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The Hidden Female Superpower In A Multigenerational Family · The Family Teams Podcast

• 0:00
  it's really important to take a big step back and say, God designed Eve with this ability to judge, to oppose Adam, to create this dynamic relationship so that the family can both be led well by the father, like led into sometimes even dangerous or very critical missions, but in a way that's hyper-relational and honoring to all the people and is centered on and is saturated in love.
• 0:26
  Hi, welcome to the Family Teams Podcast. Our goal here is to help your family become a multi-generational team on mission by providing you with biblically rooted concepts, tools, and rhythms. Your hosts are Jeremy Pryor and Jefferson Bethke, and we can't wait to chat about all things family.
• 0:44
  Hey guys, welcome back to the podcast. I wanted to take some time today to look at some topics that I've been thinking about for a long time and having a chance to address really head on. And there's a video that really sort of stuck out to me that Jonathan Haidt recorded. And he talked about girls specifically and kind of just how girls are unique from boys and a part of how that works itself out in today's social media landscape. But there's a huge implication to what he's about to say.
• 1:11
  with regards to family that almost I never hear anyone talk about. So I wanted to share that with you guys today, kind of as the first clip. So I want to play this for you guys, and then we'll talk about it. Girls' aggression has always been relational. They don't punch each other. They don't threaten to put each other's heads in the toilet. I mean, it happens sometimes, but it's not that common. With girls, it's the movie Mean Girls. It's relational aggression. They become extremely skilled at damaging another girl's relationships or her reputation. They're masters of exile teenage girls.
• 1:41
  Yeah, that's right. That's right. For all these reasons, girls are more attracted to social media because it promises them information about social relationships. You know, who's saying what about whom. Girls have a more developed social map, like representing all the people and how they're related to each other and who likes who and who's having a fight with who. Girls are more motivated to maintain that map than boys are. Boys are a little more clueless.
• 2:03
  According to the work of Simon Baron Cohen, an autism researcher and expert, boys are literally more on the spectrum. They're more towards autism, just in that they're more socially clueless, but they're drawn more towards systemizing thinking. In any case, for all these reasons, social media tracks the girls more and then harms them more. All right. So before we talk about the boys, I just wanted to zero in on what...
• 2:30
  Jonathan Haidt is saying here that girls have the ability to map their entire social network and they're very sensitive to that map. They can exile other girls. The kind of movie Mean Girls is really the kind of the example of how girls can have the superpower.
• 2:51
  And obviously the way that he's framing it, it's just sort of like in a modern social media landscape, this is like a negative thing. This is like something that he's really talking about female aggression. One of the things that is also true about this ability, this superpower that girls have is it's actually incredibly adaptive and very helpful to...
• 3:12
  So one of the things that women can do is they're hypersensitive to the social connections within a extended or larger family group. And so they are extremely skilled at cultivating.
• 3:27
  those relationships and incredibly sensitive to when those relationships are off kilter. And if somebody is doing something to really threaten the larger family group in order to keep the extended family together, then the matriarch, the mother can quickly see, sense and address or call the family to address those potential relational rifts or those disconnects that are happening within that larger relational map.
• 3:53
  I think it's really important because most women today grow up in a world in which that actual social map that they are instinctually creating, it's not clear to them why it exists. It's sort of they then inflict that same level of social control on maybe their friend group. And so you see this in middle school girls where they'll just be constantly...
• 4:17
  playing off each other, the whole problem with kind of social cyber bullying that's happening. And no one is explaining to girls why this is actually a very, very important superpower for them to cultivate. So once they become a mother...
• 4:35
  If you're ultimately going to find yourself as the matriarch of a large multigenerational clan, then you absolutely need a mother that functions in this capacity, where she's constantly aware of those social relationships. Now, again, we're not aware of this at all. We don't think about this. But within smaller villages where multigenerational families...
• 5:00
  lived, these matriarchs would be incredibly active at keeping cohesion in the family by constantly signaling, hey, that's an acceptable behavior. That's not acceptable. This is what's going to actually lead to sort of social flourishing. Now, there's a very toxic element of that in the same way that men can use their strength, their superpowers in a way that really hurts the family. Yeah.
• 5:24
  Women can also use the superpower in a way that hurts the family. But it's important to understand that the superpower itself is extremely important, adaptive, and a critical part of multigenerational family life. And girls, oftentimes, they're just sort of, this is all being kind of cast in light of, you know, you stop interfering, you're being passive aggressive, like all these things that, you know.
• 5:48
  are important things to kind of work out in the context of a family, but it's almost always framed in this sort of negative social, it's almost like a social pathology that happens within female groups. And no one's really taking this bigger step back saying, well, why do women have this power? And why is it helpful?
• 6:06
  Hey, it's Jeremy. I grew up in the Pacific Northwest where having a child was treated like a lifestyle choice, kind of like getting a dog. Most families I knew didn't talk about a vision or a legacy or building something together. So when my theology around family changed, it hit me hard. I realized I wasn't just raising kids. I was forming a multi-generational team, but I had no idea how to do that. I needed tools, rhythms, frameworks, and I needed examples. That's why we created the Family Teams Accelerator is the kind of path I wish I had back then.
• 6:33
  Each month, we walk through one key area of family life, like Sabbath, discipline, or family mission, and give you a simple video, a playbook, and real-life tools to build it into your home. If you're trying to lead your family with intention, but feel like you're making it up as you go, you're not alone. You don't have to figure it out from scratch. Join us at familyteams.com slash accelerator.
• 6:58
  So I wanted to just kind of throw that out there. I think that one way to really think about this in the context of family is that the mother of the family has this incredible ability to know.
• 7:10
  who are the most disconnected members of the family? And one of the really helpful things that a wife or mother could do, and April does this for me constantly, is I rely upon her and her social map to constantly update me on what are the relationships that I need to focus on this week? You know, what's a critical connection that's happening within the family, the larger family, the both our immediate and extended family that would help our family thrive? For whatever reason,
• 7:38
  It's almost like she has these... It's like you're in the cockpit of an airplane. And April has this ability to sort of like... She has all these sensors that are all over the place. And I'm trying to fly the plane. But she's able to say, hey, here's a... There's like alarm bells going off over here. Like we need to really...
• 7:58
  you need to really spend time with, you know, this daughter or this person, or you need to ask this question or like something's going on over here. I don't know what it is, but, but I think we need to address it. And she's always kind of,
• 8:09
  reacting to those things in herself and also doing things to kind of keep the family together. But I also need to develop a really, a very healthy communication pattern with her where it's like, hey, you can tell me about those things and I will address them. And I'm not going to see that as just a constant. Now, there's an annoying version of that where it's just like, you know, where I'm being judged. You know, this happens in some families where a wife will actually judge her husband for not being...
• 8:35
  for being dense. And one of the things that, you know, Jonathan Haidt pointed out is that men are almost like on the autism spectrum, especially when you compare our ability to do this with a woman's ability to do this. Men are much more focused on systems and they don't have this innate ability.
• 8:53
  And so sometimes, you know, women can judge men for being too male as opposed to us like working together and seeing this as a superpower that is designed for us to help each other build a kind of family that's cohesive. This is also another reason why.
• 9:10
  There's such misunderstanding in this whole world of like, oh, we live in a patriarchal male oppressive society. One of the reasons people believe that is because male power tends to be systematized and overt, whereas female power is implicit.
• 9:26
  and is often social. And so a woman can exert enormous power in a family socially because she's got access to this map and she's using it to make very fine calibrations all the time. Whereas the man, when he makes the decision, it's just like, it hits the family like a ton of bricks. It's like out of nowhere, all of a sudden, he can say, we're moving to this place or whatever. And so it sounds like, wow, he's got all this authority, all this power, he can just, he's got the leadership ability to maybe a trump card in the family
• 9:54
  But often that exists in the context of the wife making thousands of these micro adjustments using her superpower. And it's really the combination of these two where the man can be very focused on, you know, on sort of big picture decisions or major shifts in the family, the system that the family is building. And the wife is constantly engaged at the relational social level of the family. Now, these things overlap, obviously. Men need to be engaged in the social relational aspect of the family.
• 10:24
  And women need to be engaged in the big picture aspect. But oftentimes they exert their decision making power in those two realms in very different ways. And it looks very different culturally. And so this is why you have one of my favorite examples of this is in.
• 10:43
  at the Oscars when Will Smith slapped Chris Rock, one of the things that people that were really observing kind of what was going on there noticed was that Chris Rock made a joke about Will Smith's wife. And it looked like he might've kind of thought it was funny, but looked over and his wife was obviously not amused and was offended.
• 11:02
  And that suddenly did something to him, right? Her tiny signal was enough for him to become extremely offended and go into action, right? And felt that you violated my wife in some terrible way and now I'm going to make you pay for it. Well, that's a really interesting use of power, right? That she had in that situation that he had to agree to and who knows what.
• 11:28
  things are going on in the relationship, can't read their minds at all. I'm just saying this happens all the time. Women are constantly, and they need to constantly be sending signals to the entire family that is causing the family to develop a certain kind of culture. And this can be very pathological. Like if a woman uses the superpower in a very self-serving way, this can be, this can create an extremely toxic family. If a woman uses the superpower to build a
• 11:57
  like a very loving relational family team, this is extremely important and it can be very beautiful. It beautifies the family and causes the family to be centered on love and for no one to be left out and for...
• 12:11
  all of these different feelings and various preferences to be honored because she can sense when those things are being violated at that really micro level. So I just thought it was really interesting, his framing of that, what's happening with young girls in this context where they're constantly being
• 12:29
  they're struggling with how do I, how do I handle the superpower? Is it just, do I, do I sort of exert power in my friend group? And the answer is you do need to get practice at this so that you can serve your family well, uh, and you can become a really great teammate to your husband in building a family whose center is love and relationship. So, all right. Uh, and then there's one other, one other clip I want to share with you guys today that has been, um,
• 12:56
  I've been thinking through. This is kind of in a similar vein. Matthew Pajot was having a conversation with Jordan Peterson about Eve, about what was going on in Genesis 2. And in light of what we were just describing about women's ability to...
• 13:13
  oppose or serve the family through having this unique perspective, I found what they said here really helpful, just theologically and practically. So I'll play this for you guys. I'd create Eve in the narrative of Adam and Eve, because that's actually a good question. He might have just created this, the man without the woman, right? But if you're a scientist, you can easily understand that because the reason why he creates Eve is to counter...
• 13:34
  What Adam is doing. And it's pretty clear in the language. If you read it in the original Hebrew, there's a lot of hints to that. So what happens when God creates Eve, he puts Adam to sleep. Okay. What does that mean? It means it's an attempt to renew Adam. Okay. So he loses consciousness.
• 13:57
  So sleep is like a little taste of death, basically. It's like a cyclical thing where you lose your ability to control and to name and to command things. So that's what happens when we fall asleep. Our mind loses the command of the body, right? So it's like a counterpoint to what Adam just did. Adam just names the animals. He's naming everything. He's...
• 14:22
  using his authority to say, this is the name of this phenomenon. This is like a scientist who has a theory and he's,
• 14:30
  seeing if it works and it's working, it's working, it's working. And then it says it's not good that Adam is alone, basically. Why? Because he needs a feedback mechanism for what he's doing, for his naming. Because he can name phenomena, but he can't name himself. He can't see himself because he has a perspective. He's using his own perspective to view the world.
• 14:54
  But then he never bothers to, or he can't rather, look at himself. So what he needs is what's called sometimes a foreign perspective. So he needs, this is what Eve represents. So he falls asleep and then it says, God took a side, his side, and built a woman into it. See, the word for side also means stumbling, stumbling stone.
• 15:24
  See, so the side that he took, it also means a stumbling stone. So that is exactly what it is. But it's a good stumbling stone. And this is very important. Ben Shapiro told me that the original Hebrew for what's translated as help meet in the King James Version is actually something like beneficial adversary. It's because it says God created a help.
• 15:47
  against him. That's literally what it says, a help against him. But obviously, the purpose of God creating Eve is not to destroy Adam. This is a pretty obvious thing, but...
• 16:02
  Because if we look at the narrative and we give importance to each of the events, it starts with God saying, don't eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil or you will die. And then right away it says, it's not good that man is alone. So you see, it's directly related. The creation of Eve is related to the fact that he just told him, don't eat from the tree of the knowledge of evil or you will die. And then, okay, Adam names all the animals, but he doesn't find a help as his opposite.
• 16:32
  You see, he doesn't find his opposite. He needs his opposite to see himself. That's the idea. He needs like a mirror to look into where he sees an inverse image of himself. So the left and the right are flipped. Women really do. This would be associated with their association with the serpent in the Garden of Eden as well. Women really do provide a critical mirror for men. And that's partly because they're hypergamous.
• 17:01
  And so women judge men more harshly in many ways than men judge women. Now it's ambivalent, but there's some truth in it. So for example, on dating sites, women rate 80% of men as below average in attractiveness, whereas men rate 50% of women as below average in attractiveness in relationship to potential short-term or long-term mating. And so...
• 17:25
  And it's clearly the case that Eve becomes self-conscious in the story of Adam and Eve and then makes Adam self-conscious. The scales fall from both their eyes and now they can see their own nakedness. And their own nakedness is in some deep sense their own vulnerability. And so Eve provides, as you pointed out, a corrective...
• 17:47
  reflection of Adam. And you're also stating, and this must have something to do with the association between Eve and the serpent, because the serpent is the thing that lurks in the well-ordered place. And there's always something that lurks in the well-ordered place, because no matter how much order you establish, and that would be true of a scientific theory, there's always something left over that speaks of the infinite that isn't encapsulated within your theory.
• 18:12
  So one of the things that they're pointing out there, I think is so important, is when you get the creation of Eve, it's theologically so important to understand every single word of what God was intending when he created male and female. And it does say that when he creates Eve, he creates this helper suitable for him, where in Hebrew that word suitable is often...
• 18:39
  It is kind of this strange word like to oppose to him or against him. And, you know, one of the I know another place I think Peterson points out, it's sort of like the two the two parts of a trellis that are, you know, that are kind of counterbalancing each other. You need both. But going back to our previous point.
• 18:57
  That exists for a good reason. Like families need the wife to have this powerful relational vision and that she then needs to have a dynamic relationship with her husband where she can share that with him and with the other members of the family, what she sees.
• 19:12
  because she has this intuition, this instinct for the family. And this is really a difficult thing for a woman to steward. Like a mother, how do you communicate that in a way that doesn't constantly violate the family or demonstrate disrespect to members of the family that are adults that need to have freedom to make decisions when you see things so clearly and you feel them so deeply? And this is why...
• 19:40
  It's an interesting, when you think about the order of the home, that these signals need to be given, but not necessarily given sort of ultimate authority in the family. Right. And so this is a very difficult position that women find themselves in. And that's why I think at the fall, one of the things that is said over Eve is that your desire will be for your husband or in some translations, they even use the word control your husband.
• 20:06
  but he will rule over you. There's this, the feedback mechanism, this need for giving this clarity and sending these signals.
• 20:16
  The family desperately is dependent on a woman's ability to do this and to function in that capacity. But that's going to constantly tempt her to, in some ways, take authority over the family. And in many cases today, because we don't have strong theology around family order or the idea of family leadership, this is accomplished often. And what occurs is
• 20:44
  the signals basically run the plane. And there's no dynamic relationship. You've got men who are more than happy to just become passive and say, I'll create a realm outside the family that I can fully participate in. And inside the family, why don't you just rule everything and your intuitions that are much more well-refined than mine relationally can rule the family. And...
• 21:09
  In the modern Western family, that makes a lot of sense to a lot of people because they think that the family is only a relational entity. It doesn't exist as a team to actually accomplish anything. You're not actually on a mission. You are basically success is...
• 21:25
  is totally invested in the quality of the relationships in the family. So if the wife can use her superpower and then delegated authority to create a relational connection between everyone in the family, that's truly healthy.
• 21:43
  then the sense is we're doing everything the family needs to do. But the problem is that relational health exists to actually accomplish things. So it's sort of like an army that exists, and then you have maybe a chaplain or somebody who's really well-honed to create strong relationships, and the chaplain takes over the unit. And instead of having a general lead us, the chaplain just endlessly leads the family,
• 22:10
  the army unit to be relationally cohesive. Well, obviously you can understand that the problem with that is if there's actually a mission to accomplish, that's a pretty poor design. And so you want both working together. And my dad, who was a chaplain,
• 22:29
  was constantly, you know, if he had a good general he was working with, um, or a good commanding officer of a unit, that commanding officer would take very seriously, um, his feedback, right. And, and would constantly solicit his feedback. How's the morale of the, of the, of the unit? How are we doing? But I don't think he would ever abdicate leadership and say, okay, why don't, because you're so good at creating cohesive relationships. Why don't you decide what we should target? Why don't you go ahead and lead the troops into battle? Um, yeah.
• 22:57
  Well, you need somebody who is sort of has a different skill set for leading the troops into battle. And that's really the skill set of the of the male or the father, you know, in that kind of like ideal sense. That prototype or the archetype of the male and the female in the family have these different roles. Anyway, I thought this was really interesting. This idea that I think that we're because. Yeah.
• 23:24
  Women do not exist in large, complex, extended family units any longer. Oftentimes, they will find themselves in tiny families, tiny fragments of families. We can get really confused about the nature of the superpower. But imagine a woman who, like in my wife's case, she's probably managing...
• 23:45
  You know, by the time she's in her, you know, her late 60s, she'll probably be managing somewhere close to 30 sets of relationships within our just our extended family with our children, grandchildren and their spouses. That's incredibly complex. Like, how do you keep that together? Like, I desperately need her help.
• 24:05
  And she's constantly seeing signals all over the place. And I just find this so helpful in trying to build a multi-generational family. But many women are never going to experience that kind of complex relational environment. And so the only place for them to practice this is on Instagram or maybe in a work context where there's a team of 10 or 15 or 20 people that...
• 24:32
  She can sense those relationships and give that feedback. But I think it's really important to take a big step back and say, God designed Eve with this ability to judge, to oppose Adam, to create this dynamic relationship so that the family can both be led well, you know, by the father, like led into...
• 24:51
  sometimes even dangerous or very critical missions, but in a way that's hyper relational and honoring to all the people and is centered on and is saturated in love. So I find that really helpful distinction. And thank you guys for listening. And yeah, I just want to say too, for mothers who are stewarding this gift, like, man, this is such an important thing for you to learn how to steward. Like how do you communicate this
• 25:16
  to the family, to your husband? How do you create that dynamic for husbands? Are you listening to your wife? Are you asking for those signals? Are you guys having a dynamic conversation constantly about the family, its health, and leading the family together as a team?
• 25:32
  Thank you for listening to the Family Teams podcast. If you're enjoying this content or have learned something new, please make sure to leave a rating and review and share with a friend. To stay up to date with our events, new content, and products, you can follow us on Facebook and Instagram at Family Teams.