Latest / The Family Teams Podcast / Ep. 118 | Is the Modern Family Unfair to Women?

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Ep. 118 | Is the Modern Family Unfair to Women? · The Family Teams Podcast

• 0:00
  And what we're really trying to advocate for you guys is that there's a role in which the dad can step up and absorb a lot more of this than we oftentimes think.
• 0:12
  Hey guys, welcome to the 5-Minute Fatherhood Podcast. I'm your co-host, Jeff Bethke, along with my friend and mentor, Jeremy Pryor. Join us Monday through Friday as we chat about quick tips, skills, and ways to help equip you on your journey as a father to build your multi-generational family team on mission. Stay tuned.
• 0:33
  Hey guys, welcome back to the 5 Minute Fatherhood with Jeff and Jeremy. Is the modern family unfair to women? This is a really fair and challenging question. Jeff and I have talked about this a lot. We both think it likely is. Like if you had to balance out exactly...
• 0:52
  If it was all about fairness and who's who in our modern culture, again, the modern culture is the key here. Who is really bearing the unusual amount of responsibility for the family team functioning well? Typically, it's our wives. And so this is a tough one to deal with. And we had this conversation erupt in the homeroom, which I thought was really great. Stephanie in the homeroom said...
• 1:15
  For many women, the achievements come at a cost. It is more difficult for a woman than a man to have it all. That is, to reach her goals in terms of work as well as family. Although gender roles have become much more egalitarian in many countries over the past half century, it remains true that an ambitious man is often married to a woman who is willing to serve a supportive family-oriented role in a family.
• 1:38
  and take the main responsibility for caring for children and running the household, whereas it is rare for an ambitious woman to be able to find a man who's willing to serve this kind of complementary role. This is just one of those areas, you guys, where the modern family idea is breaking down. And it's unfortunate because if it breaks down more often for women than for men, then obviously it's going to play into...
• 2:04
  sort of a gender battle that's going on in our culture, and that's what oftentimes tends to happen. I just want to talk through a little bit about what this means, because what do you do when this is happening in a family? What do you do when you feel like it's unfair? And a lot of times—
• 2:22
  What I think the culture is not talking about, I think honestly enough, is that the really large, the prescription that it seems our culture bends towards is who's going to take the hit in the family. And generally speaking, what we've decided culturally is the children will take the hit.
• 2:40
  What that means is we're going to let the man pursue all of his ambitions outside the home. We want to give the equal ability for his wife, for the mother to really go after her goals outside the home. And so in that, we just talk and we want to pretend like this third party in the family, the children, they don't exist in this equation. But somebody's got to take that hit, right, to make this right. And we've had...
• 3:03
  Some hard conversations with friends of ours lately where that's happening, and it's not really being acknowledged as that. They want to constantly cast the conversation as a battle between sexes. And when you just cast the conversation in that light—
• 3:20
  then often what happens is we try strategically to not talk about who's really absorbing the loss in this case, and that is the children. And what Jeff and I have really been trying to discuss with you guys is that if you have to choose, oftentimes the culture will let the kids take the hit. Oftentimes the church will just say to the wife, well, you take the hit. It's like traditional gender roles. You need to do all the work and forget about any of those areas where you feel like it might be unfair.
• 3:49
  And what we're really trying to advocate for you guys is that there's a role in which the dad can step up and absorb a lot more of this than we oftentimes think. And so that's kind of, as you begin to think about as a family team, instead of seeing this as a battle for who is stuck with having to deal with the stuff in the family because it's being so terribly devalued, is what we're trying to do with family teams is lift the value of the family to an extent that both the husband and wife are excited to dive into deeper and deeper engagement in the home.
• 4:19
  And when that happens, that's when the family starts to flourish and the kids don't have to take the hit that the culture is sort of demanding that they take at this point to solve this issue. But Jeff, how have you thought about this one? Yeah, I think it just has to be warranted and has to be seen that like you have to tell you have to understand history here and you have to understand the big story. And we've talked about it before, but you can go all the way back to a pretty big turning point in the 1800s. The Industrial Revolution, the first one is even earlier than that. But I would say 1800s is where it started getting really strong, started really changing the workplace.
• 4:47
  And so then you have, obviously, the dad start leaving the home, going more to a place for a certain type of paycheck, and then coming home and returning that money back into the family. When he did that, it left a huge gap in the ecosystem of the family team. Families were actually, in general, mostly teams before then. And at some level, they're still teams. But it became very much divide and conquer, very much individualistic once the dad started leaving. So then you have a huge gap of needs in the home, right? The headquarters just lost...
• 5:13
  a huge asset in the father not being there anymore. So who takes, who takes the brunt of that? Who picks up the slack? The mom, right. And an enormous brutal way. Right. And so she like has to basically kind of play both sides at home, take all the, take on all that energy, take on all those responsibilities. Then you could probably go jump forward another hundred years. Once you get to like early 1900s and we very clearly historically and sociologically shift from, um,
• 5:35
  a culture of, uh, uh, contribution to a culture of consumers. So now we're all about taking and receiving. And what that did to the children is now all of a sudden the children now no longer help the team, right? When before you had kids to help, like you needed literally farm hands, you needed work hands, you needed employees for the actual family, uh, dynasty and family business. Now, all of a sudden, once we shifted to consumer cultures, kids are nothing more, but just open mouth. So you have to feed, feed, feed, give, give, give, give,
• 6:02
  Right. And so now all of a sudden they're at a contribution just got left a gaping wound in the home right now. Like they, they no longer help and give because now they're just there to consume, not to give. So who's up, buddy. My little man just popped in right now. Perfect timing. And the one thing with that is.
• 6:19
  There's another gaping wound. And who fills that gap? The mom. And you can go on and on and on. Basically, like, I would say there's probably out four or five of those where the mom has actually picked up the slack in these huge historical moments over the last 200 years. And so, yes, it is unfair. That's a long answer to say, like, yes, that is wrong. That is unfair. The slack she's having to pick up.
• 6:37
  Um, and I actually think that's 100% the reason why moms, most moms trying to do it on their own, just burn out. And I'm just like, yeah, because they should like that. They're not meant to do that. They're not meant to hold all of that. Right. The team is meant to hold that. And so that's the first thing is you have to, like Jeremy said, don't let it be a, uh,
• 6:54
  debate about gender, let it be a debate about team versus individuality. And there's always a myriad of sacrifice on any team of everyone sacrificing at different levels. There's also some teams where it's unfair. So obviously you want to look at that and say, Hey, how can we kind of make this more equitable and charitable? Um, but every team sacrifices for the greater good. And so that's the one thing is make the conversation there, center it there. And then like I always talk about
• 7:18
  with Wendell Berry to have like, don't just choose, like he says, don't just choose the slavery that the man chose 200 years ago. That's not the problem that might just delay us looking at the data, but in a hundred years from now, we'll look at the same thing and say, ah, I don't know if that's the solution. One last thing I'll say here is go listen to one of my favorite podcasts recently. Um, I, I always forget how to pronounce his name because I think it's like French or something. That's like Gabor Matei or something like that. The guy that wrote, hold on to your kids. Um, and he's a world class world trains church, child psychologist.
• 7:46
  He has a podcast episode where he got interviewed on the Goop podcast, which is that Gwyneth Paltrow podcast. Yeah. That's one of my favorite, which is such a, I just wouldn't have guessed that would be one of my favorite podcasts of like the last couple of years. But man, I don't know if you listened to it, Jeremy, when I said it to you, but that episode's brilliant, man. How did you find out about that? Are you just crushing the Goop podcast?
• 8:07
  podcast. Yeah, exactly. I'm just, I'm a, yeah, I'm a goop fanatic. I'm a goop fanatic. I love that word too. I'm like, why does she name the brand goop? But man, it's brilliant. And it's why? Because he's a secular world-class psychologist leaning into these things with the data and the research. Like, I mean, he, he comes on strong towards the end where he basically
• 8:25
  He basically says he thinks that because of our work economy and because of the unfairness of mothers and fathers and all these different things, he kind of argues that he thinks the demands of work in the West is almost giving every single baby born in the West soft PTSD because they're not able to...
• 8:41
  actually have the time. And yeah, they're not, they're not able to have the time and the resources to properly attach to the mom. And he's not saying that from religious concerns. He's not saying that because that's like the woman has to do that. He just says, biologically, you got to admit there's a level here of the mom. Like it'll go well for you. And it's a longer play, just like the stock market with compound interest. If you lean into those seasons of attachment and of those first couple of years, and it will come back around on the ROI and their
• 9:10
  There's a lot more there, but I would say go listen to that podcast because it was really, really profound and his research and his data is really, really sharp. But like Jeremy said, don't make this about gender. Make this about team versus individual.
• 9:23
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