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6 Shocking Reactions That Explain Why The Modern Family Is So Broken · The Family Teams Podcast

• 0:00
  Howdy, friends. Welcome to the podcast. All right. Today we have a little bit different podcast for you. If you are subscribed to the podcast and you are not subscribed to our YouTube channel, you are probably unaware that we have been making lots of videos over there. And so I wanted to give you guys a little taste of some of the things that we are doing
• 0:19
  doing on YouTube. And so here are the videos you guys will be listening to the audio portion of. The first one is how Doug Wilson finds the hidden key for unlocking a theology of technology.
• 0:32
  Then we'll give you a taste of the Lila Rose podcast and the guests that she has on, on why it's becoming cool to cut off your parents and kind of what we think is a good way to think about that topic. Also, the secret war the state is waging against your family. And so Catherine Boyle gives a fascinating account of what she sees as this ongoing war between the family and the state. And we talk about kind of our take on that as well.
• 1:01
  Then we have a video of Stephen Bartlett being stunned by Eric Weinstein about the nature of the importance of the multigenerational family. Definitely want to play that for you guys. And then we do a little content or video where Mark Driscoll is talking about the multigenerational family.
• 1:23
  and seems to suggest that it doesn't really exist. And so we do a response to that. And then the final one is James Sexton, probably the most famous divorce lawyer in the world, is talking to Carl Lentz, who is a pastor who was in an adulterous relationship. And they talk about whether or not
• 1:44
  it's a good idea for Christians to get married young. And our response to that from a family team's perspective. So enjoy this episode and let us know if this is the kind of content that you guys would like to listen to more often on the podcast. All right, enjoy.
• 2:00
  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.
• 2:17
  But I argue that technology is a form of wealth. As families, we have got to figure out where in the Bible to go to get a theology of technology. And I love what Doug Wilson says here. It really helps us figure out, okay, what does the Bible say? Is the Bible silent really about technology? And as Doug Wilson describes, there is so much content in the Bible around technology if you categorize it properly. So take a listen. Even technology is a gift from God.
• 2:45
  And if you look up computers or software or smartphones in your Bible, you find nothing about it. There's nothing about it. But I argue that technology is a form of wealth.
• 3:03
  And wealth has a particular bias in this fallen world. Wealth has the bias and the wealthy are tempted to forget God. That's the bias. They become self-sufficient. They become full of themselves. And if I show you my smartphone here, I've got 100,000 servants on this thing. And Nebuchadnezzar needed an actual,
• 3:33
  actually had to have 100,000 servants in order to have the things done for him that this thing will do. I need a servant who speaks Anglo-Saxon. I need a servant who carries a Latin dictionary around with him all the time. I need a servant who can give me the pitch for tuning my guitar. I need a servant who, I've got all these servants. Well, what this is is
• 3:55
  um, staggering wealth. That's what it is. It's staggering wealth. And I have to teach my kids today how to handle wealth. Right? So, um, when I was a kid, you could, uh, and I'm not trying to, um, I know how this sounds, but, but when I was a kid, you could be occupied all afternoon in the backyard with a couple of sticks.
• 4:23
  right you you just play with you play with your brothers and sisters and you played until dark and you were playing with playing with sticks um and and that was however much fun it was and it was a lot of fun uh it was not wealthy it was it was not the rich kid it was the lower middle class kid
• 4:46
  Well, even just about everybody today has these servants, has these people send messages and do things all the time. And the thing that comes in with that, the temptation that comes in with that, is self-sufficiency and entitlement.
• 5:05
  All right, self-sufficiency and entitlement. So one of the things that parents have to do is teach their children what the temptation is and also provide them with spaces or areas where they are unplugged. You don't want a dinner table with five or six people sitting around the dinner table all looking at their phones.
• 5:30
  So how do we think about this today? This is a lot like every single one of us is raising a royal family. Our kids have to look forward to having 10,000 servants
• 5:42
  at their beck and call for the rest of their lives. And so if we are not careful to train our children in a way to be others focused, to be serving others with this great power and all of these opportunities and all these resources, then it's inevitable that having all of these servants just cater to their needs is going to actually corrupt them. So we have to think about how are we giving our children a vision that's big enough for the resources that they're being provided to,
• 6:10
  If you read the parable of the talents, one of the things that Jesus says is that when he gave more talents to an individual, a lot more was expected of them. And we have to make sure that if we're given 10 talents, we don't have a one-talent vision.
• 6:28
  10 talents means a 10 talent vision. And the only way to ensure that our kids are not going to just take all of these resources and all of this opportunity and just point it at their own comfort, their own entertainment is to give them a much bigger vision. It's no longer optional to just hope that our kids will somehow think that, that they will just magically figure out how to use all these resources for others. Like this has to be trained into them at a very young age, because the way that our consumer economy works,
• 6:56
  frames technology is it's really for you. That's how you create a great consumer. If you get somebody completely self-focused and give them lots of technology in order for them to indulge all of their interests, then of course they're just going to end up thinking that the world is all about them. And so if you're going to expose your kids to all this technology, or you think that even in the future, as they become adults, they're going to be exposed to all this, this wealth of resources, then you must help your children figure out how to steward this by being
• 7:23
  getting the spotlight off themselves and say, you are given all this power, all this responsibility in order to serve others. And so that's the only way that our kids aren't going to be corrupted by the wealth of technology that's coming their way.
• 7:38
  And the storylines tend to be, you know, why is Gen Z cutting off their parents? And often over ideology. One of the greatest crises that's going on right now in the Christian world is how Christians have joined a lot of the secular world in this pattern or this trend of cutting off our parents.
• 7:58
  And this is such a clean dividing line between a secular way of living or thinking about family and a fully biblically Christian way of thinking about family. And so listen to what Noelle Maring says to Lila Rose in this podcast. It is fascinating to understand the root causes of why this trend is erupting with Gen Z. So take a listen to this.
• 8:20
  Is that your sense of it, that this idea of the youth being the wiser ones, the youth rejecting the older ones, the old ones throwing them away, that's a very modern thing? Like, you don't really see much of that throughout human history. Yeah, I love the way you described it. I mean, it's very ideological and very modern, right? So I think that that's exactly right. I mean, reengineering society takes kind of a culture of forgetting.
• 8:40
  that you want to interrupt and then you want to forget. You don't want a unity with what's come before you. In the path of history, you want to be on the next thing. If you want to be at the right side of history, you want to be, at the very end, the first to revolutionize the most. It creates this sort of hastening of the future and a hastening to transgress. I mean, a big part of this is an inversion of the fourth commandment, honor thy father and thy mother.
• 9:07
  which is the only commandment that has a promise so that you can live long and flourish in the land our Lord has given you. So I think, in other words, there are some civic kind of implication to disregarding that commandment. And the interesting thing is that not only are we disregarding it, it really is an inversion. So there's a lot of common scripts amongst the no-contact community. And one of the things that they will say is that,
• 9:31
  You know, you chose to have me. I did not choose to be born. And so you owe me everything. I don't owe you anything. And you know, you hear in this language, they'll say, you know, I didn't consent to my life. I didn't consent to being born. And one therapist I heard actually said this phrase, which totally jolted me, but he said, it's true, you know, if you inflict life on unsuspecting flesh, you owe it a lot. And I was like, gosh, that sounds like sexual assault.
• 9:59
  Doesn't it? You know, imagine like the gift of life, you're giving somebody their life and I'm not gonna be grateful for it. I'm gonna see that as a burden, right? It's not a blessing, it's a burden. And you did this to me. You inflicted life on unsuspecting flesh. And so, you know, it's a recasting of what the role of the parent is.
• 10:19
  And the point of life. Life is inherently, it's nihilism. That's right. Life is inherently not good. That's right. And one of the consequences is that those young adults then who bought into this philosophy, that's language of consent, which is basically meaning, I mean, consent is, there's a lot to that. It's a reflection of an autonomous understanding of the human person that has no moral language for any action except for, did I consent to it? Anything goes if I consented.
• 10:47
  which actually prohibits any ability to contextualize when we've made bad choices and we suffer from them. You know, if I consented and then I'm suffering from it, I can't look, I consented, so it must have been fine. So who is to blame here? And it makes you look outside again. But anyway, my point was going to be that the young adults who adopted this language, I did not choose to be born. They are not moving into parenthood.
• 11:08
  And it makes perfect sense because if parenthood, by their own definition and framework, is something that's not honorable, it's not noble, it's just a lot of work, and you might end up isolated and rejected at the end of it by your adult children. And you look back in your own childhood and you're like, look at all the mistakes they made anyways.
• 11:25
  Why would you want to move into that category? And so I think it really explains a lot about why these young adults are not moving into the category of parenthood. I just listened to this interview of this beautiful Israeli director. She's a documentarian. And she was talking about why she's not had children to another, an older woman who's, uh, was her friend's mom.
• 11:43
  And the woman said, you know, when you have children, you know, it makes you less spontaneous. You have to look at someone else's priorities and put them above your own. And she was saying these things that are about generosity. And the woman kind of laughed, and the young woman laughed, and she said, you're making the case for why I don't want to be a mom. And then the older woman said, you know, don't you think that's a little bit, there's a tish of selfishness to that.
• 12:06
  And she immediately went on to kind of like, almost like a sanctimonious moment. Like she said, well, you know, we think that it's actually selfish to have children because this world is really horrible and there's a lot of suffering. And, you know, I tell my parents all the time, I did not ask to come into this world. So, you know, so you can see how, not only does it make parenthood unappealing, it also makes, gives a moral cover for it, you know, for rejecting it altogether. So dark.
• 12:31
  It really is. It really is. In a culture that valorizes victimization, it's always going to be incredibly popular to cut off your parents and really believe that they are responsible for inflicting a kind of trauma on you. This is the kind of victimization that...
• 12:46
  everyone has access to because our parents have screwed us up, no matter who you are. That's true. And we live in the first generation in history where most of us have taken psychology classes, either in high school or in college. And so we see the impact that our parents have on us. The Bible knew that as well, but how the Bible talks about this is the complete opposite of the way that the culture talks about this. The culture talks about our parents as people who owe us everything,
• 13:15
  a endless debt. They could never pay down the debt that was created by their decision to bring us into this world. And therefore, they're personally responsible for every bad thing we experience, all the trauma, all the pain. It ultimately comes back to the decision that our parents made to have us. That is the opposite of the way the Bible talks about this. In 1 Timothy 5, Paul says that every person who has, for example, a widow in their family, he says, must repay her.
• 13:43
  And their first responsibility is to take care of that member of the family. Why does it use that word? Why does it say repay? Because the Bible sees that the debt is actually on the child, not on the parents. This is why in the Ten Commandments, it says that we are to honor our father and mother and get this blessing of life, of an abundant life. Why is that? Because...
• 14:06
  It's our responsibility. It's really a matter of justice and righteousness that we care for our parents because they did so much for us. So the Bible starts from the premise that life is a good thing, that it's an incredible gift to be given life. It's an incredible gift to be raised by parents. And for every sacrifice that they made that went without us noticing, those are things that—
• 14:25
  constantly we're accumulating a debt, not a debt that we have to pay them back a dollar for dollar, but it's really a debt of honor. And that's why it says in the fourth commandment that we must honor our father and mother. Now, our culture believes that the only grounding for morality is not the Torah, not the Ten Commandments, not what scripture says, but is this area of consent. And so this is why what you're seeing happen in a lot of universities where there are so many rules around consent, all the steps of consent in any kind of relationship.
• 14:54
  And this really gets back to what G.K. Chesterton said. He said that if you don't believe in the Ten Commandments, then you're going to have to come up with the 10,000 commandments. And so we're in the process right now of coming up with those 10,000 commandments. But did you know that the Torah, the first five books of the Bible where we see the law contained, and this is kind of the grounding of our understanding of justice and righteousness, that there are more commands in the Torah given to us about how to honor and care for our parents than how to care for our children? Yeah.
• 15:22
  So we live in a culture that oftentimes can be obsessed with safetyism around children, but completely neglects our responsibility towards our parents. Now, the problem, you guys, is that this creates a certain kind of culture in which no one wants to be parents. This creates a culture of death instead of life. This creates a culture of plummeting fertility. We have to lift up an honor.
• 15:43
  our parents, and this will cause our children and grandchildren to live in a world where they are also going to be honored. And then they're looking forward to, as they get older, having this position of honor in the family, this creates a, a beautiful culture, a culture of life instead of death. But our culture doesn't understand that our culture desperately wants to make it all about us. And so we're creating these terminal generations, uh,
• 16:04
  constantly just by the kinds of values that we're promoting. So I love this conversation. You guys can check out that conversation if you want to hear more about what Lila Rose and Noel were describing there.
• 16:19
  I see kind of all of history as a war between the family and the state. The most underrated war in our day by far is the war between the family and the state. Nobody wants to report it this way, but listen to what Catherine Boyle says here. She describes the fact that the only way that the state can really grow its footprint, take more and more control of society is by encroaching on the ground that used to belong to the family. This happens in lots of areas.
• 16:49
  State goes to war against the family, but first listen to how Catherine describes this conflict. I wrote a speech that I gave a couple months ago where I really started talking about how I see kind of all of history as a war between the family and the state. These two big institutions. One is, you know, and it goes back to Plato. It goes back to like the Republic, the Greeks, right, where the entire history.
• 17:14
  you know, philosophy of the republic is that perhaps the state can take better care of a society than these institutional families. And so when you look at sort of, you go back through history and you see that especially authoritarian regimes, the first thing that an authoritarian regime does when it wants to take over a society is it ruthlessly destroys the family.
• 17:32
  So you mentioned the one-child policy in China. That was an attack, a deliberate attack on the family from an authoritarian regime. And the purpose of it was, you know, it was for national interest. They talk about, oh, we couldn't, you know, we wouldn't be able to supply enough people with food. But what it really was was to weaken the only institution that can ever combat the state, which is the family.
• 17:50
  All right. What do you guys think? Is Catherine Boyle overstating the case or is there a war between the family and the state? I'm going to give you guys eight examples, eight times in the last 50 to 100 years where the government has actually taken power away from the family and given it to the state.
• 18:07
  And pay attention to the last one. This is the one that nobody's talking about that I think is actually wreaking enormous havoc on the family in our day. But the first one is social security versus honoring parents. So historically, it was always the job of the children to take care of their aging parents. This created an incentive
• 18:26
  for the two generations to really get along well. You were constantly thinking as you were raising your kids, well, I'm going to someday be in their hands when I'm old. And so you have a huge incentive to be careful how you raise them, how you're emotionally connecting with them. When the government said, no, no, no, we're gonna take care of that. We're gonna let you guys be free.
• 18:44
  from having the responsibility of caring for your parents. This destroyed an enormous incentive that used to exist for parents to care for their children or even to have children. And so we'll never know the cost that this is creating for the family, but we do know that enormous power shifted from the family to the state. An enormous amount of meaning and purpose was taken away from the family and given to the state when we made this shift.
• 19:10
  All right, number two, subsidize college loans versus early marriage and children. So when the government got involved in subsidizing college loans, we all thought, oh, this is great. Like more people can go to college. What we didn't see was that when they got involved, the colleges would see that and raise inflation three times the rate of inflation. This has been going on for so many decades now that you look at college, you're like, how in the world did college get that expensive? It got that expensive because the government got involved.
• 19:37
  And when the government got involved, we began to, instead of having people paying for college pretty easily with a part-time job, maybe a summer job, they now just take out loans and they graduate in so much debt that they delay having children and getting married often five, 10 years later. This has caused people to drastically reduce their interest in having children, of starting a family. And often when people wait into their thirties to start a family, they have much fewer children. So this is also being blamed for a lot of today's fertility crisis.
• 20:07
  All right, number three, government welfare versus family and community support. So it used to be understood that you wanted, if someone's struggling with a crisis or with poverty, you wanted it being dealt with at the most local level possible. If possible, if it could be dealt with in the family, with the parents, with siblings, that's the best. They know what's going on. They understand the situation. Let's help our own family out.
• 20:31
  If the family is not able to help out a really struggling family member, then it would bubble up to the church, right, to their faith-based community. If they're not a part of one of those, then it would go up to potentially the local town, right, that city, the smallest possible so that we can be caring for people at that level. Right.
• 20:51
  Once the government got involved in offering federal welfare or state-based welfare, this completely changed the way that people thought about how to get support in times of crisis or how to overcome poverty. And this deeply weakens the family. Again, it really violates the purpose of family.
• 21:12
  We're needing to all build really strong families to make sure that when any of us are in huge amounts of need, there's a family there to back us up. Today, it's almost considered inappropriate to go to your family. If you have a need, you're going to go straight to the government. You're going to be looking for government handouts, government entitlements, government welfare. But this, in turn, really weakens our incentive, our need to build strong families, and it has caused families to...
• 21:36
  to just not need each other as much and to become increasingly isolated as an individual in a relationship with the state instead of a small branch of the family in a relationship with an extended family. All right, number four, public sex education versus faith-based values. So when public schools got involved in sex education, they didn't want to have to frame it from a religious lens. They wanted to not violate that separation of church and state. And so they then framed sex education
• 22:04
  Sex primarily or exclusively as a biological issue. Well, once you do that, once you reduce every human being to our biological essence, we basically become animals with appetites. And that's the reason why so many people today think that's what sex is.
• 22:20
  But the Bible refutes that completely. The Bible says in 1 Corinthians 6 that sex is primarily a spiritual issue. It's becoming spiritually one with another person. And so, so much of the problems that are created by people having premarital sex are created because of the framing that they hear.
• 22:38
  in our state-based education system. This shifted the idea that sex is something that happens inside of a committed relationship between a man and a woman in order to build a family line. And now it becomes just a basic biological appetite. So this has had an enormous detrimental effect on the family. Number five, abortion rights versus honoring motherhood. So when you think about a feminist activist, what are they promoting? Okay.
• 23:06
  Historically, there was a time when somebody who was really fighting for women would be fighting primarily for motherhood. Today, if you're a feminist activist, the primary thing that you're fighting is for freedom from motherhood. This is what the abortion debate has done.
• 23:23
  to the way we view family and motherhood. By making this a women's rights issue and by framing most of women's rights from the perspective of the abortion debate, this whole area has caused so many millions of women to get politically involved instead of involved in families. Instead of saying the primary place for women is to make sure that we are creating a feminism of care,
• 23:50
  of maternal care, we are now saying that we need to fight for rights in a political arena. This shift has had an enormously detrimental impact on the family, another area where the state has gone to war against the family and has weakened the family.
• 24:06
  All right, number six is when the government got involved in fiat currency versus sound money. So there was a time when the government had to be extremely disciplined about the way they generated money. We were on something called the gold standard. Fiat currency is just when the government just prints money whenever they want for whatever reason they want.
• 24:22
  When this occurred, this greatly incentivized going into debt instead of savings. If you save your money for decades and decades, thinking about the generations, then you know that the government will inflate so much of that money away through all of its printing of money and creating of inflation. So fiat currency has really shifted us from being primarily a savings-based culture, thinking about future and the future generations, into a spending and debt-based culture, thinking about inflation.
• 24:50
  what is best for this generation? What do I want to, how do I want to use money now? Because it's not going to necessarily be there. If you look at how inflation works, let's go further into debt because that all of the ways that the currency is devalued really incentivizes debt over savings, which really incentivizes spending over long-term financial planning. All right, number seven is the two income-based mortgage versus a single income-based mortgage.
• 25:18
  So actually, Senator Elizabeth Warren, a very progressive senator, before she was a senator, talked about the two-income trap when she described that when banks began to look at both a husband and a wife's income to determine how much they could afford to take out in a loan, this really drove housing prices up so much that you began to have to have two incomes to afford a house in many areas of our country.
• 25:43
  And instead of the government looking out for what is best for the family, what it did was it looked at what was best for the banks. And this caused all kinds of problems for families today. Now we see what happens decades later where this next generation is taking longer and longer and longer to be able to afford to buy a house. This could have been stopped decades.
• 26:04
  Decades ago, if the government cared about the family, but what they cared more about was looking like they were helping families by allowing banks to loan based on two incomes instead of one. All right. The eighth one and the one that almost nobody's talking about is 401k programs versus family owned businesses. Now, what do these have to do with each other?
• 26:24
  Why does saving in our 401ks actually affect family-owned businesses? Well, the way the government rolled out 401k programs destroyed millions and to this day destroys millions of small family-owned businesses. What occurs is that all of a sudden, virtually everybody in society is investing their money
• 26:41
  in public markets. 401ks force you to invest in often large publicly traded markets. Well, what happened when we all put our life savings or our retirement savings in only these large publicly traded markets is there's just a lot more money chasing businesses within those large publicly traded markets. So what occurs to try to get access to that money is that you have an
• 27:05
  and they will roll up, let's say 500 plumbing businesses. If they can buy out all those plumbing businesses from those families and put them as one giant corporation and sell them into a public market, they can get five, 10 times more money in those public markets than those different businesses are worth at just a local level. This is mostly created by the way that we are just dumping our pensions into public markets exclusively. And so we have just destroyed millions of small businesses.
• 27:35
  Now, if you've got a 401k, you should max it out. This is not a problem for how an individual saves. This is a problem or designed for how the government has very cleverly found a way to increase its power and increase corporate power at the expense of families, small families, and small businesses.
• 27:52
  And so these eight different ways are just some examples. There are so many more examples, you guys, of ways that the state is growing its power base at the expense of families. So really pay attention to this war that's going on because it's really impacting all of us. How much do you care about people saying your name four generations out?
• 28:15
  Stephen Bartlett from Diary of the CEO has a one generation mindset that he's about to reveal. And Eric Weinstein, even though he's an atheist, is a Jewish man who has a multi-generational mindset. And these two mindsets are about to collide. Check this out. The superstructures of the world. Yeah. One being family. Yeah. Traditions. Yeah. Things that ground, that connect you to that.
• 28:43
  And what are the symptoms of that unhooking from the superstructures of the world? How much do you care about things? How much do you care about people saying your name four generations out? Me? Yeah, you. You're probably asking the wrong person because I just don't think legacy matters because I'm going to be dead. That's right. But I'm asking all of you who believe that. Yeah. That is so sad.
• 29:07
  It is so weird that no one cares about their legacy because they don't see a future. So what I'm trying to say is,
• 29:15
  I'm desperate to get you a future so that you care. Guys, this is the collision of our time that nobody's talking about. The one generation versus the multi-generational mindset. Stephen Bartlett, he's brilliant, but he thinks he's living in a single player game. And so once he's dead, once lights are out, it doesn't matter. Eric Weinstein comes from a Jewish family. He has a totally different paradigm. He understands that his entire life is based on...
• 29:40
  his forefathers in the past, generations and generations, his ancestors have given him a tremendous gift, a legacy that he cherishes, thinks about, really pulls identity from, and then wants to propel that into the future, into his children, his grandchildren, his great-grandchildren, all the way to the fourth generation. And this...
• 29:58
  is what gives his life tremendous depth and tremendous meaning. Stephen Bartlett, it's like he doesn't even understand what Eric Weinstein is talking about. And so this is what we're here to really help you guys understand. We do not live in a single-player story. We live in a family-centered story. We are born into families and...
• 30:15
  We are only here because of our ancestors in the past gifts they're giving to us. We have an obligation and the privilege to give that to our children. We are existing within this multi-generational mindset. So I want you guys to understand this deeply. Thank you.
• 30:32
  Hey, it's Jeremy. I've had the privilege of walking with a lot of families over the years, and one pattern I've seen is how many people feel stuck. They want to be present at home, to work with their kids, to build something of value, but they don't know where to start. That's exactly why we created Family Inc. It's not a crash course or a pitch.
• 30:48
  path. One that helps you start and grow a business as a family with coaching tools and a community of people doing the same thing. We've packed in everything we wish we had in our early years, and it's been beautiful to watch what's happening inside. If you're ready to explore that kind of future, I'd love to invite you to go to familyteams.com slash family inc to learn more.
• 31:15
  Now that my kids are getting married, now Grace and I are extended family. At Family Teams, we talk a lot about the importance of restoring the multi-generational family team. So a number of people have sent me clips like this from Mark Driscoll asking for our take. So I'm going to unpack our thoughts. But first, let's hear Mark unpack his position.
• 31:32
  The husband's side of the family is pulling, hey, you guys need to come over for Christmas. You need to come over for Thanksgiving. We need to spend the holidays with us. We need to go on vacation, family dinner, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday. We need to do everything together. We need to see you for your birthday. His side is pulling. Guess what? If her side is pulling, what does that do to that young couple? It potentially divides them. Because she's like, well, I don't want my family to be abandoned by me. He's like, well, I don't want my family to be abandoned by me.
• 32:02
  And so it creates this pulling tension on this young couple, and it causes strain. Now that my kids are getting married, their spouses are not joining my family. They are launching to start their own family. And now Grace and I are extended family, which means we're not the highest priority. They are starting a brand new family. I say this all the time, and I get attacked for this...
• 32:24
  all the time. When my daughter got married, I didn't say, I'm so glad that we're adding a son to the family. They're leaving their mother and father to do what? Start their own family. And where this really gets painful, holidays, where you live, where you go to church, how you educate your kids, all of a sudden they're like, hey, you can't do that.
• 32:43
  Yeah, we can, because this is our family. No, no, no, that's not how our family does it. That's not how your family does this. The big problem becomes we don't allow the next generation to have healthy families because we don't let them be a family. This is where it's really important for those of us who are older, not overly parent and meddle, not guilt and manipulate, not control with tears or dollars, but let them be their own family.
• 33:10
  All right. What do you guys think? Let me walk through some of my thoughts on this. First of all, there's a number of things that Mark says here that I agree with. I think each branch of the family has its own authority. It's not appropriate for Gen 1, for example, to exert authority over Gen 2, saying we're older, therefore we have endless authority over your spouse, over your children.
• 33:29
  No, that is not true. Each one is separate. There's also something that he's reacting to that I think is really a problem. And that is that I know that I grew up around and I think that Mark probably did as well. Certain families that we saw that had kind of this boomer sort of selfish entitlement where they were constantly using their money to get their kids to hang out with them and
• 33:49
  design their lifestyle as maybe retired adults or older adults around their kids engaging in their leisure time, essentially. Come on vacation with us. Do all the holidays with us so I can have the perfect nostalgic experience. That's really what he's describing here. And I agree with Mark. That can really put a lot of strain on the family. You've got two sides of the family that both want.
• 34:10
  the children for in their home on holidays or on vacations for nostalgic reasons. That's not a good enough reason to put strain on that new branch of the family. And I think that that level of selfishness can be really, really tough and totally unnecessary.
• 34:26
  that is not at all what we're talking about when we're talking about family teams. So in order for you guys to understand how different these are, and this is part of the reason we spent a lot of time, we write books and we try to really help you guys understand how different these are very different ideas. Mark is assuming that,
• 34:42
  the Western vision of family, that you're really raising your family to be a nest, to launch your kids out at 18 or at some point during adulthood to be completely separate and start a brand new branch of the family or brand new family, actually, in his language.
• 34:57
  And that's a fairly new idea. And this is what we critique as just a bad design of family. It's not the kind of family you see in scripture. I'm going to kind of go into a little more detail about that. But this is what we're describing in family teams is the way families have been done for thousands of years and that modern Western people are just not even familiar with at all. And so just to kind of unpack that. So in ancient times...
• 35:25
  Sending your kids or launching your kids out at 18 was close to a death sentence, right? They weren't arguing about nostalgic holidays or meals. They were attempting to survive economically. And this was kind of the context that you see the Bible describing family in, and it's a very different context than we have today. The generations had to work together to build assets. And the way that even Gen 1, or the generation that was currently leading the family, the household—
• 35:54
  as it's often called, that household existed and was thriving only to the extent often that they were receiving multi-generational assets from previous generations. You see this in Israel, you see this over and over again in virtually every country. This is the way that things happened in ancient times. And so you couldn't launch your kids out and say, why don't you guys start over? Again, that was incredibly dangerous. You were enjoying the benefits of what
• 36:20
  previous generations had acquired and you were stewarding those things. And so a lot of the relationships between Gen 1 and Gen 2 in ancient times were around stewarding the assets themselves. Jesus refers to this multiple times, right? So he tells a story about a father who has two sons in the morning, and he tells them both to go work in a field, right? Or Jesus tells another parable about...
• 36:43
  about renting out the family's assets, this, this, this vineyard to a bunch of tenants who were taking advantage of the family. And then he sent his son. So were these sons that had breakfast with the dad or where was this son he sent? Was he like a five-year-old kid? No, like we don't understand the word son even today. And in ancient times, the word son, this, this was an adult. This was a man who was the heir of the family. And he,
• 37:07
  he had a position within this multi-generational family and he was receiving that legacy. And therefore he had a lot of authority. But when he was working on the family multi-generational assets, he was in that economic arena underneath his father. And so this was extremely, extremely common in those days. And if you didn't do that again, it was very dangerous. Like in the story of the prodigal son,
• 37:33
  Even if you send your son out with a lot of money, but he has no access to the family assets, it was incredibly dangerous. And you would end up often just devolving into starvation. So everybody understood this. This was the way that family is described. And a lot of times when people hear this, like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. The Bible specifically says that we launch our kids out, right? That's what it says all the way back in Genesis 2.
• 37:57
  And so let's look at that verse that is oftentimes used to defend this really new idea of family that we've had just in the last 100, 150 years of the nest version of family. So in Genesis 2, one of the things that we read is, "...therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and they shall become one flesh. And the man and his wife were both naked and were not ashamed."
• 38:19
  So it's describing there what we hear that we're like, oh, yeah, that's what we do today. It's like, you know, you your kids get launched out. They they move a couple of states away. They start their own family line. Everything kind of hits the reset button. And that's all healthy. And to violate that is to violate the basic design of marriage that's described in Genesis 2. Now, it's important to take a step back and say, OK, what is he actually saying here? Because how did this play out in ancient families? Yeah.
• 38:47
  because that wasn't happening. When somebody would marry into the family, like an example is if you have a very healthy family, relatively healthy family like Abraham and his son Isaac, when Isaac got married to Rebecca, they didn't move two states away. They moved into a new tent. And what happened often in ancient times was that you would move into a separate room in the house. That's why Jesus says, in my father's house, there are many rooms.
• 39:15
  That's because this was the design of the ancient family. And what he's describing here is that this new family line, this new branch of the family, has its own authority structure. And that's where I completely agree with Mark. You do not...
• 39:31
  lead your son's wife, like that's not appropriate, and they need their own privacy, right? Because the whole context here is, a man shall leave his father and mother and hold fast to his wife, and they shall become one flesh. The purpose of the privacy and the separation that he's describing here is for the sexual union, the oneness that's happening inside of that branch of the family. But like I mentioned, this doesn't necessitate that you fully leave the family in some sense where,
• 39:59
  you have no more economic dependence on the family. And this is not something that Mark's comments really are addressing because I think he's assuming that everyone is going to develop their own economic engine through their own career path. And that is what I am concerned about. This is what we constantly are trying to describe or discuss with you guys at Family Teams is that that new idea of family –
• 40:20
  that every family, and we have what sociologists today call the assumption of stability. We can launch our kids out and they'll be fine. They're going to be able to afford a house. They're going to be able to afford payments. They'll be able to find a career path. They're going to be able to have kids. Oftentimes, in a Christian context, we're like, yeah, they'll be able to probably live off of one income. Yeah.
• 40:39
  That was a very short period of time in especially America, especially after World War II, where there was so much prosperity that you had this emergence of a generation that had incredible stability and incredible economic ability. The middle class really expanded at the time, and it allowed for this sort of new idea where if you get your kid to college, they're going to be able to get a career. And once they get that career, they're going to be finally able to start their family and have kids.
• 41:09
  failing the next generation terribly. And what the next generation is discovering is what every generation experienced up till fairly recently, the last 100, 150 years. And that is that that is really difficult to do. The majority of kids are not going to be able to economically survive in a lot of the world that they're going to be going into. And this is why if you go to the Middle East,
• 41:30
  One of the fascinating things I love, like when we take people to Israel or other parts of the Middle East, I show them like a typical Arab house, right? And it's got usually three or four levels. And in that house, there are different generations living on every floor. This is a more ancient way of viewing family. This is much more close to what Jesus was describing when he said, in my father's house, there are many rooms. And the reason why houses are constructed that way is because,
• 41:56
  they don't have this assumption of economic stability. They know that if one family, if your friend's family is working across generations and everyone's working together to create economic stability, the chance of you thriving and surviving to be able to have multiple children, your wife being able to stay home, all of those things become possible.
• 42:15
  But if you were to just constantly launch your kids out, 90% of them would economically fail. And even if they're able to survive at some level, they're not going to thrive. They're not going to be able to expand the family line. They're not going to have lots of children in any kind of healthy way. And so that's the way that most of the world lives today. That's the world I believe our children are actually moving into. And so we have to take a big step back and look at how does this actually work? And so I think Mark's asking some really important questions like, what's the world that's going to be?
• 42:44
  What is exactly the power relationship or authority relationship between the generations? And the way that I think about this is that the new branch of the family, I don't like the language he used that they start a new family. The reason why there's so many genealogies in the Bible is God is obsessed about multi-generational family.
• 43:03
  We are a part of the family of Abraham, the Bible says. The language of you start a new family, that's a modern way of referring to what's happening. And I think it creates this situation where you see where most families today, they don't even know who their great-grandparents are. They're irrelevant because they hit the reset button every generation. But in the Bible, that wasn't happening. You were existing within these multi-generational family lines. And you would constantly be honoring your ancestors and thinking about your descendants.
• 43:31
  How does that affect the way that we think about authority inside of that structure? Well, the authority exists inside of specific arenas. For example, a business. So if you think about the Green family that owns Hobby Lobby or the Cathy family that started Chick-fil-A, these families...
• 43:47
  when you ask the questions like, okay, are they, um, who are they like trying to coerce their children to join the business or coerce their children to have vacations with them or, or it's a very different conversation because they're stewarding a, um, a vast, um,
• 44:05
  multi-generational asset. And so one of the reasons why you're going to want to have regular meals with your children is not just for nostalgia. It's not just because, Oh, we, we miss you guys and we just want to feel what it's like to have the family back together. It's because we're, we're actually during the workday, we're doing hard work together, building things for our future generations. And,
• 44:25
  And as we do that, we need to make sure that we also prioritize relational time. And so there's a lot of interdependence between generations in those kinds of families. And so they have to think very differently about the questions that Mark's describing. Mark's assuming that, okay, everyone's doing their own thing economically, and therefore all that's left is that we're fighting over leisure time. And that is the way that a lot of people live their lives.
• 44:49
  My family doesn't live that way at all. Right after I get off of this video, I'm going to be meeting with my sons who are all starting businesses. And so we work together throughout the week. We work together and constantly are trying to figure out how to build assets for their children for the future. We're constantly interdependent when it comes to helping them with their kids.
• 45:12
  We weren't designed to live in these one-generation nuclear families. This is kind of what we're trying to advocate to you guys. And the problem, and I think this is the thing that Mark is sensitive to, and I think this is actually important to point out, the problem is that when you go from the Western idea family, we're the only...
• 45:27
  time you leverage and try to get your kids, you put pressure on the other branches of the family to come in like, let's be together. Let's hang out for vacation or whatever. The only reason to do that is for kind of these self-centered reasons and you need to be careful. And then all of a sudden you build a multi-generational family that's building assets and,
• 45:47
  And that needs to work together because you're having lots and lots of your daughters are having lots and lots of kids early and often. Your sons are out there building businesses together. The father has resources that he can deploy to make sure. And then everyone's going to be inheriting lots of assets and ministries. And we're preparing them in their 20s and 30s to take on those roles. Everything is very different in that picture.
• 46:17
  Generation two, we don't tell any of our kids, like, you have to do this. You have to live close to us. You know, you have to have kids. Like, we're going to exert authority over you. We're going to, like, you have to join the family business. Like, these are all things that our kids voluntarily do.
• 46:32
  want to do. And they want to do it because we spent the first 18 years of their lives, you know, they were deeply integrated in us doing this stuff together. It was very healthy. And we're very careful to not cross those boundaries of authority in a way that is inappropriate. And so they trust us and they want to work across generations and they know we're here to help. And we're excited to do that. And if we have to have hard conversations because we are crossing some line that is putting too much pressure on them,
• 47:00
  we have developed the kind of relationship that can withstand that kind of conflict. And then we can work through that stuff and make sure that we're honoring them appropriately. And we're honoring our, you know, our, our daughter-in-law, our sons-in-law, and we're honoring their role in making educational decisions for their own children. Like all of that is so important. If you want to work together across generations, but what I'm trying to, and what we're trying to say at family teams is guys, this is an amazing opportunity for us to, to do family totally differently.
• 47:28
  to stop this nest building, to stop these one-generation families. They're too fragile. They are so economically unviable in the future we're heading into, and we need to start to think about how to build multigenerational families again the way they have been done for thousands of years. They were done all throughout Scripture, and this Western one-generation nuclear family experiment has failed, and we need to get over it and try to think about how to do family differently.
• 47:59
  It's in that moment. God hates marriage. If the proof is in the pudding, he might as well call us to jump out of airplanes without parachutes. James Sexton, the world's most famous divorce lawyer, talking to Carl Lentz, whose marriage is recovering from his infidelity, talk about why you should not get married young. They are missing the most important variable, but let's listen to how they think about young marriage. When it comes to marriage...
• 48:23
  Like you're signing on for something without giving a lot of thought to what it's going to be. Like the metaphor I've used in the past is if you asked me or asked Carl when he was 20, you can have any car in the world. What car do you want?
• 48:40
  It would either be like a Ferrari, a Lamborghini, or like a muscle car. It would have been one of the most guys fall into one of those two categories. It would be a muscle car. It would have been like, until you hit what 40 right then, right. And then we're going Prius. Then you're going Prius. How much mileage. Right. You're going to go Toyota Sienna in your thirties. Cause you got the kids and you got a lot of stuff you got. Okay. So what if I said to you when you're 20,
• 49:01
  Pick whatever car you want. You're going to have that car. And then you go, oh, my God, I want a Ferrari. Great. By the way, that's the only car you're ever going to have. Wait, I'm sorry? What? Oh, that's the only car you're ever going to have. You can't have any other cars. You're not even allowed to ride any of the cars. That's your car. That's your car. You picked your car. Wait, no, no. I picked the car I wanted because I'm 20. Like, it looked nice. And it had a loud engine. I wasn't thinking about where will the car seats go.
• 49:23
  fit, or how does it sit and I might have some sciatic pain because of my herniated disc. Like I wasn't thinking about when I'm 80 getting out of a Lamborghini. So what's marriage? Marriage is you're 19, you're 20 years old. You're like, oh my god, she's so pretty. Oh my god, he's so handsome and he's tall, and I can wear heels with him.
• 49:42
  OK, you know what we should do? We should get married. Yeah, let's do it. And everybody's going, yay, you're getting married. There's going to be cake, and we're going to have a party, and everybody signs on. Meanwhile, you just picked the car you're going to drive for the rest of your life. Have you talked about, do you want to have kids? What's your faith? You know, if, by the way, I lost my faith or suddenly found faith, would that change the dynamic of our relationship? What if I became a vegan? Would you be cool with that? What if I'm a vegan now, and I said, I don't want to be anymore. I want to eat pork chops. Are we going to break up? Like nobody.
• 50:10
  You picked your car and you signed on for the car. Can I lovingly interject and double down? Because to me, when I really have the nuts and bolts conversations about this, that's what I point to.
• 50:22
  is if there is a huge flaw in the Christendom marriage cycle, it's the age in which we push people to get married. Because me and Laura laugh, when we got married, do you think that she was looking across at a guy who, like, I'm finding out who I am today, I won't be the same guy tomorrow. I'm 46, I'm just getting cooking. Like by the time I'm 50, I'm really gonna have a good idea about this much of who I am. Like that's the nature of what you find out.
• 50:49
  your your self-care your mental health your journey like this is all stuff you start to learn as your brain changes but we're going to look at a 22 year old and we're going to pump up this marriage it's going to be the greatest thing ever i don't know what the answer is but i am really curious about even in my own house i got two girls right and i'm not going to say you can't get married young i am going to say my love please understand
• 51:15
  Take as long as you can to find out who you are. And if you really like that guy, let's figure out a way to make this, you know, resourceful. But let's let's take our time. OK, these two didn't get anywhere near a reasonable answer. Carl is saying, you know, maybe by the time you're 50, you'll know yourself well enough to pick somebody to marry. OK, that's obviously not going to not going to be helpful.
• 51:39
  We need to have this conversation because delaying it from 23 to 26 or even from 25 to 35 does not solve the problem that they're describing. The problem they're describing is much, much deeper. And there are lots of ways to solve this problem that they don't explore at all.
• 51:57
  So let me talk through the analogy they use and just kind of help us understand, okay, what are the options? Is getting married young really reasonable? Now, one of the things that James Sexton is sort of framing this issue with is this horrendous, you know, close to 50% divorce rate. And he's saying, this just seems like a really, really bad bet. You're going to make a commitment at a young age to somebody and it's going to be reliably fragile.
• 52:21
  So the question is, is that normal? Is what we're experiencing in our culture normal across history and across cultures? And of course, the answer to that is no. We've done something to marriage. We've redefined marriage in a way that has made it incredibly fragile. And what we really need to do is address the underlying foundational problems that our culture has given to marriage. Do you guys know the divorce rate in India today? Yeah.
• 52:48
  So today, think about any percentage that you have in mind. What do you think the divorce rate is in that country? It's a much more traditional country. And even with all the Western influence that has gone into India, today the divorce rate is at 1.1%.
• 53:04
  It's about a 99% certainty that whoever you marry in that culture, you're going to stay married to. And I'm sure there's lots of problems with marriages in India, but that actually illustrates one of the major differences between that we approach marriage and the way that these two men are talking about marriage. So the way that they're framing this is some, um,
• 53:23
  Some man or woman, they're like they're picking a car. They're just asking themselves, what are the things that I want in a car? And there's no mention of anyone else giving them wisdom that have lots and lots of connections to what actually is going to help the marriage succeed over the long haul. In India, it's famous for...
• 53:44
  the fact that parents often arrange marriages because if you're going to make a decision like that, that is for life. And it's not like it's sprung on you all of a sudden, like you pick somebody and then all of a sudden you hear for the first time that marriage is a lifelong commitment. If the entire family is working together to bring all of the wisdom of the family into that decision,
• 54:03
  And the and both the potential husband and the potential wife want to get that feedback from their families, then you're going to be making a lot more wise decisions. We have decided as a culture to make this about whatever kind of fleeting attraction you feel in the same way that you might see a car drive by and say, oh, that would be nice to drive that car.
• 54:25
  Yeah, that is a cultural problem. That's not a problem with marriage. We've decided to think about marriage in those terms. We've made all these movies and all of these songs about the fleeting attraction that a man might feel for a woman or a woman might feel for a man and say that is the basis for how you decide who to marry.
• 54:41
  And that is, of course, a crazy idea when you're talking about a lifelong decision that goes through all these stages. The second problem with the analogy they're using is that the car never changes. It just gets old, breaks down, and you have to swap it in for a new one. And, of course, that's what James Sexton is seeing in the families that he works with. As a divorce lawyer, people just are constantly...
• 55:01
  watching their marriages fall apart. And their response to that is to just trade the marriage in. Actually, what happens in a really good marriage is that because you've made a covenant, a lifelong commitment to love each other, you get better and better at loving each other, then the more kinds of adversity, the more challenges that you face as a marriage, you get to go through and grow together. You're not a car. You're constantly evolving. The person that you marry when you're 25 years old is not the same person that you're married to when you're 50, 60, 70 years old.
• 55:29
  You both change, and it's the covenant and the love you have for each other that allows you to get through those challenging times. But it's actually a really, really good thing that you change. It's really good that you're not constantly the same model that you were when you were young. And so the analogy they're using really doesn't make any allowances for that. And I think that that's the second flaw to the way that they're describing this. The third thing is that James says, he's constantly saying, well, what if you want this? What if you want that? Describing basically...
• 55:58
  A person who's making the decision around who they marry based on individual fulfillment, desire for self-expression. And it's really important to understand that one of the things that creates a lot of stability within marriages in India and other more historic or traditional cultures is that they're not primarily getting married as a desire to fulfill some kind of internal need.
• 56:21
  They're trying to found a family. And so part of the equation is, yes, I want to have a deep and meaningful love relationship with my spouse, but also we're trying to found and continue a multi-generational family line. And that...
• 56:36
  creates a situation where it's possible for every man and woman in a relationship to hit that bar. I can't fulfill every desire that my wife has. My wife cannot fulfill every desire that I have. We put way too much freight on modern Western marriages. And it's almost like taking that Ferrari, just dumping thousands of pounds on that thing. It's only designed to carry a few hundred pounds. And watch as it just gets crushed under the weight of all of that freight.
• 57:05
  And that is a huge systemic problem to the way that we see marriage. So we need to take a look at these analogies and understand why it's still a good idea to get married when you're young if you have the right vision for marriage. But if you are primarily operating like a normal, Western, hyper-individualistic person, then you are never old enough to be mature enough to...
• 57:29
  to make a decision around marriage and find the person who's going to fulfill every one of your desires. There is no amount of wisdom that's going to come into your life that's going to predictably create a marriage that's going to be able to bear up under that much freight. So that's kind of the bigger picture that was not being discussed in this video.
• 57:49
  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.