Latest / The Family Teams Podcast / Stop Raising Daughters Who Are Fiercely Independent! Do This Instead.

Transcript

Stop Raising Daughters Who Are Fiercely Independent! Do This Instead. · The Family Teams Podcast

• 0:00
  Hey everybody, welcome back to the podcast.
• 0:02
  I am joined today by my lovely wife April.
• 0:05
  April, thanks for jumping on here today.
• 0:06
  Hello.
• 0:08
  So I'm excited to dive into a question.
• 0:12
  What spirit should we be cultivating in our daughters?
• 0:18
  So this is an extremely important question, and our culture has generated an answer to this question that is very recent, very different than an answer you'd have gotten historically, and I'm going to argue different than the answer you're going to hear biblically.
• 0:39
  So I would say the most simple way to describe what we are attempting to cultivate in our daughters is fierce independence.
• 0:50
  That has become the bullseye for what it means for us to help our daughters become who God's intended for them to be, or if you're not a Christian or a believer in God, who they most are, reflect kind of their basic nature the best.
• 1:10
  And this idea of fierce independence creating a female who's able to be fully independent from a man, fully independent from society, from her extended family, from her children.
• 1:23
  This is getting more and more intense as a trajectory for what we're aiming at in modern Western parenting.
• 1:33
  and what we are wrestling with here is, is that biblical?
• 1:38
  And if that's not biblical, I think a lot of people, a lot of Christians have questions about that.
• 1:42
  Like, that doesn't sound like maybe the best idea, but then we don't really know what else we're aiming at.
• 1:48
  And so what I've noticed for a lot of Christians who are like, well, maybe we shouldn't be trying to maximize our daughter's independence,
• 1:56
  But I don't really know what else to do.
• 1:58
  And so then all the stories and all the cultural messages kind of get through.
• 2:03
  And despite our best efforts, because we're not aiming at anything else, our daughters end up really imbibing the message.
• 2:11
  What it means for them to succeed is to really exhibit and cultivate this spirit of success.
• 2:17
  intense independence.
• 2:19
  Okay.
• 2:19
  So that's one way of viewing this.
• 2:22
  And so April and I did a talk at Integrated.
• 2:24
  Integrated is our mastermind for dad business owners.
• 2:28
  So twice a year, Jeff Bethke and I take a group of dads away to Colorado.
• 2:32
  And then we also take a group away to Franklin, Tennessee and
• 2:36
  We were in Colorado, and we decided to really stir up this conversation about what should we be aiming at?
• 2:42
  What spirit should we be aiming at with our daughters?
• 2:44
  Does the Bible weigh in and try to say, no, no, daughters should become fiercely independent?
• 2:49
  If not fiercely independent, what are we aiming at?
• 2:51
  And so I kind of threw out the thesis that when I'm reading Scripture and it's depicting peak daughterhood,
• 3:00
  The thing that it appears to me to be aiming at is fierce loyalty, not fierce independence.
• 3:08
  And we walked through lots of examples of that spirit throughout Scripture.
• 3:14
  Now, this is an extremely different answer, and it's going to lead you to raise your daughters very differently.
• 3:21
  April and I have raised four daughters.
• 3:24
  All of our daughters are now adults.
• 3:25
  Kyra just turned 18, so an adult in that sense, but two of our girls are married.
• 3:31
  We've really tried to figure this out, and this is a very difficult topic.
• 3:36
  I want to just real briefly share what I think the Bible is describing here.
• 3:41
  April, I'd love for you to share your experience in this area today.
• 3:46
  Not only in our family, but particularly in your family of origin.
• 3:48
  One of the things that April shared with the guys that integrated was what it was like growing up with her dad, who really did a fantastic job of cultivating a spirit of daughter loyalty in her and how that
• 4:01
  transferred to me and our family in in such a beautiful way.
• 4:06
  And I'm just like, this is just so healthy, so amazing, so good for families that want to be family teams.
• 4:12
  And so I wanted to share this with you guys.
• 4:14
  So, well, where in the Bible do we get the idea that what is being cultivated is a spirit of fierce loyalty?
• 4:20
  Well, to go back to our cultural obsession with cultivating fierce independence.
• 4:25
  A lot of why we're doing that is because the concern our culture has is if you cultivate anything else in the heart of a young woman, she will be taken advantage of by men.
• 4:36
  I think there's essentially a protection for women.
• 4:41
  And the idea that we are increasingly believing culturally is that women are a separate cohort, men are a separate cohort, and that we need to do a lot.
• 4:51
  to defend or protect our own group.
• 4:54
  And so what feminism began to teach women is that, okay, you can't trust men.
• 5:00
  The patriarchy is there to take advantage of you.
• 5:02
  And if you make yourself vulnerable to men, then you're going to end up
• 5:07
  with all kinds of damage in your life.
• 5:10
  And there are examples of this for sure.
• 5:12
  And so those women who have been really hurt by men or do not want to make themselves vulnerable to men have really cultivated this idea that we as women need to stand against the patriarchy, stand against men as a cohort and defend ourselves from the vulnerability and the victimization that could be ours at the hands of selfish men.
• 5:35
  Okay.
• 5:36
  So,
• 5:36
  That is, I think, part of where this came from.
• 5:40
  And it's really interesting that the Bible actually does answer the question, what does a vulnerable woman do when she finds herself taken advantage of by powerful men?
• 5:52
  And there are multiple examples of this in scripture.
• 5:55
  So the first one that's really stark is the story of Judah and Tamar.
• 6:01
  And we kind of went deep into this story.
• 6:04
  It's a bizarre story in the book of Genesis about Tamar who finds herself in this really impossible situation as different men are trying to take advantage of her and how God rescues her through that.
• 6:17
  And through her own ingenuity, there's lots of interesting things about that.
• 6:19
  We're not going to go into detail there.
• 6:21
  But you see that in that story.
• 6:23
  You see this in the story of Rahab.
• 6:25
  You see this in the story of Esther.
• 6:28
  And probably the story that typifies this pattern the most is the book of Ruth.
• 6:35
  And in the book of Ruth, you have the word daughter used more times than any other book of the Bible.
• 6:40
  Seventeen times in these four short chapters, you hear this word daughter over and over again.
• 6:46
  And we love to do a deep dive into the book of Ruth to understand the nature of daughterhood and what God designed a daughter to be.
• 6:54
  And what you find there is a woman who is in an incredibly vulnerable situation.
• 7:01
  There is a sense as you're reading the book of Ruth, if you hear what everyone is saying in the first couple of chapters—
• 7:07
  Everyone is terrified about when Ruth is going to be sexually assaulted.
• 7:12
  That is a huge part of the beginning part of this book.
• 7:16
  She returns home to be loyal to her late husband and now her mother-in-law, Naomi, and their whole family.
• 7:23
  She is wanting to bear a child that will inherit the family's land, as well as protect her and her mother-in-law in the future.
• 7:33
  It's a very patriarchal society.
• 7:35
  And so there needed to be a male heir in the story.
• 7:38
  And so a lot of the ideas of the story is really stirred up there.
• 7:42
  And then you have the situation where she is going from field to field, gleaning, and Boaz is telling her, do not go from field to field.
• 7:52
  My men will protect you.
• 7:53
  If you're reading the book of Judges, Bethlehem, the city where this is all taking place in, had just committed this terrible sexual assault.
• 8:00
  And so that's kind of the backdrop of the book of Ruth is during the time of the Judges.
• 8:04
  That's how the book actually starts.
• 8:06
  And you see how God protects Ruth and how he provides for her, despite the fact that she is in this incredibly vulnerable situation.
• 8:14
  She doesn't become the daughter that God wants her to be through attempting to become fiercely independent from men.
• 8:22
  Right.
• 8:23
  That's the trajectory that a modern woman would really recommend.
• 8:29
  The way that she does this is through constant acts of loyalty and love to the people in her family that she feels responsible for.
• 8:39
  So it's a beautiful story.
• 8:39
  There's a lot of elements.
• 8:40
  We're not going to go into all the details.
• 8:42
  So that's, that's the contrast I want to, I want to really like lift up.
• 8:46
  So April, how does that, like, when you think about these two tensions, we'll start with that.
• 8:49
  And then I'd love to get into your story and dive into what this looked like in your family.
• 8:54
  When you think about this tension between cultivating fierce independence versus making, helping a daughter become fiercely loyal.
• 9:04
  Yeah.
• 9:04
  How does, how do you think about that tension?
• 9:08
  Well, I think a lot of it depends on what your experience has been with men.
• 9:13
  You know, if you are someone who has a lot of negative experiences, anything from abandonment to neglect to abuse to a dad who's just like disinterested or – but it can also trickle over into brothers and uncles and grandfathers and, you know –
• 9:36
  And so that the experience we personally have with men greatly affects how we view this particular subject.
• 9:43
  And I think when you have a father who loves you and is involved and is interested and curious and curious.
• 9:53
  is for you and supportive and wants to get to know you and wants to show you things and teach you things.
• 10:01
  It's just a recipe for a daughter's heart to want to be loyal to that man.
• 10:08
  And so I understand there's a lot of really hurt women out there.
• 10:11
  And it makes sense that they would want to be independent from that.
• 10:18
  men because they have hurt in their background and they believe that men aren't worthy of their affection or their loyalty.
• 10:26
  They can't be relied upon and all of that.
• 10:28
  And so it makes sense in that if that's your framework.
• 10:32
  But even if you're a believer, a Christian, and that's your background, I would encourage you to, you know, try to view God as a good dad.
• 10:42
  And what does that mean?
• 10:43
  What
• 10:48
  to God as our ultimately good father.
• 10:51
  You know, our dads are supposed to be a kind of window into showing us what God is like and what his affections are towards us and the purity of his own heart and those affections and love.
• 11:05
  how much he takes joy in us and wants to see us thrive and wants to show us the beautiful things in life.
• 11:15
  So for me, I was blessed to have a father who was very present and wanted us children and was committed to my mom in a lifelong covenant and
• 11:31
  And it was all just like a recipe for him evoking loyalty in me towards him.
• 11:41
  And that's not how he grew up.
• 11:43
  He grew up with a very disinterested dad.
• 11:45
  And so when my father became a believer early on in my parents' marriage and right before he became a dad, it just really shifted everything for him.
• 11:54
  And so he learned to view God as a father and to figure out also, you know, how to be a good dad to us children.
• 12:06
  Yeah.
• 12:07
  And part of what you described in our conversation in Colorado that I was really struck by is this analogy of like a daughter's heart.
• 12:18
  And I'd love for you to kind of go into that because I think it creates both a really practical perspective.
• 12:24
  image for how we know as fathers, how to, what we're stewarding and what's at stake, what it feels like to be a daughter and how kind of this process of cultivating her heart works.
• 12:39
  Yeah, this idea came upon me because I was actually struggling with, as a grown adult woman, struggling with calling God dad because I had such a good dad.
• 12:52
  So it's maybe an upside down problem to what you might think.
• 12:55
  And I was really wrestling.
• 12:56
  I was like, God, I want to be of you as father.
• 12:59
  And I want to be able to call you dad.
• 13:01
  But like that word is reserved for this man.
• 13:04
  And I don't know how to transfer that over, that loyalty over to you in this little corner of my heart, which is actually a very big corner.
• 13:13
  And it was in the wrestling of that season that he kind of gave me this message.
• 13:17
  I got this idea in my mind of what a dad does and what his role is.
• 13:23
  And so I feel like a father is responsible the moment he has a daughter, whether he's present or whatever his personality type is, doesn't matter.
• 13:31
  He has a baby girl.
• 13:34
  Then he is instantly handed a place in her heart that only he can go and she's
• 13:43
  How he stewards that heart is up to him.
• 13:47
  And it can be something really beautiful.
• 13:51
  So is he going to steward this heart as perhaps a garden that he's cultivating?
• 13:56
  A well-tended garden.
• 13:58
  He's planting.
• 13:59
  He's watching.
• 14:00
  He sees the weed as soon as it comes up and gets it out.
• 14:03
  He right away notices when some more water is needed over here in this section and then
• 14:09
  The next year he wants to try to plant something different because he thinks it's time for this kind of new plant to grow.
• 14:15
  He has an idea in his mind of the beauty that it could be.
• 14:19
  Maybe the garden's going to grow into more of a pathway.
• 14:22
  And there's a meadow on the other side.
• 14:24
  And there's maybe a tire swing in the tree.
• 14:26
  And there's a bench to sit on.
• 14:29
  You can just see like as the years go by, this father's carefully tending the garden of his daughter's heart.
• 14:35
  And he's noticing and he's...
• 14:37
  thinking in the future and he's adding components to this beautiful place.
• 14:43
  And what a flourishing, robust, rich heart that daughter has to then go out into life and welcome people in and to love her husband well and to be ready to embrace the difficulties of child rearing and all of these
• 15:08
  And then I think that the opposite is also true.
• 15:11
  If that father decides to neglect or to abuse or to ignore or to not know how to not give the time to engage, then I feel like that daughter's heart, the picture that I had in my head was this daughter's heart being like a concrete thing.
• 15:28
  abandoned parking lot, an abandoned parking lot that has cracks in it.
• 15:33
  And there's weeds growing up out of the cracks and no one's tending it and no one is noticing the crack and no one's taking care to make sure that these things are dealt with as they pop up.
• 15:46
  And no one's doing anything intentional with this space.
• 15:49
  I mean, the father is supposed to have an idea of what he wants to do.
• 15:52
  And
• 15:55
  To have this parking lot of a heart, it just makes it, I have such compassion for women that that's the shape of their heart because you can imagine going into life with that.
• 16:06
  Of course, you're going to like have the walls up and kind of be guarded against things.
• 16:12
  you know, men or deep relationship with anyone or any kind of, you know, trust or whatever of being able to open yourself up because that's the condition, like the lack of plushness.
• 16:28
  Now, of course, the analogy breaks down at some part.
• 16:32
  We have Jesus.
• 16:34
  He comes.
• 16:34
  He heals.
• 16:35
  He is our father.
• 16:36
  He bulldozes the parking lot away, and he plants fresh sod, and he starts over.
• 16:43
  With the Lord, everything changes for sure.
• 16:47
  But I think that that was just a really helpful image for me to see that what a good dad does and what he wants.
• 16:55
  And our dads are not perfect.
• 16:56
  Our earthly fathers are not perfect.
• 16:58
  And so they're never going to do exactly what God can do for us as the father.
• 17:03
  But it's just an image of what if you are a young father or a dad of a daughter and you're listening to this, just want to encourage you to consider the role of cultivating your daughter's heart.
• 17:16
  And being creative with ways to do that.
• 17:22
  Yeah, so that's kind of what we want to kind of encourage you guys to think about.
• 17:25
  I love that picture, April, just to think about as a father, we have this opportunity to cultivate that.
• 17:34
  And that a lot of this for me, a lot of where I would say I've struggled in this area with four daughters, and is I think that part of what really my daughters need to experience for me is like an attachment.
• 17:48
  And I was really surprised.
• 17:50
  to find out that the Hebrew word for daughter, bat in Hebrew, is also translated in other places in the Hebrew Bible, the apple of my eye.
• 18:00
  It's the same word, apparently, that you can translate that phrase.
• 18:03
  Sometimes it means apple of my eye.
• 18:05
  Sometimes it means daughter.
• 18:06
  And I think the idea is...
• 18:08
  your daughter needs to be in this place in your heart as the father where you are extremely protective.
• 18:17
  You're very careful.
• 18:19
  You're very vulnerable in this place and that your daughter can sense the level of emotional attachment that her father has in her life.
• 18:29
  And that is, I think, one way that you're cultivating that place in her heart.
• 18:34
  You're making sure it's not becoming
• 18:36
  calloused but it's like she's able to be free because my dad is protecting me like like i'm the apple of his eye and we have these kind of cute cutesy little phrases like oh daddy's a little girl or you know she's got her daddy wrapped around her little finger or you know the proverbial dad with the shotgun you know when the guy comes to the the
• 18:58
  These are all images to try to convey this idea that the dad is extremely emotionally attached to his daughter.
• 19:06
  He cares a lot about her, and he takes everything that happens to her very personally.
• 19:12
  And this allows his daughter to be very free in her life because she knows she's being protected by her dad.
• 19:20
  And so does everybody else.
• 19:21
  I mean, you grew up in a little village or like Bethlehem, you know, like where Ruth was.
• 19:26
  Once it was known that Boaz was guarding Ruth, she became extraordinarily safe all of a sudden in the story in every way.
• 19:35
  But until that moment, she was very vulnerable and there really was no answer to that.
• 19:40
  And it's not great that women have this vulnerability in a state in which men are actively trying to take advantage of a woman or there is not a father trying to love and protect her.
• 19:51
  But Ruth didn't have that either.
• 19:52
  And this is how God provided and loved Ruth was to give her Boaz as her kinsman redeemer, ultimately as her husband redeemer.
• 19:59
  And through her loyalty, Ruth then gives birth to the descendants of both King David and to Christ, to Jesus as the Messiah of the world.
• 20:13
  And I love tracing this story of Ruth from this fierce loyalty to the Savior of the world.
• 20:22
  And I think that's intended in Scripture.
• 20:24
  Like, that's how big of a deal this is.
• 20:27
  And we know there's a lot of challenges that that creates for women.
• 20:32
  But this was God's design.
• 20:34
  And for a lot of times what we're trying to articulate at family teams is, okay, what was God's, what is God's design?
• 20:42
  We know there's a lot of brokenness.
• 20:44
  We know there's a lot of
• 20:45
  situations where God's design is being violated and women have to make very difficult decisions.
• 20:51
  But part of what we're trying to do is say, okay, you guys, a lot of you guys listening to this, you are raising daughters and you have a fresh opportunity to cultivate a spirit within your daughter.
• 21:03
  And you are being taught, no matter how loving you are as a father, that you're
• 21:06
  No matter how much you are helping your daughter be protected in that sense, you need to understand that the goal is to make her invulnerable by cultivating a spirit of fierce independence in her so that she does not take advantage of by men.
• 21:23
  And God's answer for men taking advantage of women is for stronger men to step between that woman and that situation.
• 21:34
  And God has provided for that.
• 21:35
  through this position called the father.
• 21:38
  And again, we're talking about the ideal situation that God designed.
• 21:44
  And so we want to create this in order for women to be free to experience and give the gift to their family of fierce loyalty.
• 21:55
  So that's part of, I think, what we're really wrestling with.
• 21:59
  Is there anything else you'd want to say to women who are listening to this and like,
• 22:02
  Oh, that just feels really unsafe.
• 22:05
  How do I deal with the sense of, you know, I'm raising a daughter.
• 22:09
  I know there are men out there that are going to try to take advantage of her.
• 22:12
  How do we, how do I, how do I think about this in light of that, those, those facts?
• 22:18
  Yeah, I would really promote your daughter's relationship with your husband as a good thing, as a positive thing.
• 22:26
  I know that sometimes a dynamic that pops up is the wife actually can get jealous of the daughter if the husband is paying attention and loving on the kids and all of this.
• 22:35
  And I just want to promote healthy marriage.
• 22:39
  Make sure you're connecting with your husband.
• 22:41
  And so there's like unity there.
• 22:43
  And then really encourage all of your kids.
• 22:47
  But we're just talking about daughters on this podcast.
• 22:49
  But daughters to really connect with their fathers and helping your husbands to understand like the emotional side of women.
• 22:59
  And if your husband isn't used to, you know, maybe didn't have any sisters or.
• 23:03
  or whatever, like helping him understand what girls are like and how ways to, you know, I think my mom did such a good job with this.
• 23:12
  She was always giving my dad credit for ideas that might have started with her, but then he kind of took over and she was always promoting like him as the leader.
• 23:25
  the leader and someone to be respected and really not undermining his reputation in our household.
• 23:34
  She really promoted like us obeying him and following him.
• 23:40
  And my dad was very...
• 23:43
  worthy man of, of that.
• 23:46
  Yeah.
• 23:46
  So I would say, you know, don't be afraid of this.
• 23:50
  I think that the men, the husbands, they do need, the fathers do need encouragement.
• 23:55
  They do need deeper understanding of what, what they're stewarding.
• 23:59
  Um, but we can help them and come alongside them in that and not be afraid of it.
• 24:05
  Yeah.
• 24:06
  Yeah.
• 24:07
  Yeah.
• 24:07
  So good.
• 24:07
  And I would say just like a huge part of what made our family healthy, as healthy as as it was.
• 24:16
  And there's a lot of areas in our family that that needed a lot of work.
• 24:19
  But I would say so much of where the health came from.
• 24:23
  had to do with the foundation that April, you brought into our family because of your relationship with your dad.
• 24:29
  I think that, that just made, that created incredible stability in our family.
• 24:35
  And I think that, that there was a, there's always been just this, this rock solid sense of,
• 24:41
  I always knew you were going to be loyal to our family no matter what.
• 24:43
  And I think you were, you demonstrated that by first being loyal to your dad and your dad, you know, cultivating that so well in your, you know, your, your, uh, family growing up.
• 24:53
  So I just, I, that's why I think, because it's really important for people to be aware.
• 24:57
  This is a, and this is a really good design, you know, and in a world full of sin and danger, and there is real danger out there.
• 25:03
  Um, yeah,
• 25:05
  We need to decide, is the family going to be a team and we're going to stand against that danger together?
• 25:09
  Or are we going to become fiercely independent and try to stand against these things alone?
• 25:14
  And you can't do that second one without doing damage to the family team.
• 25:18
  So we really want to promote, hey, let's stick with God's design wherever we can.
• 25:24
  And so that's, I think, going to help your family.
• 25:29
  really experience what God, God did want daughters to be protected.
• 25:34
  He wanted them to be able to experience that loyalty without it being taken advantage of.
• 25:39
  And we want that for our daughters, we want that for your daughters.
• 25:43
  And so we really need to understand, you know, how good that design is.
• 25:46
  So
• 25:47
  If you guys enjoy this conversation, by the way, like I said, April and I did this very deep dive into this topic, including like all kinds of practical implications of this understanding of daughter loyalty at our integrated meetup.
• 26:01
  And if you guys are interested, you go to familyteams.com and click on integrated.
• 26:05
  And this is a mastermind that we have for dads who own businesses and are trying to figure out how to integrate faith, family and business together.
• 26:13
  And then also their wives.
• 26:14
  April is often, you know, there's a monthly call for the wives as well as a get together at our two meetups a year.
• 26:21
  We meet up in Colorado and Franklin, Tennessee, as I mentioned.
• 26:24
  So if you're interested and you own a business and you're like, man, I really want to figure out how to take my family to the next level.
• 26:30
  We, Jeff and I both really wanted to figure out how can we.
• 26:33
  create a mastermind that's for dads who are really, that are in a position to make some really forward thinking decisions about how to cultivate a multi-generational family team because of the freedom given to them through business ownership and,
• 26:49
  and some of those kinds of things.
• 26:50
  So if you're interested in that, go to familytees.com, click on integrated.
• 26:54
  We'd love to see you.
• 26:55
  Our next meetup is in Franklin in March.
• 26:57
  And so check that out.
• 26:59
  If you are interested and, you know, I jump on calls a lot of time with guys who are asking questions.
• 27:05
  So happy to do a call if you think this might be something that would be a good fit.
• 27:08
  So April, thanks so much for sharing your story and your insights.