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The Ancient Ugandan Motherhood System That's Way Better Than The Nuclear Family · The Family Teams Podcast

0:00
We are surrounded by all kinds of messages that say, put yourself first.
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And all those messages fly in the face of this kind of celebration of motherhood,
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the kind of support that we need to be giving to mothers as they're having children early and often.
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Don't lose hope for family.
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Don't lose hope for motherhood or fatherhood or childhood.
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Lose hope for these modern Western experiments that are not working.
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God designed the world really well.
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Sin has done a number on us, but so has really bad ideas about family.
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So we need to get back to this ancient path.
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Hi, welcome to the Family Teams podcast.
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Our goal here is to help your family become a multi-generational team on mission by providing
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you with biblically rooted concepts, tools, and rhythms.
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Your hosts are Jeremy Pryor and Jefferson Bethke, and we can't wait to chat about all
0:49
things family.
0:51
Everybody, welcome back to the podcast.
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I'm here with my lovely wife, April.
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April, what's today look like for you?
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Anything fun, exciting?
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Well, I got to spend the morning with our lovely daughter, who is getting ready to head
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off to a Navigator's ministry for two months in Florida.
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And so I got to hang with her, spend some time shopping for some last minute things
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and, you know, just talking about life and catching up.
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So we're really excited about this opportunity for her.
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but she's also really going to miss home.
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So it's one of those things where you're excited, but a little bit, you know, pre-homesick.
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I know.
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Yeah.
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She's our most, I think, attached child.
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She's very healthily but very intensely attached,
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but very much excited about this new season as well.
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You know, our practice as a family, none of our kids went to college,
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But what we did is started curating a lot of immersive kind of mission experiences and educational experiences for them.
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Some were actually in colleges, but they weren't in degree programs.
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This one is really interesting.
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We've never done this one.
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We've done a lot of YWAM.
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But, yeah, the navigators have a great base there in Jacksonville where they do this immersive training where I guess you go from.
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They're really training you on like workplace evangelism, I think.
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So you work during the day.
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She's already got a job set up.
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And then you are in this discipleship community, this super intense discipleship community during the evenings and weekends.
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So super excited to see how that works out.
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If anybody is in the Jacksonville area, you can let us know and look her up if you want to give her a home-cooked meal.
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um so speaking of which like we need to talk about so april i want to talk to you about
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something that i know is you're passionate about and um it's something that is super important for
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everyone who's listening to this to consider and that is how do you care for a new mother
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someone who's just had a baby so um so there are really two kinds of people that i think are really
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important to really listen closely to this, this conversation.
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So one kind of person is if you
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actually have adult children who in the next five to 10 years might give birth, like you,
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is there a culture you can create for your family that will help in that situation?
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But also for
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those of you who are mothers and have young kids or just having kids, it's important for you to
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understand that there is a culture that is so healthy for new moms that ancient cultures seem
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to understand really well that needs to be restored and so if you're not experiencing this
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I hope you don't spend too much time listening to this podcast and thinking to yourself like I just
3:54
wish I had that when it's not realistic like most of us aren't going to have this
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but I hope that your thought is I can't wait to build this for my future daughters and daughter-in-laws
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and I think it's really important to have that vision very very young very early because there's
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small and subtle things that will help you move your family towards that so April's thought about
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this a ton so she's the real expert I I care about this but you're the one who really who
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have studied this, you've got the cookbooks, you've got the dual credentials, you've got the whole
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nine yards.
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But I wanted to, I wanted you to share some of that stuff, but in the context of
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the collision of ancient and modern cultures, because it was perfectly, really beautifully
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described by this woman who wrote an article in the Guardian.
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So the Guardian is a, you know,
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probably one of the most popular publications in the UK.
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And this woman from, let's see,
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She from Uganda.
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Yeah, from Uganda.
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Patience Akumu.
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She wrote this amazing article, says being a mother in the West.
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Would be a dream, I thought, but compared with Uganda, it was a nightmare.
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And then her little subtitle is nothing prepared me for the reality of mothering without my extended family to help.
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How have Western women managed like this for so long?
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So, man, we have to talk about this.
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And a lot of the collapse of fertility rates, a lot of the frustration and isolation that mothers and new mothers experience, a lot of this is recent and is created by very recent cultural transitions that happened before, you know, most of us listening to this podcast were born, maybe before our parents or even grandparents were born.
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But they do not exist in the ancient past.
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If you go past 150, 200 years, and they certainly don't exist in these ancient cultures.
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So I'm going to read some of this.
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I just want to do sort of a reading of this article.
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April, get your thoughts.
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I think this is so insightful what she says here.
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And then, so I'll do a first reading, get your thoughts, and then we'll read the rest of the article because this is so helpful.
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All right, this is what Patience writes.
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She says,
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I hear the baby crying in my sleep.
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My mother hands him to me.
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I sit up to breastfeed without opening my eyes.
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Then I hand him back.
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I know that when I'm ready to get out of bed,
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there will be fruits and ketogo.
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I'm going to mispronounce everything here.
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A meal of plantain mixed with all the fatty meat cuts
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my mother could lay her hands on waiting for me.
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Or I could choose to have porridge.
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It is a sacrilege to have a Nakawiri, that means new mother, I guess, in Ugandan, in the house and not have a flask of hot porridge available for her all day.
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Nakawiri, the syllables are pronounced slowly and the word must roll off your tongue.
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It's not happening for me.
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With awe at the woman who just went through the remarkable ordeal of bringing life.
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Awesome opening paragraph.
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replaying my new mom experience became my favorite pastime when i moved from uganda to switzerland in
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may last year i moved with my husband and two children aged 6 and 12 because i found my dream
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job in health advocacy i was not ready for the parenting nightmare that came with it while i
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had lived in europe before including in the uk in my 20s i had never had to live outside uganda
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with my family.
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Nothing prepared me for the reality of mothering without the extended family
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to help take care of you and the nonchalance with which the Western world treats mothers.
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There were no cheers for me when I made it to the bottom of the staircase without stepping on a toy
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car.
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The audience remained silent when I managed to get my six-year-old son to sit still through a
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one-hour journey.
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In Uganda, someone in the matatu, or shared taxi, might at least whisper
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a compliment.
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What a disciplined child you have.
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They might have even offered to carry him,
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so that I didn't have to pay the fare for two.
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Narratives on African motherhood often depict
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a life of labor and impoverishment as the woman tries to raise more children than she can afford,
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in most cases single-handedly.
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But not much is said about the systems that have developed to
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enable women across the different echelons of African society to cope.
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You never hear the
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story of how it is normal for a mother to drop off her five children at a neighbor's house
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for an entire day without notice as she goes to do her hair or to the market.
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No one explains that the aggrandizement, such as the title of Nakawiri and the care given to
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a new mother for up to a year after she has given birth is community recognition and reward for a
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woman's unpaid care work.
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As we settled in Switzerland, it was scary for my husband and me
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to realize we were not just parents anymore.
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We had to be teachers chipping in with formal and
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informal education.
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There were no elder cousins to help with the homework or aunties to share
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folktales that carried moral lessons.
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The system requires parents to be everything to their
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children and still somehow maintain a semblance of a sane life and career.
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All right, I'm going
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to pause there.
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So April, what does that stir up for you?
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The very powerful juxtaposition between
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the two cultures.
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I love hearing people that have experienced such a different culture from ours
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with new becoming a mom because it's so hard to imagine.
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What she described is this, if you
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actually practically can see what's going on, that if she heard the baby crying in her sleep
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and someone was handing her the baby that means her mom was like right there in room or sleeping
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in the next room that could hear the baby that was she was right there physical physical proximity
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um that there would be she would be up before the new mom to make the fruit or make the meal that
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she feels is so nutritious and delicious for the new mom that's going to just be what she
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needs to nourish her new baby um these are beautiful depictions of roles that um well
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a role that a grandmother would have and um perhaps maybe some aunties as well or a great
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grandmother maybe um so i think that there are so many like you said kind of like if we can go back
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and back and back and back you can start you can see the unraveling of why this is no longer a thing
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in our society in america or if it is it'd be super rare um so i it's what i would call the
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breakdown of the family over time and the fragmentation of the family so that we have
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a bunch of individuals that are springboarding into their own desires um and we're now living in
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the you know the consequences now that we're seeing with like the the falling birth rate and
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people not even wanting to get married anymore and things like that um or even wanting to have
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children.
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It's the long-term consequences of these types of things.
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So anyway, I have really
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been stepping into this role of grandmother postpartum, the postpartum help.
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I did take
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a doula course in order to be able to better assist in my daughter's births.
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It was super
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helpful and, and very, uh, educational and I value, I value it very much.
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Um, the understanding
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that I gained during that time that I get to implement it with my daughters, um, it's very
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special.
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And the idea of dedicating my time right now at this stage of my life, where when my peers
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are, um, you know, their kids are like off at college or graduating from college, they're out
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the house spread across the country um you know in different states and it just would make sense
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in that narrative to for someone in my stage of life to just be like okay sweet finally like now
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is when i just get to think about myself and you know um the different conversations that we hear
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like the different um michelle obama's of the day who just is like it's me time whatever i want
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you know so um for me the continuation of the selflessness of motherhood continues on into
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grandma grand motherhood so you're still a mother you're just a grand mother right and so we play
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it's like this dignified kind of elevated not not in a like a a cocky way but like a respectful way
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like an understanding of, um, I have gone before you and I have lived long enough and God has
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allowed me to still be here.
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So I have gained all this wisdom and I'm still here.
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And, um,
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if you will let me, I would love to bless you with that and pour it out onto you.
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So, well, it's, yeah, I love that you're pointing out.
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We haven't talked about this, but
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I do think that I do love that language of grandmother and to understand that mother,
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is still the primary noun.
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Grandfather, like grandson, like that's still my son.
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That's still
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my daughter.
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That's my grandson, my granddaughter.
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I think that in most cultures, these ancient
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cultures, that's always seen as a promotion like you're describing.
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It's like, oh my gosh,
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this is like the epic experience of motherhood, fatherhood, sonship, daughterhood, as opposed to
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the demotion that I think most people think of it as.
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And almost rightfully so.
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They think about it
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Because to your point, they don't want to go back into that season.
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They've been sort of taught to and they've been conditioned to think that children are constantly a interference in their self-centered life that is really designed to be based around what they want.
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And so this is what we're trying to figure out, guys.
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What Family Teams is all about is we are cultural archaeologists digging up ancient practices that will bring back the ancient family.
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This ancient family that was incredibly functional, that had very low divorce rates, very high fertility, very, very like united, right?
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This highly functional ancient family, the Abrahamic family.
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So I just love anywhere we can find the tools, things to help you guys see this, as opposed to this Western family.
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And I find that people that, what this woman, what Patience is describing, the author of this article, is she's walking through a portal from the ancient world in Uganda into the modern Western world in Switzerland.
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And as she goes through that portal, she is noticing that this is appalling, almost like she's looking at in horror at what mothers are enduring in the West and how different it is.
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And because we have great wealth in the West, it would actually not be difficult for us if we had these values to replicate and restore all the experiences she's describing in Uganda.
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So I don't think our wealth actually stops us from it could easily propel us into much more healthy rhythms.
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But as David Brooks says, when Americans become wealthy, they purchase loneliness.
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And so our our whole use of financial resources is to try to build these bigger walls.
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Instead of building longer tables, we build higher walls.
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This is our intuition as Western people.
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We think that wealth equals more independence from each other, including family members, especially extended family.
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And so this is why this is such a disaster.
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And again, this is a choice we're all making.
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Everyone listening to this, you can make a different choice.
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Even if you can't because there's a bunch of toxic stuff happening in your extended family, you can build an extended family downstream from you that looks just like this.
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Like this is in your hands to build.
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You can create this vision and you have the resources.
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Believe me.
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You have more resources than the traditional Ugandan family.
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You can do this if you decide to do it.
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But we are choosing not to do this.
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We are surrounded by all kinds of messages that say, put yourself first.
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And all those messages fly in the face of this kind of celebration of motherhood, the
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kind of support that we need to be giving to mothers as they're having children early
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and often.
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Like, this is a beautiful culture that we can participate in and we can craft and we
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can create.
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But man, we are on a different path.
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So I want to read the rest of this article, but what else?
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There's a start for you, April.
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Yeah, I just want to say I feel like the the I want to encourage everyone out there.
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I couldn't agree more with Jeremy.
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Like, we don't need to look back.
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And like, I grew up in a pretty great family and I have Christian parents and and I didn't experience this.
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Like, this wasn't their mindset.
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So I'm I don't need to get bitter and upset about not having this myself.
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But what I can do is say like, ooh, but I want this for my girls and for myself.
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I think this would be a great culture and a tone to set in our family.
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And but what we need to do, not just like change our own mindset about what we want,
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but we also need to fight for the relationship with our daughters as we are raising them
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so that we're in a healthy relationship when this time comes around.
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and I think that for me that's a huge motivation for working through the things that you need to
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work through remember with Jesus as Lord of our lives we have a whole toolbox full of things to
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mend relationships when those rifts come we have forgiveness we have repentance we have
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gratitude we have so many tools in our toolbox that you can overcome relational challenges when
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they do come because they'll come but being able to work through them and getting to the place of
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adulthood with your kids where you can be in a in a healthy relationship with your adult children
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so that they can let you in and not have to protect themselves from you um so that you can
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lean into this type of multi-generational mindset 100 yeah the family plan calendar is the new way
19:04
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19:07
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19:09
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19:12
Visit familyteams.com to purchase.
19:16
All right, I'm going to continue to read this,
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and then April, let me know what your thoughts are
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on this second half of the article.
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So she says,
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the Ugandan primary school syllabus
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inherited decades ago from British colonialists
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and never reformed
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teaches that the nuclear family is the ideal model.
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When I thought about raising children in the West,
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I used to picture happy families with no more than two children seated at the dining table,
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surrounded by beautiful things, not worried about malaria,
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the distance to the well or the smoke from firewood and cooking stoves.
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Now I look at women who have had to raise their children in the Western world
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in the nuclear family setting with fresh eyes.
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How have they managed for so long?
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We know that even as men are stepping up more to care, help care for their families,
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most of the physical and mental care workload still falls on women.
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Globally, women do 76%
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of the unpaid care work.
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In 2019, Oxfam's analysis showed that unpaid care work done by women across
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the globe was valued at $10.8 trillion.
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My husband and I had to accept that we were not equipped to
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look after our children alone.
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It felt unnatural.
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We were tired all the time and our house was
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falling apart.
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We missed Irene, our home manager, and vowed to appreciate her more, knowing what it
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would cost for us to have help with child care in Switzerland.
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Unlike in Switzerland, where getting
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help with care is the preserve of the wealthy, the average Ugandan family can afford to hire
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someone to help with running the home.
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Even where a family might not have the money, they pay for it
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in kind of taking turns to look after each other's children or communal sharing chores on busy days
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such as funerals and weddings or when hosting guests.
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My husband and the children have returned to Uganda,
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and I will try to live between Uganda and Switzerland.
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Our children will be near their grandmother and cousins,
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surrounded by love, neighbors, and sunshine.
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And when we sit in our Ugandan living room
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watching the perfect nuclear family on TV,
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we shall know the exhaustion that comes with keeping a house clean
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and telling the children 20 times a day to pick up their toys.
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We shall remember the dates that we did not go out spontaneously because there is a particular servitude in parenting without your people.
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Okay.
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So it's so important what she's saying there at the end.
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It's very basic, but it's so important that every single one of you guys understand this, that the nuclear family is not the ideal.
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It leads to burnout.
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out.
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And this shock that patients had at seeing that, thinking that, oh, this nuclear family that
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is constantly promoted in the West is somehow working out wonderfully for people in the West.
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It doesn't work.
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Every sociologist that studied the nuclear family has said the nuclear family
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was something that occurred primarily in America between 1940 and 1955.
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It did not pre-exist that.
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Before that, you had these extended family tribes.
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And after that, you have people attempting the
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nuclear family and failing.
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But there was a 15-year period, at least in America, post-war,
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that it really worked well because there was so much wealth.
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The suburbs were just coming online.
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There was very unique circumstances that caused people that were raised by a much more clannish
22:29
extended family to be able to have all these resources to be able to bless and create a
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functional nuclear family.
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And then the whole thing fell apart.
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It was always incredibly fragile.
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It
22:40
was never going to be a long-term solution.
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It's not what the Bible describes at all.
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It's not the
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Proverbs 31 woman.
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There's not a single family that's described in that way in the Bible.
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You'll
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see everywhere in the Bible, these households or oikoses, they were large extended family units.
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That's what always has worked.
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And so it's part of what we're here to tell you guys is this ideal
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is broken.
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It doesn't work.
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It doesn't mean that we should blow up the family.
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That's what a lot
23:05
of Western people are concluding.
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It's that we're using the wrong blueprint for the family.
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And so
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she discovered that and she's like, all right, we're done with this.
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My family's going to,
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my kids are going to be raised in an extended family clan.
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Our, our grandchildren are currently
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being raised in an extended family clan.
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Every person listening to this, that is building a
23:24
family could choose to do the same thing with your family.
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And if you choose not to do that,
23:28
then the fact that your family line will likely become extinguished is directly a result of that
23:33
poor design of family because it's too hard on mothers.
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It doesn't work.
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It's too hard on
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children.
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It doesn't work for them.
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It's too hard on fathers.
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It doesn't work for them.
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It's too
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easy on those who have, who, who's no longer have the responsibility to have children.
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It's,
23:49
there are all kinds of these challenges.
23:51
And so we, we want to really emphasize the importance
23:54
of this.
23:55
So April, any last thoughts about, about this, this kind of model collision?
23:59
Well, I have a bit of an analogy.
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I think when, when you're talking about the nuclear family,
24:04
which you mean like mom and dad and their kids, like that nuclear.
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I think that when that happened in the 1940 to 1955, the 15-year period redirected, set us on a trajectory.
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And the analogy it's making me think of is like when COVID happened in 2020,
24:25
there were so many things that shifted trajectory when that happened.
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or like when 9-11 happened like airport security it like shifted and now it just is the way it is
24:35
like kids don't know any different um and like 2020 has shifted these things were with covid that
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you know all these different societal things that have happened and um like it became normal to see
24:47
people in a mask during that time period and and before that would be like what's wrong with that
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person something must be wrong with them so so these things like it doesn't take long for these
24:56
trajectories to for the society to be impacted by this and so i think that the restoration of the
25:04
ancient blueprint is on all of us we need to get back to that place as much as we can of of figuring
25:11
out what it is the lord originally designed there have been these micro shifts in the trajectory
25:16
over time of family and then like a huge one for our american culture anyway um really shifting
25:22
around that post-World War II era.
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And I think that the more that we can focus on the way God
25:31
has set things up, that we believe that his design is good, that family was his idea, that we can
25:38
surrender ourselves to his idea and his plan.
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I'm not surrendering myself to like a man-made idea
25:45
that could take us on this weird, another weird trajectory.
25:48
We're like restoring an ancient path
25:51
that is founded in scripture.
25:55
And so that's what we're the foundation
25:56
that we're trying to build the foundation on.
25:59
So it's a worthy pursuit.
26:02
Yes.
26:02
Amen.
26:03
What is it?
26:03
Jeremiah 6?
26:05
16 and 17, I think.
26:07
Yeah.
26:08
Where it says,
26:09
stand at the crossroads and look,
26:11
look for the ancient paths and walk in it
26:16
and you will find rest for your souls.
26:18
Yes.
26:19
Yeah.
26:19
Such a powerful idea.
26:21
It's really powerful.
26:22
This is exactly what this woman did.
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She's like, oh, this new path is exhausting.
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Let's find an ancient path and find rest.
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And, man, this is God specifically speaking through Jeremiah telling a generation that is exhausted to stop where they're going.
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Stand at the crossroads.
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Find an ancient path.
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And we're encouraging everyone of you guys to listen to this.
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Find an ancient path.
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Man, it's way better.
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Don't lose hope for family.
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Don't lose hope for motherhood or fatherhood or childhood.
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Like, lose hope for these modern Western experiments that are not working.
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Like, God designed the world really well.
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Sin has done a number on us, but so has really bad ideas about family.
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So we need to get back to this ancient path.
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So thank you all for listening.
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April, thanks for jumping on here today.
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You bet.
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Thank you for listening to the Family Teams podcast.
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If you're enjoying this content or have learned something new,
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please make sure to leave a rating and review and share with a friend to stay up to date with
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