights.

They said, you know, pause off my uterus, my body, my choice, as if the body inside of them wasn't the father's descendants. The father not having any say in the life and death of his descendants has been very, very damaging pain of, you know, abortions and so forth because, you know, my ministry, we deal with women who are a lot of trauma and I and I pain and regret over the loss of their child. But unfortunately, the feminist movement even took

Christy-Faith: the father's voice out of

Jennifer Strickland: the equation, said that men were unimportant, children were disposable, and you know, really pornography increased because of this whole sex work is work mantra, that they had this whole sexual revolution that that that women were gonna be truly liberated through endless sexual activity. Well, you and I both know that that's not true. And that's how girls get their hearts broken. And that's how their dreams get squashed. So there's at the same time, there was this entire exodus of women from the home.

They created a vacuum. Well, every space longs to be filled. And as women who are the glue of the family, actually in my studies for my book, I discovered the Hebrew word for mother is glue. Okay? Family when the mother vacated the home?

The family dissolved and fell apart. Divorce went on the rise. Kids had more mental illness than ever before. Kids got, you know, get involved in all kinds of things when there is not a parent, especially a mother figure in the home. She is the glue and the family unravels without her presence.

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I loved that. I did not know that about the Hebrew word for mother. When I read that, I was like, wow, that's incredible and it makes so much sense. The other thing as I was reading through your book, there's always been something that has stopped me when I'm in the store or I'm at the mall and I see these t shirts for girls that say, you know, girl power or those types of things.

I've never let my daughters wear those and I've always my heart has always stopped me a little bit. And part of it is because I have a son. I have a son that I wanna raise to be an incredible man. And what's interesting is when I was in college with I went to college with my husband and he took a class and it was on call the class was called authentic manhood. And I actually also took a class called authentic womanhood, but that that male class was very famous.

It was hard to get in at the school, and they really explored what it means to be a man. And I think that that what the reason why your book is so important is because we've we've lost how we were created to be, and there's these beautiful roles that we're naturally inclined to. You know, I look at myself. I delayed being a mother until my mid thirties. And as soon as I became a mother, this, I mean, this nurture that came out of me, it was like, where did this come from?

This is and I just loved being a mother and I immediately actually quit our we had a business at the time. I quit the business because I said, I cannot leave my son. This is unbelievable. We hired 2 people to take my place at the business. And then when we tried again for our second baby, I was already in my late thirties and and couldn't get pregnant.

And that was probably my darkest time in my life because I had tasted how amazing motherhood was and how much I absolutely loved it and was just deeply, deeply saddened that that my I might only have one child. So, anyway, that that's a whole another story, but I think no one can really deny this instinct that is within us, that that we were created. What did you, when you were exploring and researching for your book, the meaning of a woman, the meaning of a mother, and family, and all of that, what are some things that you discovered?

Jennifer Strickland: So I discovered, you know, for me personally, I'm I'm a dictionary nerd and a word girl. And so I took long looks at the evolution of the language in the dictionary. You know, discovering that the dictionary's changed the definition of men and women and male and female in 2020 and 2021. And I really believe that's to our detriment. The new definitions say that to be a male or a female is a feeling.

And so for me, I went back to the Bible because I I read the Bible every morning with my coffee pretty much. And I started looking at these words the book of Genesis that say woman and a lot of people don't realize that the that Hebrew is a gendered language and it's a language of action. So we can't see that in the English, but when you go to the ancient language, and the story of the creation of woman, we discover that the first woman's name means life giving. That her name is an action of the body, soul, and spirit. And, you know, a lot of people are wanting to say, look, I can answer the what is a woman question.

We are double X chromosomes. Well, the truth is we are so much more than that. You are a mother, you are you are bringing life giving action to your family when you're loving your children, you're teaching your children, you're homeschooling your children. Walking in your identity as a mother, not because of your chromosomes, but because what you bring to the table, body, soul, and spirit. And so the first woman's name means Eve means life giving.

In the story of the creation of women, we discover that she's a stabilizer, she's a rescuer, she's a force of incredible, actually military like strength to the man. And we find all of these powerful actions in womanhood inside the words that, you know, God uses in Genesis. And these are words that I want to bring to the conversation about what it really means to be a woman, is to be a strong stabilizer, a rescuer, a voice also for the vulnerable, the glue of the family, the life giving change agent in the home, the community, and the nation. You know, this whole question, what is a woman, has been going around our nation for a couple of years and and all that time I was researching this word. And so I'm so ready to answer that question and try to pass it on to the next generation.

Boys and girls so that they understand the incredible actions in their gender that they can be proud of. And that goes for boys and girls.

Christy-Faith: I think that's powerful. And it goes to the very core because even with the gender issues going on and and women dressed a certain way you know, when I was raised in a in a Christian home and I definite oh, we this is something we can talk about. I was raised in full blown purity culture, like the toxic kind. And even today, kind of in the homeschool space, there is a little bit of patriarchy in the homeschool space. And so I think that I'd love for you to speak to that a little bit because there are problems.

You know, I I don't think your book is saying, like, let's go back to the patriarchy at all. It's more of a reclamation of of embracing who we are and how we were designed to be so that we can fully live in that purpose. But, you know, at the same time, in fact, I'll just read a quote that I found really powerful in chapter 9. So I cannot read a book without totally marking it up and highlighting stuff but you write, mothers are the greatest influencers in our homes and in our nation. I wrote this book because I am a mother and the deconstruction of masculinity and femininity is happening on my watch.

As gatekeepers of the family and the spiritual guardians of our home, community, and nation, it is our responsibility to take back our name. This is not the call of the daughters. They are called to carry on the family legacy, and the young women are figuring out how to do that now. The calling to take back our name is the call of the leaders, the mothers specifically. But we cannot do this while being silenced by fear.

I found that so powerful. What did you mean by silenced by fear?

Jennifer Strickland: We know that unfortunately in the history of the church that women have been silenced. And it's not just the church. It's any it's any unhealthy structure in which the woman is subservient to the man and of lesser value. You know, we are created male and female in the image and likeness of God. We are of equal value.

We are to walk side by side and face to face through life. And it and that, you know, like we talked about, the feminist movement wanted to raise women up as superior to men. Well, the patriarchy wants to raise men up as superior to women, and neither one of them work. They don't work in human relationships. They don't work in marriage.

They don't work in churches. They don't work anywhere. So my heart is that by reading I am a woman, women will find their voice again. That women will discover that their voice has value and has purpose. And it's very important how we use our voice.

Because if we use our voice in a way that demeans men, then they're not going to rise into their identity of who they're supposed to be as protectors or providers or leaders or teachers or businessmen or whatever it is they do. Story of how impactful women's voices can be to impact culture. And we have an incredible opportunity right now. This is like the prime opportunity to answer the what is a woman question in a way that challenges both us to use our voice with wisdom, but also, patriarchal structures that try to silence women. I mean, even when I looked at the, you know, to me, the church has no excuse.

That's it. I'm just gonna say that because if you really look into the the Hebrew words, like even at the root of Eve's name is one who would speak, one who would announce. Even at the in the roots of the word woman has to do with her voice. So women's voices historically have been silenced whether it's through abuse or through superiority or whatever from men. And this is a time from men.

And this is a time where we can reclaim our voice and say, look, the pornographic culture of women, they're no longer gonna dominate the narrative about what it is to be a woman in our country. Gonna dominate this narrative. We're not gonna do it by demeaning men, by demeaning the home, demeaning children or the family. We're gonna do it by upholding men, upholding children, upholding the family, upholding the home. And as we do that, we have the power with our own influences to redirect the nation in a whole different direction.

Back to home, back to family, and back to the children.

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Grab your copy and maybe an extra one for your mother-in-law today. Homeschool Rising is available wherever books are sold. And I appreciated, at the end of your book, you talked about using this voice in love and not shaming anybody. Can you speak a little bit to that? Because I think that in the with this discussion about gender right now that is happening in our culture, faith based people, Christians particularly, are criticized for almost hate speech regarding people who identify with as different genders and stuff.

You spoke directly to this and you, in a way, my friend, raised us up to a higher calling in how we are to love others. Can you speak to that a little bit? I found that really powerful.

Jennifer Strickland: You know, once again, you know, Christians, they can follow the example of Jesus who sat there and spent time with the most, despised people in society, often went into their homes just sat with them, loved them, opened his heart to them. We're no different, right, than anyone who's struggling with same sex attraction or gender dysphoria. My heart only goes out. Very, very painful, you know, mental crisis to feel like you're born in the wrong body, for example. But once again, that is a mantra that is so cruel.

It is wrong. And just like the feminist mantras kind of worked their way into our society, my body, my choice, smash the patriarchy, sex work is worth just the way those mantra started working their way in and people stopped thinking. They're called thought stoppers. Okay, as you get to the end of my book, I talk about the power of thought reform. Those are thought stopping mantras.

Let's just stop for a minute. Hold on. Telling children that you're born in the wrong body? I mean, I spent 20 years teaching and studying and researching body image and helping girls with eating disorders. The last thing that I would have ever told an overweight girl or girls that would write to me with my ministry, read my previous books and Bible studies, they would write to me and talk about their skin diseases.

They would talk about their scars, you know, losing their body parts, their eyeballs. Are you kidding me? I would never in a 1000000 years tell a girl she was born in the wrong body. This is an awful message. It's something we would never to say to somebody who had cystic fibrosis or down syndrome.

Okay. So right away, we have to put a stop to things like that. And we have to also say, look, it

Christy-Faith: is not loving to partner with a lie. I am

Jennifer Strickland: not going to tell a girl before she ever has her period that it's possible to live out a non sexed identity in this world. The body and soul are are married. That that that we we express who we are through these bodies. Truth. It's not loving to lie to them and to start calling a girl, a boy, you know, Jordan Peterson talked about this, you know, using all these pronouns and things.

K. Pronouns, first of all, are the most meaningless words in the English language. They mean nothing. They tell me nothing about you. You know this from dancers?

Are we writers? Are we singers? Are we mothers? Are we fathers? Who are we fathers?

Who are we? It's about what we do in this world. That's how we influence the world. But you know, Jordan Peterson said, you know, calling these kids by opposite pronouns, he's a renowned psychologist. He's like, this is gonna cause a wave of gender dysphoria.

And it did. So we cannot give into fear. We have to love people right where they are. Get to know them, invite them to your home, invite them to your table. And at some point, hopefully, truth of their identity into them.

Christy-Faith: And listen, this is one

Jennifer Strickland: of my sort of thesis, you know, in the book is that we start elevating the beauty of being a woman and a wife and a mother and a daughter and a sister and a female and how awesome it is that we get to bring life into this world, that we get to speak life into this world, that women set the tone. You know, all these amazing things about what it is to be a girl. We can start speaking those positive truths of femininity into them, and then they're going to rise to it. And the same goes for boys. The same goes for boys.

We see that in the Bible, in the book of in the story of Gideon. Just real quick, I'll just say, you know, he was a weakling and he was scared and God called him a warrior. And so he rose to that calling. Warrior inside of every boy. And if we start speaking the truth of that identity into him, he's gonna rise to it.

Christy-Faith: That's absolutely fabulous. And what was coming to mind as you were sharing that is that I feel like our culture has such mixed messages. Right? Where, first off, we're like, oh, you know, we gotta teach our boys as like boys think. And and he's he's all boys, so we gotta teach them this way and girls learn this way, which we do know this.

There is evidence regarding boys and girls learn differently. And then at the same time, you know, we we have issues where our girls are no longer comfortable in locker rooms because of the people that are in there. And it's like or there are men engaging in women's sports, dominating the women's sports. How is that helping the feminist movement? How is that helping women at all?

And so I think that regardless of where anyone stands and the reason why I had you on the show today is it's the same as with education. I've been in education for over 20 years. There are trends. There are always trends in our culture. And just because something is trendy does not mean that it's good, does not mean that it's necessarily true.

I mean, look at the whole language movement of reading. We have an entire generation of kids who are poor readers because of phonics was abandoned. And, you know, people wonder why homeschoolers score so much better. It's because we never abandoned phonics. We've always taught our kids to read through phonics.

We never went through those trends that the public school system was basically treating our kids like guinea pigs. And I and I am I want us to pause and think about what our kids are being exposed to in the system. What trends it's not just educational trends. It's also trends like this. Do you really think a young kindergartener should be having conversations about their sexual orientation at a public school?

Do you do you ask yourself this? Do you really think that's an appropriate place? Do you think it's the government's place to be having these conversations with our kids? How do you think the government feels about it? We need to have an honest conversation with ourselves in the sense that in some ways, the government is really stepping into the parental role and overstepping boundaries as to what should be our sphere and what and what should be their sphere.

Right? Like, teach my kid to read. We don't need to have, you know, we don't need to be reading things about social justice necessarily. So anyway and this is why there are so many people in the homeschool movement, the modern homeschool movement in the last 10 years that aren't necessarily Christians anymore. They're just like, what?

What is going on here? This is nuts. Whereas in the eighties nineties, it largely was a Christian movement, which I just want to make a side note. Homeschooling started with hippies in the sixties. That was a is a very much a non Christian movement that then in the eighties nineties, a lot of Christians started taking their kids out of the public school because of things that they started to see.

But if you don't take anything away from this episode, it's try to take a step back from our culture for just a minute and observe it in a way of what is trendy right now? What where are the lies? What do I believe? If you are a Christian, how does this balance against what scripture says about our identity? And if anything, I just love how your book rather than just complaining and and and throwing mud, right, at all of this, you're more about this reclamation of how beautiful and wonderful we are and we're created to be and that we can raise our daughters to be proud of who they are.

If you are a believer, if you are a Christian, it's who they are in Christ and who they were made to be and embrace that beautiful femininity and and reclaim that for our culture. I think that's such an important message. You end the book with some practical ways to take back our name. If you're enjoying the show and you don't wanna miss out on future episodes, hit that like and subscribe button and show us some love with your comments. Those 5 star reviews really do make a difference.

Would you share some of those with us?

Jennifer Strickland: Well, absolutely. You know, when it comes to mentoring, it's so important. Important. And obviously, you know the value of that in the homeschool space that older women need to be mentoring younger women, all the time as much as possible. Having groups of girls in your home, all kinds of resources for that at my ministry youaremore.org, which is the letter u, the letter r, more.org.

So at you are more dot org, you can find different curriculum you can do. But most of all, you know, get a girl around, get the girls around your table and start being honest. You know, be honest about the stuff that you're seeing in culture. Be honest about your own story. As soon as you're honest about your story, they are gonna have permission be honest too.

So that is one way that we can take back our name. And the other way is to do a book club with my new book, I am a woman, gets the get the women around. I have other books that teach identity and self image and body image and things like that for girls. But we really wanna speak the truth about identity into this next generation. Their identity is not their sexuality.

Okay? We've got to be honest about these these trends and these mantras that are coming through from kindergarten to college. Only should you not be telling kindergartners that you shouldn't be telling college students that their sexual urges are their identity. But we we are so much more than that. Your identity is the things people are gonna say at your funeral.

Okay. You were selfless. You were kind. You were loyal. You were a mother.

You were a wife. You were a teacher. You were an educator. These are the kinds of truths that we have to ground young people in to create an identity that is really going to last.

Christy-Faith: What a beautiful message. And I love that. You know, we talk about just this last week in Thrive Homeschool Community, we wrapped up our our program where it's called the fail safe homeschool setup, where I teach women logistically how to set up their year, and I ended with some words of wisdom. And I reminded everybody that take your focus off of grades. Right?

That your your success as a homeschool parent is isn't if they've earned the a. Your kids' identity shouldn't be wrapped up in the grades that they get. And I feel like this is just an expansion of we are more we are more than being identified. How many times at parties do you get you know, people start talking about their kids and they go, I've heard this so many times. Maybe it's just culturally in my area, but, oh, yeah.

Olivia is a great kid. She's a straight a student. Like, that's the that's the definition. How how much more are we than that? And what a beautiful thing to study and embrace, and you do it so very well in your book.

Remind our audience that Jennifer's book is a faith based book. It's absolutely beautiful. Great to do as a bible study or as a small group or as a book club. You mentioned you are more. The book is on Amazon.

Correct? On Amazon Prime. Is there anywhere else our audience needs to find you if they want to?

Jennifer Strickland: Absolutely. They can go to Iamawoman dot us and find out about my online and in person book clubs and host their own book club with the book or any of my other curriculum You can find me also on Instagram at jenniferstrickland_author. So I would love to connect with you that's there as well. Great. Thank you so much

Christy-Faith: for coming on the show today and uplifting us women and and just reiterating that us choosing our families and a lot of us have given up our careers and we have chosen our children. We have chosen to raise our children and that is beautiful and that is worthy. And our our identity is also not in what career we have or what job we have. It is so much more than that. And when we discover that, that is where we find true contentment and joy in our lives.

Thank you so much for coming on the show today, Jennifer.

Jennifer Strickland: Absolutely, Christy. Thanks so much for having me on. You keep up the good work. What you're doing is so important. Oh,

Christy-Faith: thank you.