Latest / The Family Teams Podcast / The Destruction of The Multigenerational Family

Transcript

The Destruction of The Multigenerational Family · The Family Teams Podcast

• 0:00
  Hey guys, today we're going to talk about the destruction of the multi-generational family. So one of the things we try to do here at Family Teams is try to understand what happened to the family and how to get back. And this is a very difficult and dark period in history that we really need to study and understand.
• 0:16
  Because part of what we're trying to dive into is why is the family so broken? I know so many people, when they think about the family, they're like, this is crazy. Why would I start a family? It's got a more than 50%, in some cases, failure rate. Even when there's not divorce, there are so many families that have experienced real failure. And so would you get on a plane if the failure rate was around 50%? Would you put your children on a plane?
• 0:44
  With a failure rate like that, of course not. And the family is far more important than a plane. It is the structure that really shapes us in every single way, spiritually, emotionally, physically, and relationally. So we really need to be careful what's going on here and understand what happened. And we believe, you guys, that the family is incredible design.
• 1:04
  It is not designed to fail, but we have adopted a new idea, a new design that is creating all of this brokenness. And all of this happened long before any of us listening to this right now were born. And so we're not even aware that we have created or adopted a novel, novel, novel,
• 1:22
  family paradigm or blueprint that is obviously not working. And instead of actually going back and studying the different blueprints in history and trying to figure out how to rescue the family, we just keep double and tripling down on this broken idea. So what happened to the multigenerational family? What really broke it down? So it starts in a kind of an interesting place. First of all, the Catholic church. I was not at all expecting that.
• 1:48
  Yeah.
• 2:07
  They actually, and this is not a book about family. They're just saying this is what created the modern world. This is what they're calling weird, the Western, educated, industrial, these things. So there's a chapter in history that they really focus on, and that is the Catholic Church made a decision.
• 2:25
  That kind of escalated over time, started in the 5th century and then really culminated in the Middle Ages around the 15th and 16th centuries to outlaw cousin marriage. And that might sound like a really good idea, who wants to marry their cousin. The problem is that at the time, people were living in villages and the Catholic Church continued to increase the level of the restriction until it got to making it illegal to even marry up to the sixth cousin.
• 2:51
  Now, again, for us that live in cities, this doesn't seem like a major shift. But Heinrich's team believed this was the largest variable that destroyed the multigenerational family. So you can imagine people are living in villages. And when it's time to find a spouse for your daughter, you cannot look anywhere close to your family. Because people lived in very tight clans. And this was what it appears, and this is kind of Heinrich's, his...
• 3:20
  he's, he's exploring, was the Catholic church actually intentionally trying to break down the clan system? Because every single time the families got weaker, the church got stronger. And so as they began, if you were a patriarch of a family and trying to find someone for your daughter to marry, you had to look further and further and further out. Well, of course, because of transportation back then, if you married your daughter to somebody who was living, you know, 50, a hundred miles away, that was effectively not seeing your daughter ever again.
• 3:45
  Um, or very rarely, you could not have any kind of interdependent life. Now, if you knew you were going to have to do that and all of your children would have to be married in that fashion, then of course you would raise your children to expect the whole thing to self-destruct, um, as your kids got older and had to get married. And so that's what Heinrich's team said occurred.
• 4:04
  Uh, and this was the beginning of the end of the multi-generational family and the beginning of the nuclear family. The idea that the family is a nest that self-destructs, this really was created, uh, because of this. And they even trace the, uh, tradition to say during a wedding, does anyone here have any objections or know of any reason why this man or woman can't be married? What they were leaning towards, what they were saying is, does anybody know if they are related in any way to the sixth, uh, uh, to, to the sixth cousin? Uh, uh, to, to the sixth cousin.
• 4:33
  Because the Catholic church was extremely powerful and they were able to enforce this law and they enforced it actually at the altar where people were getting married. So this was an enormous influence. So this happened so long ago, it's very hard to understand. And of course, this restriction does not impact us nearly as strongly today. We can still build multigenerational families. We live in much more dense environments where it's possible to find people to marry and we likely won't even have to worry about marrying even to the sixth cousin. But...
• 5:02
  It's important to understand that the natural design of the family was to stay rooted and stay together and stay fairly close. This restriction was so powerful at the time when it was being enforced that it made it impossible for multi-generational families to continue to get stronger and stronger. And of course, this had the...
• 5:23
  what some say the unintended consequence of making the church stronger and stronger while the family got weaker and weaker. Um, and others believe this was intentional. So that's the first factor. The second factor was the industrial revolution. My partner, Jefferson Bethke, who's a part of family teams, he wrote amazing book, Take Back Your Family goes very deep into what happened during the industrial revolution, but this is when we disconnected work from home.
• 5:43
  So people began to move from villages into cities. They began to work at factories. And what the Industrial Revolution wants to do is atomize the family into its different individual components. And just like any kind of machine, then rebuild the machine in a way that suits capital and industry the best. And so this was incredibly powerful. This was the second massive hit to the family. So you already have the breakdown of multigenerational families into nuclear families. Now you have the breakdown of nuclear families into individuals.
• 6:13
  And so you begin to do what's best for the economy, do what's best for how to make money. And that meant that you had to elevate work identities above family identities. This also caused people to move from villages, which were almost like this incredible place for large families to flourish, into cities where it's very difficult to have a large family. And so the industrial revolution and the elevation of workplace identities was a second variable. And I would say the third variable was...
• 6:39
  And the final variable that we're going to look at today is the government. So the power to transfer from family to the government and the individual. And so if you look at these circles over here, the government, one circle, the family is a small circle, the individual is also a large circle. What's really important to do is if you increase the size of the government or increase the size of individual, you have to shrink the size of the family. In other words, there's a finite...
• 7:02
  amount of power that exists within our agency. And so if you give more agency to the government, it takes it away from the other two, the family, the individual. You give more agency to the individual, it takes away from the family and the government. So what we decided to do in modern Western contexts in our democracies...
• 7:21
  and in the way that the world is constructed, is that there are powerful constituencies within the government that wants to increase the size and power of the government. And this causes the family to shrink, right? As well as the government, if it can promote the power of the individual, it's going to end up shrinking the family as well. And so that also can increase the power of the government. So we need to, there's really no one standing up to fight for the family, right? You don't see that. There's no, the word family doesn't even exist, for example, in the US constitution.
• 7:50
  There were times in history where the family had all kinds of laws, all kinds of responsibility. Back in Roman and Greek law, for example, there was lots of elements of the family's life that the responsibilities were spelled out.
• 8:06
  in lots of government legislation. You see that far less in modern democracies. And then you have in founding documents like the constitution, the family, not even mentioned at all. And so it's very easy to see the importance of the individual, right? And we talk a lot about the importance of the individual and the government also has a vested interest in increasing its power, but the family doesn't really have anything standing up for its power structure. And so it just gets smaller and smaller and smaller and cedes more power to the government and to the individual.
• 8:33
  An example of this, I think, that's really stark is what happened to the black family when the government began to give a lot more entitlements. And so this seems like the best thing in the world for, at that time, very much an underprivileged group that had all the effects of slavery that they were dealing with in the 1950s.
• 8:50
  But it's just shocking to think about how the out-of-wedlock birth rate within the Black family was around 15% to 20% at the time in the 1950s. And then when the government became more and more involved in trying to provide entitlements in order to potentially deal with this inequity, now today the rate in the Black family is closer to 75%. Again, like...
• 9:13
  probably, maybe you'd say an unintended consequence, but this law of this finite amount of power in these different structures is really important to study and understand. And so how do we respond to that? I want to talk through really quickly just three ways to respond to these three problems. What happened to families with regards to the church's legislation, the industrial revolution, and the government? The first thing is,
• 9:36
  We got to find our homeland. What happened when the church made these decisions about cousin marriage was it destroyed the idea that families were rooted in a particular place because you were constantly sending your children off to other places. And so you really couldn't think about your family any longer in that way. Historically, this is always the way that families thought of themselves. We are rooted to the land.
• 9:58
  Land, this area is really important to us. We've been here for generations. We bury our dead here. We have memory here. This is a powerful thing for creating family and enough stability to raise children. So this is a really basic, good part of the design that got disrupted. Part of that 50% failure rate of family is because we're no longer in our natural habitat. And so one way to think about this, I like to think about is raise your families on the outskirts.
• 10:25
  of an underrated city and then unleash your grandchildren on the world. In other words, you need to create first, a generation has to create that sense of place again for the family. And so I think that oftentimes to find a place that actually is affordable for large families, for generations,
• 10:43
  or the first generation attempting to do this to actually get a hold of land, but not be so far into a rural area that you don't allow for enough opportunity economically for your children. I think that what I've seen over and over again, families are doing the trend that I just love is that you find a city that may be a little underrated, right? So the cost of living is lower.
• 11:02
  You get enough land, but close enough to the city to be able to take advantage of all the education and economic opportunities of the city. And then you begin to create sort of this village atmosphere, again, that used to exist all around the world and in the Western world until what happened when the church began to really undermine the power of the family.
• 11:21
  Okay. A second thing is we need to build multi-generational family assets together. So the industrial revolution disrupted this idea. Like we are now atomized. We're just going to work for other people. And what we need to do is begin to build these things together. I discovered this. I was doing pastoral ministry. I left that.
• 11:42
  kind of career path to start my first business. This picture is actually, my father is working for us. My father-in-law, my wife is a part of the business. My sister, so many people in our family, my sister-in-law. We were just constantly working together on businesses. And I could not believe how much this caused all of our family identities to become so much stronger and that we were able to really work together. I know this is very difficult for a lot of people to do because part of what's broken down is our ability to be in tight and close relationships with each other.
• 12:10
  And so we're just used to cutting each other off or not forgiving each other. And so these are diseases that are creating problems. But this is the actual thing we were designed to do before the Industrial Revolution, before we went to work in factories. We thought about our identity as families first, the father, the mother. These were elements of a team that worked on productive economic workplaces.
• 12:31
  projects together. And we need to get back to this, right? This is really important. There are two kinds of work, building assets for your family and building assets for another man's family. And remember, your family is your primary team. So part of what we're trying to help you guys understand is that there's obviously a reason why people want to turn you into an employee of their family or themselves as an individual. One of the things I discovered as I
• 12:56
  begin to see a lot of these different very, very wealthy corporations. And you get all the way up to the level of the board of directors. You begin to discover that they are oftentimes very powerful, multi-generational families. And in many of those large and powerful, both private and public businesses,
• 13:17
  And so what you're doing by atomizing your family into its different units and then sending them all off to work for these large corporations or other entities is that oftentimes we are training our children to be the asset builders of another man's family. But this is being hidden from you. And it's really important to get back to the idea that if you don't build assets as a family and begin to think about your family as an economic team.
• 13:44
  then this is going to constantly happen to you. And we do live in a day and age where this is possible. It's possible to get back to working with your family. And the third thing is we've got to get away from the government. So this picture is a picture of a woman who got her, this is the first woman who got a Social Security check from Roosevelt in 1940, the beginning of Social Security. And we were like, this is so amazing.
• 14:06
  finally, we are taking care of our elders. Isn't that great? That the government has stepped in because families are no longer taking care of the elders of their family. Let's do that. Let's do that as a government. Isn't that compassionate for us to do? The problem, you guys, is you cannot transfer responsibility from the family to the government without weakening the family. In this one move,
• 14:32
  What was created was we took away the greatest incentive in human history for parents to ensure the economic viability of their children. Right. Think about it. If I knew that my ability to have a reasonably comfortable life in the future when I grow older would.
• 14:50
  really was dependent upon my children being economically viable and then caring for me, I would spend my entire life trying to fight for their economic viability. I mean, it would just be in my self-interest to do that. Now it's not in your self-interest at all. It's actually the opposite.
• 15:06
  You can be completely independent for people. I was like, oh, I don't want to be a burden on my kids. All this stuff is such an incredible psyop to destroy the multi-generational family. So we've got to stop this kind of weakening of the family. And by doing that, we got to say, look, whatever these government entitlements, I get why they were created, but these are so destructive to the family. There are trade-offs
• 15:30
  I love how Thomas Sowell says, there are no solutions, only trade-offs. You think you've solved the problem of having elderly people, providing for elderly people by creating social security, but you also create the trade-off of destroying the greatest incentive that the family has to stay multi-generational. And so these three massive hits
• 15:49
  have caused so many problems with the family. So we gotta go a lot deeper into this. I know if you guys felt like I was being kind of hard on the Catholic church, please stay tuned for our next video because I'm gonna talk about the Protestant church and how modern Christianity also has really worked to, again, it could be inadvertent, but it does work to destroy the family, the multi-generational family team. We need to really understand how the mechanics work and then how to recover from them. So stay tuned for that.
• 16:17
  Families weren't designed to be a group of disconnected individuals. In scripture, the household was a team, a multi-generational team on mission. We've forgotten that. That's why we wrote a free course called Five Days to Transform Your Family into a Team. Each day unpacks one key idea, vision, training, mission, or rhythm, and gives you one way to live it out. No hype, just wisdom and practice. Enroll free at familyteams.com slash transform.