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The Case For Fatherhood: Convincing A Childless Generation with Tyler Graham · The Family Teams Podcast

• 0:00
  That's the pathway that oftentimes begins to injure the relationship in a way that causes that bitterness to build up and that disappointment and that rift can generationally begin. But it doesn't start that way. It starts in a very, very precious place where they're just trusting and they're like, I just want to have a relationship with you.
• 0:23
  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. Hey, everybody. Welcome back to the podcast. I am joined today once again by my friend Tyler Graham. Tyler, thanks for jumping on here today. Yeah, thanks for having me, Jeremy. Good to be back.
• 0:52
  Yeah. So Tyler and I both share a passion for fatherhood and really understand why it's valuable. And so I'm always interested in what is a way to make this case for those who are
• 1:10
  kind of like looking at it saying, why would I ever try something like that? So I'm excited to dive in. I've got a few clips I wanted to chat with Tyler about. But before we get started, Tyler, I'd love to hear just like, yeah, what do you generally say? Or what's your kind of sense of why is fatherhood worth it when you think about like, especially on this side of having all the kids? Yeah.
• 1:36
  Yeah. So for those listening, I've got six kids. They're all 10 and under. So our life is very full, very centered around having kids and building a large family. And the thing that I always say to people who either are just entering into fatherhood or maybe they're they're thinking about entering into fatherhood.
• 1:56
  is that there is no aspect of my life that hasn't gotten better with kids. There is not a single aspect of my life that hasn't improved in some form or fashion by the presence of my kids.
• 2:10
  And I think we'll probably talk about some of those things over the next hour or so. Some of those concerns or those fears that keep people from entering in. And hopefully debunk some of those and show from our life, both of us raising a lot of kids, how it's just so opposite of how I feel like it so often gets portrayed in kind of media and things like that. Yeah. Big time. Yeah.
• 2:32
  Yeah, it's definitely worth teasing out the case for having kids because I think it's under assault now more than maybe it's ever been. And people are making the opposite case. Oftentimes people who have never experienced have having kids are making the child free.
• 2:48
  case okay so um yeah there's so there's three a little piece of content i wanted to kind of tease out with uh with tyler one is so i think at one of jordan peterson's um his lectures i think he was asked the question why have kids and i've heard him say things like this in the past and i feel like this is this is a very interesting part of thinking about um and i think this really comes from somebody who's
• 3:14
  has adult children, like, has seen kind of the full spectrum that is often, I think, left out of the conversation. So I'd like to start here. Your kids want to have the best relationship with you that they possibly could have. Like, they're 100% on board with that idea. Way more than anyone you've ever met in your life. And that means you could have the best relationship with your children that you've ever had with anyone. That's what they offer you. And...
• 3:44
  It's up to you to realize that, and you could. And that's a hell of a, oh, that's a good opportunity, man. You know, even if you've been beat around a lot and betrayed and hurt, you've got those little kids and they're thinking, what do you want to do, dad? You know, and if you're bitter, that'll cut you to the quick and you'll hurt them.
• 4:18
  You don't want to do that. Okay. So yeah, he gets emotional about this and understandably so. His basic idea here is that when you have children, you are entering into a relationship with someone who pre, before knowing anyone else, they want to have children.
• 4:41
  the best relationship that they could possibly have with you. And if life and meaning is centered on relationships and you could have, you can introduce into the world and into your life, people who want nothing, no relationship to go better than their relationship with you.
• 5:00
  Like that seems like a incredibly good deal. And I think there are certain things that like have obvuscated this reality to people in the modern world. But yeah, Tyler, what does that serve for you? Yeah.
• 5:13
  Yeah, just last night, I took my eight-year-old son up to a Charlotte Hornets game. And while I was watching that clip of Jordan Peterson talking about creating these relationships with your kids, I'm just thinking about this extended one-on-one time that I had with my son last night.
• 5:32
  And he had this giant smile on his face the entire car ride up. Didn't matter that we were sitting in traffic. Didn't matter we were standing in line. Didn't matter we were having to wait. He just had this giant smile because it was me and him. He was with dad. We were doing something fun. We were doing something exciting.
• 5:50
  And I think about that moment and what that built in my relationship with my son. And hopefully this moment that he'll remember for the rest of his life. And how many times that happens with each of my kids each and every day. Every time one of my kids says, hey, dad, look at this. Dad, look at this picture that I drew. Dad, look what I built with these Legos. Dad, dad, dad. You know, I hear it.
• 6:11
  A thousand times a day is probably not an exaggeration. I hear my name called, but it's just these kids that just they so deeply desire my attention, my affection, my love. And there is no greater thing that I can give my time to than giving my kids those things and giving my kids that time, that attention, that affection.
• 6:33
  And helping them see through that love who they are and what they're capable of. I mean, it's just it's the greatest joy to get to build that relationship with your kids and to see them desire it so deeply from the onset. Yeah. Yeah.
• 6:47
  Yeah, it's a crazy thing to see how much they are rooting for this relationship to work. Like they are completely on board with that. Now, I think there are challenges, like I said, that I think are kind of unnatural that we've introduced into the relationship where I think people have had very strained relationships with their parents and they sort of think that that's the norm.
• 7:15
  as opposed to what Peterson's describing here. The other thing that really gets me is towards the end, he kind of like... As he's getting emotional, he's talking about this child who's like, what are we going to do today, Dad? And I think what I take from that, kind of like to your example, taking your son to the game, is I think part of what's happening is there's a whole...
• 7:44
  very long season of their life where all they, all they want to do is what you want. Like they want to know what are we doing? Like I will follow you. I will go with you into whatever you want to like get into something. Let's get into something. They have nothing better to do and they have no one better to do it with.
• 8:02
  And I think that it's really stewarding that opportunity. I think that is what he's sort of signaling there. That's the moment when your child says that or signals that. That's the moment where you invest into that relationship and say, I know that you want this.
• 8:26
  this relationship with me and I am going to reciprocate. I want that relationship with you. The thing that's different though, when you're a parent, when you're the father or the mother is that you have a much broader world and you could decide that investing in this relationship with this child isn't.
• 8:43
  isn't you'd rather there's something else you'd rather do. And, um, there's a lot of other relationships you think are more important. And I think that's the pathway that oftentimes begins to injure the relationship in a way that, uh, really causes that bitterness to build up.
• 9:01
  And that disappointment and that rift can generationally begin. But it doesn't start that way. It starts in a very, very precious place where they're just trusting and they're like, I just want to have a relationship with you. Yeah. And if you want proof of that, dads, go tell your kids you're running an errand and ask who wants to come.
• 9:21
  And you don't have to tell them where you're going. You don't have to tell them how long it's going to be. You don't have to tell them if they're going to get anything while you're out. You'll be amazed to see how many times, every time I ask, I have at least four kids that say yes, they want to go with me. And again, they don't know where we're going. They don't care. They just want to be...
• 9:37
  with me. And the more times that I think we as dads or moms can say yes in those opportunities, we can say yes to inviting our kids into the things we're doing, whether it's running an errand, mowing the yard, a business meeting, eating a meal together. I,
• 9:54
  You're just like you said, you're reinforcing to those kids that you value that relationship just as much as they do. And it keeps them coming back. Right. If you tell your kid no enough times, they're going to eventually get this message, whether you intend to or not. The dad isn't as invested in this relationship as I am. And they're going to stop asking.
• 10:14
  And I've heard John Tyson say that, you know, the kids will stop asking with their mouth, but they'll never stop asking in their heart. They'll never stop longing for their dad or for their mom, for that attention, for that affection. But they're just going to get to a place where, because dad has prioritized so many other things, that they have just moved on. But it doesn't, that never, that longing never goes away. And it's just replaced by a wound. You hear Pearson talk about towards the end of that clip that, yeah.
• 10:43
  Like you, you wound them, you curse your kids when you tell them and when you show them that you prioritize and you value all of these other things over your relationship with them. Like what you hear? Be sure to leave a rating and review for this podcast wherever you use streaming.
• 11:05
  Man. Yeah. Such an opportunity. So, so that's the, maybe the first part of the case is that you have the opportunity to have the best relationship with any other human being than you can possibly imagine. It will last likely your entire life. Um, and it's yours to, to build up. There's no baggage. Like it starts and ends and you see the whole story out. Um, it's a really beautiful opportunity. Okay. So the second part to this case I wanted to talk about was a, um, something that, um,
• 11:34
  And I don't know who this person is, but Nikanj Kothari said this one was written straight from the heart at 4.32 a.m. Somebody shot this over to me. I was like, whoa, that's a really great description of the case for having kids. So he just wrote, have kids. Yesterday, my second born held my hand for the first time. Not the automatic grasp of a newborn, but a deliberate choice. That rush of unconditional love hit again.
• 12:00
  You think you understand love before kids. You don't. Every other relationship comes with implicit conditions. Partners choose each other daily. Parents love you deeply, but there's a history. With your child, it's different. It's a love so fundamental, it becomes part of your operating system.
• 12:20
  The surprises compound. Watching your partner become a parent shows you sides of them you never knew existed. You fall in love differently, deeper. Each 3 a.m. wake up, each small sacrifice becomes a window into your own childhood. Suddenly you understand your parents in ways no conversation could explain. That house full of love you grew up in, it was built in these exact moments through these exact choices.
• 12:48
  Before kids, I obsessed about protecting my time, startup hours, ambitious goals, career growth. How could a child fit into the equation? But nothing transforms priorities like unconditional love.
• 13:01
  When every minute matters more, you waste fewer of them. Your ambitions don't shrink. They find their foundation. I'm more ambitious now, not less. Kids don't limit your dreams. They force them to grow. They push you to scale professionally because you deserve, they deserve your best. And personally, because they're watching everything you do.
• 13:22
  Most people think having kids means choosing between ambition and family. But the biggest paradox, nothing fuels ambition quite like unconditional love.
• 13:34
  That's a great description. There's a lot there. I think one of the elements that he's bringing to the surface is that one of the things that you can just look at the data, married men with kids make a lot more money than single men. And so the idea that kids get in the way of your ambition, the fact is like men are always struggling with having the proper motivation for their ambition. That's oftentimes a far bigger problem.
• 14:03
  You need that ambition to be founded on the right thing is his point. And so to have it founded on the desire to build a family because you unconditionally love these kids and you unconditionally love your wife, that is a different foundation from which to build a life. And it allows you to pursue things in a much purer way.
• 14:25
  much more in an integrated way from the heart or or the best of reasons and that allows you to go much farther so he's making many many great points in his post but yeah i'm curious tyler what part of that stood out to you
• 14:38
  Yeah, you hit it so well. That quote where he said, your ambitions don't shrink, but they find their foundation. That part to me was so beautiful. And I found that to be so true is how I kind of opened up and said,
• 14:55
  Fatherhood has made me better in every way, right? Like the ambitions that you have, whether they're career, personal, family, those things, they find their footing in family, right? It's no longer this like trivial materialistic pursuit for more power or more money. It is rooted in something so powerful
• 15:21
  Much deeper than that is rooted in how am I going to provide for our family? How am I going to create the best life? How am I going to take this vision that we have for our family and make it possible? Like those are the things that drive you on a bad day or when you have, you know, a day full of meetings you're not looking forward to. And I'm sitting there with my kids and we're eating breakfast and they're asking me about my day.
• 15:43
  Like they're, them seeing how I respond in those moments, them seeing how I respond and why I show up to work completely changes the way that I show up, completely changes the work that I do. And not only that, it's created more of that. It's created more vision. It's created, you know, so much of what you talk about in family teams of creating that multi-generational team on mission. It's helped me to find that mission and allow the, like,
• 16:11
  ambition to achieve that mission to fuel me day in and day out in ways that I just cannot fathom being possible without kids. Yeah. Oof. Yeah, yeah. So good. And, you know, part of what I'm so struck with in, you know, this very short post is, you know, he is really spelling out like, and he wrote this, I guess, at like 4.30 a.m. or something. The surprises...
• 16:38
  of what it means to be a father. And I think it's very important for us to admit humility, like be humble before you have children. You really don't know what it's like. And I think, I think what's really difficult and I find so frustrating is that, is that people, people, there's a constant conversation. Like, do you want to have kids? And this is a very unfortunate sort of,
• 17:02
  part of modern society instead of there being sort of a just an expectation that um yeah of course i don't know what's involved in this how could i know but there's a basic lifestyle that god has designed he's designed if he designed you to get married he's designed you to have sex if he designed you to have sex he's designed you to have kids and you're gonna have kids like that you're gonna build this family and and that this isn't these aren't these were not designed to be
• 17:27
  that surprise you. And I think that this obsession or this, this sense of like, well, we live in a culture that idolizes freedom. And by freedom, we mean the ability to indulge really impulsive desires.
• 17:43
  kids get in the way of that. They force you to live for someone else. And it's such a long-term commitment that the more you value impulsive kinds of freedom, the less you're going to value having kids. And it's understandable, but at the same time, it's just not a fair question to ask somebody who doesn't know what the advantages are. They've never experienced them. And so I think this guy is just sort of like saying,
• 18:08
  Like, I got to tell you while it's fresh in my mind, this is absolutely amazing. And I didn't expect any of these feelings. I didn't see all the transformations that were going to occur in my relationship with my wife and in my understanding of my parents and, and now my relationship with not only my kids, but now my relationship, my work, everything's changing.
• 18:28
  everything's being transformed because God's a really good father and he knew how to give us good gifts. But sometimes we don't have the wisdom to receive them. And so this idea that like, let's just give everybody, let's assume that, that, you know, while somebody is 16 or 17 years old, do you want to have kids someday? Um, yeah, that's, that's just a, like who has the wisdom to know what they would be missing out on if they made decisions at some early stage to destroy their ability to have future children.
• 18:57
  Like that, that most people don't have that kind of wisdom. And that's why societies throughout history and the society that God really designed in just the way nature is designed, doesn't, doesn't actually ask that question. And that, that kind of stirs up this last clip that I'm really curious, you know, tell her what your thoughts are. So there was a, a couple of weeks ago,
• 19:16
  The New York Times wrote an article, and it was about basically this generation of aging women or aging parents who are realizing that they will never become grandparents.
• 19:34
  And the article is just trying to like express the grief that they have of like, they had this expectation that they had kids and that someday they would be grandparents. And so they're reaching that point in their life where that they were assuming they would be sort of increasingly centering their lives around the next, this third generation that would be coming. And they are slowly realizing no third generation is emerging. It's not going to happen.
• 20:04
  So it was surprising. The New York Times wrote this article, and it was very much a hyper-individual article in that the idea was, let's center on the grief of the grandparents. But what we can't have and what people really struggle with is having more of a societal conversation about, is there something wrong with this? How do we critique them? If you read the comments or the Reddit conversations that were happening around this,
• 20:32
  There's almost a universal understanding in our culture that, okay, it's okay for these people to grieve. You know, that's, you know, they had a misplaced expectation. You know, society's changed. But what oftentimes is not being explored is that we have re-engineered society and we've created this problem.
• 20:51
  And we're not talking about it honestly, because this is a completely brand new problem that did not exist in the past. And we need to, and of course, there were exceptions, times where it happened because of, you know, but it wasn't something that was being manufactured by choice by an entire generation like it's happening now. This is a very unique situation.
• 21:13
  And so Matt Walsh, he kind of jumped into the fray, did a pretty lengthy opinion podcast on this. And at the very end of his podcast, if you want to listen to the whole thing, you can hear he makes a lengthy case for a critique of this movement, this change. And the actual podcast is called How...
• 21:37
  generational selfishness is destroying our future. But I'd like to just play the very last thing he says, where he makes kind of the duty case for having children, which is something you rarely hear people make. So we've already made kind of the much more personal cases for having children. Why, as an individual, this is something that you might want to consider because it actually benefits you.
• 22:03
  And we've also talked about how it kind of benefits your family more broadly. Um, but how does it benefit? It's like, um, is it a duty that you have to your ancestors and to your descendants? And so he tries to spell out this case. People rarely make this case. So, um, I, I love to, I love to hear people make this case. This is a case I make it occasionally, but I love to hear, I love to interact with how, how Walsh makes the case here.
• 22:29
  And that brings me to the final point that I want to make. We heard those responses to the New York Times article from people who insisted quite indignantly that they don't owe it to anyone to have kids. But actually, you kind of do. And nobody will tell you this. Nobody will talk about the obligation to start a family. The idea that any of us have any obligations at all is, of course, anathema to the modern mind. We are deeply distressed by the thought that we owe anything to anyone ever.
• 23:00
  But you could be distressed about it all you want. I will say what no one else will say to you. You do actually owe it. You have a duty. Now, there are exceptions. Some people are called to a life of service apart from biological parenthood. Some people simply can't have kids. I get that. There are other vocations that human beings can have. But most of us...
• 23:27
  are called to start families. And for those of us who are called, we do owe it. We do have a debt. We're called. We are called to it.
• 23:39
  Your ancestors suffered and bled and died to build the civilization you live in now and to give you all of the comforts and luxuries that you take for granted. They lived lives that were, by our standards, brutal and short and impoverished. They built their lives by hand from scratch. They built the civilization that you live in from scratch.
• 24:02
  You think you can't afford children. Well, you have a grandfather, not all that far back in your lineage, who built a one-bedroom cabin by hand, shared it with your grandmother and eight kids, one of whom gave birth to the person who gave birth to the person who gave birth to the person who gave birth to you. You experience more comfort and luxury in a single day than that man did in his entire life combined. His life would have been easier if he never had kids, but he had them.
• 24:28
  Because he wanted you to exist. He was actually thinking 100 years into the future, 200 years, 300 years. You come from a long line of people who actually cared about what the world would look like in the distant future, even as you only care about what you're gonna have for lunch this afternoon. And you don't have just one grandfather like that. Your bloodline was carried on through the centuries by men and women of that type.
• 24:53
  They carried your family name and your lineage and your history and everything that makes you you. They carried it on their backs and they suffered for its sake. And now after all of that, after those thousands of years of struggle and strife, just to bring you into this world, you're going to shrug your shoulders and refuse to continue? They ran marathons, handed you the baton, and you're going to just sit down in a lawn chair and say, sorry.
• 25:23
  You wasted your efforts. The race ends here. I don't feel like running. I don't feel like it. Nah. All of that is going to end with you going, nah. Nope. You're going to wipe out your lineage and bloodline just so you have more time to watch Netflix? Thousands of years of toil end with you by your own choice because you just can't be bothered? Yeah.
• 25:50
  That is a failure of historic proportions. It is a failure to live up to your obligation. Because, yes, you have an obligation to the people who built this world. You have an obligation to continue what they built. Now, I'm not saying, I know that what I'm saying here is not going to be the most compelling argument to most people these days. I know that.
• 26:12
  And I know that a lot of people are going to it's going to get shared on Twitter. People are going to snicker about it. And this is dumb. We have an obligation to our ancestors. Continue the lineage. That's stupid. Who cares about you know, there'll be a lot of that. You know, a lot of that. I get it. Because to a lot of people these days, the idea that they should have any respect for their ancestors, much less that they have any obligations to them, is totally foreign.
• 26:35
  Now, I realize that we are a culture severed from its own past, living in a perpetual state of now, as though the past never happened and the future will never happen. That's how you end up with people who act as though they're facing unprecedented financial hardships because they can't afford to buy a three bedroom house at the age of 23. I understand all that. But what I'm saying is still true. All the same. So.
• 27:03
  If your parents are sad that you aren't giving them any grandchildren, this is why. They have every right to be sad. They are mourning not only their own loneliness, but also the fact that you're choosing to squander 10,000 years of work. They're mourning the extinction of their bloodline. And they're wondering what the point of any of this ever was. If it all ends like this, it all ends with you.
• 27:33
  For no good reason. Oh, yeah. He was pulling no punches on that one. We fired up.
• 27:42
  Well, there's a few things I think are really important to kind of tease out in, and I'm really curious, Tyler, what this startup for you, but I think that there's a few reactions I imagine people have when they hear a case made like this. One is I didn't choose to be born. So how do I have any obligations at all? I didn't choose to be on this world. Somebody else chose to bring me into this world. And because I didn't give my consent
• 28:11
  Consent is actually what creates debt, right? If I didn't sign the contract, there is no debt created. And I'd recently talked about this on a podcast where we sort of deconstructed the Dave Ramsey, his idea that basically children owe their parents nothing because they gave no consent.
• 28:35
  And one of the things that I think this really misses is that that is the kind of belief system that can only exist in a kind of a justice guilt culture. And that family really exists primarily in an honor shame culture. So...
• 28:54
  And this is one of the weird transitions that between the West and the East or that has happened between ancient times and modern times is a transition from a primarily honor-shame culture into a justice-guilt culture where we see ourselves primarily as individuals.
• 29:10
  And therefore, as individuals, we can choose anything. We have ultimate freedom. So we have nothing to be ashamed of, but we might need to feel guilty if we gave our consent to something and didn't follow through with it. Then there would be an obligation that was created and we can feel guilty about that because we did something that was, you know, at some level unjust. Maybe in a very small way because we said we show up at the party and we didn't or a big way that we said we were supposed to, you know, we owe this person thousands of dollars and we didn't pay it.
• 29:37
  But that's sort of the extent. And that was kind of the Dave Ramsey argument. And I think this is incredibly strange because family doesn't exist primarily in that way. You have a you have a debt of honor that you have to give to your descendants.
• 29:53
  and to your parents. The honor is that there was something that was done. They constantly were putting you into a kind of a relational debt that is very real. And there aren't extremely clear, it's very fuzzy boundaries to this. There's no way that you can ever put a number on it. But the Bible talks about this in many, many ways. It's in the Ten Commandments, honor your father and mother.
• 30:22
  And that was always interpreted, but both by Jews over the centuries and by Jesus himself as primarily about...
• 30:31
  caring for your parents in an old age, that there is, do you have a debt? Paul specifically says that you have a debt to repay your parents. In 1 Timothy 5, he talks about repaying your parents. And why does he say repay? Because you owe them a debt. This is the way that God designed the world. This is actually what makes for a very good world. This is why we all came into existence and why we all have
• 30:56
  Good lives to the extent that our parents provided for us. It's a pay it forward honor based system as opposed to a justice system that is rooted in some kind of mutual consent or a contract of some kind. But this is incredibly confusing to Western people. And it causes us to think that there's no obligation to carry on the human race. Yeah.
• 31:19
  So I think he's referring to this. He's not really teasing out the philosophical elements or the sociological elements the way I like to try to try to dive into like that, that core objection. But yeah, that's, that's one of the things that causes me to, to think through. But yeah, Tyler, what did this serve for you?
• 31:36
  Yeah, there's a couple of things that come to mind. The first one to touch on kind of the debt of honor that you were talking about there. It reminds me, I think I may have talked about this on the podcast before, but my dad, when I was four years old, made the choice to move our family from rural middle of nowhere, Ohio, where my entire extended family still lives to Greenville, South Carolina, to where we didn't know anybody.
• 32:00
  And the reason that he made that decision was to give me and my two younger brothers opportunities that he never had growing up in such a rural part of the country.
• 32:11
  And we've done that. Like me and my brothers have achieved things that my dad never had the opportunity to do. And I think about one of the greatest ways that I could honor my dad is by doing that same thing for my sons, right? Is to give his grandkids and his granddaughters, my daughters as well, opportunities that I never had. I think I got this quote from you where it's like, you want to make your ceiling your kid's floor.
• 32:37
  And that is not just for my kids. That's not just for me. That's for my dad. That's for him who took this massive leap to do what he thought was best for his family to create new opportunities. Like what a sad thing that would be for him if he did that for me.
• 32:55
  And I returned that by saying, I'm good. I'm going to prioritize my own life and not carry on what you set out to create for the Graham family name. And so that's one of the things that I think is such a vivid picture for me of what it means to repay that honor to our parents by honoring God.
• 33:16
  those choices that they made the hardships that they'd endured like he talked about uh to to navigate the complexities of what it meant to move across the country to have a lot of kids or to to take these giant risks to provide these opportunities that they never had and that we have the opportunity to continue that with our kids yeah
• 33:38
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• 33:58
  Yeah, it is. It is primarily an honor-shame culture is primarily a pay-it-forward system. And I think that it's really important that we take that seriously. And that is the primary way the Bible talks about family. And I think that that's the right framing for it. Now, one of the things that the article is teasing out and that Matt Walsh doesn't mention
• 34:19
  but I think it's important to at least say as well is, so these parents who are grieving not becoming grandparents, I don't know that they necessarily are grieving the loss of their bloodline. I think that they actually probably raised their children
• 34:34
  Primarily to be hyper individualistic and their parent, their children are just saying, I'm doing exactly what you raised me to do. Like you, you, you told me to think about myself. And so there was, there was a, they created these parents created a terminal generation.
• 34:49
  without realizing that that's what they were doing. And the way to stop this is actually very simple. You don't aim your parenting at your children's happiness, but at your grandchildren's happiness. What you're doing is you're raising your children to be parents of your grandchildren. And you need to be having that conversation. And just like you said, when your dad moves home,
• 35:17
  you guys, um, and said, I'm going to make major sacrifices, you know, in my generation to set you guys up for success. I think, I think that part of what's important is actually to talk to your children about the reasons for that. And that I'm trying to set you up so that you can be an amazing father or a mother someday. And I'm, and I'm going to try to get us to a certain degree. I'm going to, I'm going to get us to the next stage. Yeah. I want my ceiling to be your floor.
• 35:44
  And I want you to make, you know, your ceiling, my grandchildren's floor. Like this is, this is how this continues. And I think that, you know, part of the, like in our, in our family, this is something that sometimes we just said explicitly, you know, that, that when we would set up all kinds of things, like, why are we buying this house? Why are we moving to this city? Why are we starting this business? Why are we starting this family bank? Like, why are we investing in this way or that way? And I would just say, guys, I'm, I'm preparing to maximally bless.
• 36:13
  your ability to have children. And you and I are going to have an amazing life for the rest of our lives. I'm going to partner with all five of you to help you maximize both the quantity and qualities of the children coming from this family. And so we've designed everything around that because I believe that's exactly what God called us to do in Genesis 1 and in Matthew 28. This is our mission.
• 36:41
  Um, so it wasn't, so for our kids, it wasn't surprising, right. That we had this expectation. We didn't, we didn't raise them to be hyper individualistic. We raised them to, to be able to have and raise, uh, our grandchildren and we're commanded to do that.
• 36:58
  The command to be fruitful is the command to have children, but the command to multiply is the command to have grandchildren. And these parents that the New York Times is highlighting violated the second mandate of why humanity was created. They were fruitful.
• 37:16
  But they didn't multiply. And now their children refuse to even be fruitful. Now, I think there's a whole journey of being fruitful, multiply, filling, subduing, and ruling. It's an amazing journey that God has called every family to be able to go on. And the fact that we're given the purpose statement of the family right in the first chapter of the Bible is so...
• 37:34
  Oh, such an advantage. And so I have a lot of like empathy or sympathy for people who don't, who aren't believers and have never, who have no access to divine revelation. And therefore they're just sort of like, they're just caught up in whatever trend happens in society. If society becomes hyper individualistic, they're like, oh, I guess we should raise our kids to be hyper individualistic. They have no idea what they're creating. Now, Matt Walsh, who's a Christian, you know, who's a Catholic Christian.
• 38:00
  The Catholic church has done a fantastic job in this one area. They really have preserved the mission of the family and have promoted that mission in ways that I think have, have, have really helped society, but has been ignored by, by many people, many, many Christians, many Catholics. But man, I, I just, I find that so important that we, we are, we, we need to be talking to our children and,
• 38:26
  about being future fathers and mothers. It's like, I think a lot of parents today actually feel guilty if they had a conversation with their seven-year-old and the seven-year-old daughter and talk to her about what an amazing mother she's going to be. And here are some things that I'm going to train you to do so that this will really help you when you become a mother or my son, when you become a father.
• 38:50
  The thing that goes off in the hyper individualistic Western mind is, well, they're an individual. Like, how can we possibly tell them that they're going to be a future father and mother? What if they don't want to be a future father? And this is why, like, even the gender debate is so bizarre. It's like, I can't even say to, if you take this to its logical conclusion, you can't even say to your seven-year-old, I want you to be a, you know, a really, um, a great woman or a great man. Because what if they don't want to be a man or a woman?
• 39:20
  That's why I think that was, it's actually really, really helpful that the sort of the gender debate emerged because it really demonstrates the logical conclusion of this absurd level of hyper individualism. You can't, you can't give your kids any direction because all you care about is that they maximize their free choice.
• 39:42
  And so you can pour all the resources of the world into your children. But at the end of the day, they can decide to absorb all those resources and make horrible choices that are completely based on their own individual desires and leave in the dust you and all of their ancestors.
• 40:00
  And this idea is so bankrupt and it will completely end all of these bloodlines. It's absolutely unsustainable. It doesn't work. It's undiblical. And so we need to be really careful because we're all swimming in the waters where these ideas are being generated.
• 40:20
  Yeah, one last thing that I'll add on that is that I think one thing that if you're listening to this as a mom or a dad and you're wondering, you've got young kids, like what can you do? The thing I think about often is talk to your kids about the goodness of fatherhood and motherhood and about the goodness and the joy of family.
• 40:39
  Because that's what stuck out to me in the Walsh clip was like this, this massive drop off in what people are exchanging family for, right? They're exchanging this feast for crumbs because they don't know any better, right? It's like we talked about in the last, the post from Twitter is like until you're in it, you can't fully understand what...
• 41:03
  kids bring to your life. But if you grow up in a family where it's normative to talk about how good it is just for your kids to see how life giving it is to be a dad, like they're going to, they're going to, that desire is going to start to grow in them and things like Netflix or things like this individual lifestyle or social pursuits, like those aren't going to hold a flame to what they've seen and experienced. Yeah.
• 41:29
  family bringing into their lives. It's going to create that desire for them to carry that on. And like that, I think is a role that we can play now in the lives of our kids is to help show them what family is, how beautiful, how powerful, how much joy it brings now so that those other things pale in comparison. Yeah, man.
• 41:52
  Well said. Yeah, we need to lead our families, our children to do really hard things that are maximally meaningful. Yeah. And that's a positive thing to be leading your kids into. And this individualism is so destructive of this generation and is not being properly diagnosed. That's why I wanted to...
• 42:14
  have this conversation. Well, Tyler, thanks so much for jumping on here today. Um, Tyler's got, um, a, uh, a great, um, uh, LinkedIn profile. Um, and he writes a, is it like a newsletter? 3 PM fatherhood. Um, yeah, yeah. Three months, three months. Yeah.
• 42:32
  Yeah. So open dads be intentional, be present, live at a slower pace to, to be able to do the exact things that we talked about here, uh, to, to show up for their kids in a way that's meaningful, impactful, and sustainable. Yeah. If you want to, if you need inspiration, um, and encouragement, please jump, jump on, uh,
• 42:51
  subscribe to Tyler's newsletter and his LinkedIn. And yeah, it's so helpful to see a dad who's really going for it in this way and is just sharing how it works. So thank Tyler for what you did and what you do and for jumping on here today. No, thanks for having me on, Jeremy. It's always a blast.
• 43:08
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