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The Only Way To Build A Healthy Family Culture · The Family Teams Podcast

• 0:00
  What the wife could do is she could try to use a lot of her strengths, her competencies to help her husband in the crafting of that culture. But if she tries to overthrow her husband, then it's going to end up backfiring on the family. Yeah.
• 0:16
  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. April, how's it going today? It's going great. Yeah? Yep.
• 0:41
  Cranking on stuff. Yeah, we're getting ready to send off a daughter to a three-week camp where she'll be serving. So we had to do some last-minute errands for that today. Yep.
• 0:57
  Man, yeah, this is a camp that I grew up at and April and I got to serve at with our kids. And if you want to join us at the camp in August, something like the 22nd, the 26th, something we're on there. We're doing a week of family camp at Lakeside Bible Camp on Woodby Island, just outside of Seattle. So please look us up if you want. We're going to talk about Israel and family and all the lessons that we've learned over the years from living there and just watching and observing things that have happened in Israel.
• 1:24
  in the various Middle Eastern cultures. So I think this will be one of the coolest weeks. I can't wait. Amazing food. I'm so excited. So this is where I like to hang out in August, right, April? We love Woodview Island in August. There's nothing quite like it. Yes. It's kind of reprieve from the Midwest heat. Yes. Yeah.
• 1:42
  Yeah, they got multiple pickleball courts, a gorgeous lake, and some of the best coffee on that. It's like just a few minutes away. There's a couple of our favorite coffee shops in the country are like right there. There's this place called the Flower Cafe. You'll find April and I going there several times that week. It's going to be amazing.
• 1:58
  Awesome, guys. Well, we are about to open the carts today, actually. We're going to open the cart for the Family Teams Accelerator July theme, which is going to be, drumroll, we're doing SOPs, Standard Operating Procedure. So these are various things that if you are struggling with chaos in the home, if you're like, man...
• 2:20
  I can't stand bath time. Every time we try to go out the door, every time we get in the car, if there are times there's meltdowns around dinner time or whatever, this is how you fix it. We are going to train you step-by-step how to create a standard operating procedure that will help you.
• 2:37
  figure out exactly how to move from a really chaotic, either repeated event in your family's life or a certain time of the day or a time of the week. There's a way to make that very, very peaceful. And so we want to walk you guys through that. We're going to have some amazing community coaches and Blake and Chandler Smith,
• 2:55
  They have seven kids now. So it's like they keep out the more kids. That's right. Seven plus kids. Blake and Chandler, they're an amazing family. And so they're going to be our community coaches. They're going to be on the podcast next week. So we're going to talk to you guys all about standard operating procedures.
• 3:13
  But especially for larger families, I know this is for a lot of people sounds a little bit too workish, you know, having SOPs, standard operating procedures for a family. But this is a lifesaver. If you are trying to figure out how to lead your family and have kind of repeated success instead of continual chaos, this is how to do it. If you want to get our free download, there's Blake and Chandler have written.
• 3:36
  this amazing playbook that we're going to put out to the accelerator. But if you just want to grab the free download, you can go to familyteams.com slash SOP, and you can get that download and see some of their top tips for how to create a standard operating procedure for a family. So there's ways that they do it for family that are fun and memorable and work really well for little kids. So we want to talk to you guys all about that. Next week, that's what we're going to be talking about. But today, April and I are going to talk about
• 4:06
  How exactly does a husband and a wife develop a family culture? There's a very sticky, challenging issue that families, that couples have, and it has to do with the way that men and women are wired. Right.
• 4:22
  And April, I've heard you talk a lot about this recently, about, okay, there are subtle things that a wife does to partner and sort of accentuate the culture that the father's trying to lead the family into. And there are subtle things that a wife does.
• 4:39
  that I think are helpful in the short term, but, but subtly undermine the ability for a father to develop a cohesive family culture. So, um, so I've, I've, there's a couple of different clips I want to play for you. This one is, uh, well, really interesting. It sounds, this is a homeschool mom who was kind of wrestling with this question. Um, and she says something kind of surprising in this. So April, I wanted you to like, kind of give me your take on what she describes here, um, about the family culture.
• 5:05
  All right. This is Sarah McKenzie. She's on the Lila Rose podcast. It's just about family culture. Yeah. Because I feel like so much of what you're saying comes back to the mom and the dad and the marriage, quite frankly. And you said something really interesting earlier about really so much of this depends on the peace and the joy of the mom. Yeah. Yeah.
• 5:26
  And yeah, and you would want the dad to have that as well. So what would be some tips for you that you would give those listening to cultivate that? Because maybe they're feeling like, I would like to do this, but I don't feel like I can do this because on an emotional kind of psychological bandwidth, I don't feel up to the task. And so putting them in school so that I can at least do some self-care even. Maybe they're thinking that. Yeah. Well...
• 5:54
  It's a big question, I know. Yeah. One of the things that comes to mind for me right away is that early on, I said I read like way too much, really. I read too much philosophy of education kind of stuff because it's just my personality type to like read everything I can get my hands on when I get excited about something. And to the point where I was sort of ignoring the children that were in front of me and idealizing this like this Charlotte Mason kind of education or classical education, whatever it was. And it changed. What?
• 6:23
  One of the things that that did, unfortunately, is it gave me sort of this prideful, like, I know what I'm doing here because I'm the one who's reading all the books. So when my husband would make a suggestion for our homeschool,
• 6:36
  I would think you don't know. I'm the one who's doing the reading. I'm the one. And I oftentimes in those early years sort of discounted what he would suggest or say. That is probably my number one advice. I would say like more than anything else I've said, what I should have done in those early days is ask my husband 20 years from now, what do you want our kids to say? Because he loves these children. Yeah, shared vision. Exactly. And then is there a way that I can...
• 7:06
  when I'm homeschooling, the kids can modify the way I was going to do it to also make sure that we're encompassing the way. That really, when I made that shift, is when he got excited about homeschooling and really, and that changes everything. So if you have like a spouse, whether it's your husband or it's whoever's doing most of the homeschooling, right? Mom or dad,
• 7:31
  Um, if you can get a shared vision so that you both are really excited about it, that changes the whole tone and tenor of your homeschool. And then I think it also makes it easier for the one who's not doing most of the homeschooling to support. And, you know, a lot of times in those days I would say, like, I just need two hours in a coffee shop with nobody touching me.
• 7:55
  Because, you know, when you've got all the little kids, they're always touching you. I just need to go. He would, you know, send me off to the coffee shop for a couple hours on a Saturday morning so that I could have a minute. And a lot of times I was just planning homeschooling. So it's not even I didn't need a break from that necessarily. I just needed a minute. And this is such a tricky. I really liked she's kind of putting her finger on something. I think we talked a lot about April. I'm just curious your thoughts on this, because there is a an unholy alliance in our culture.
• 8:24
  between the boss mom and the passive dad. We have created a culture where that is very common, especially within the Christian world. So, and man, as a husband and father, I am so happy for you to just take all of this. You read all the books and I can do whatever I want. It's like...
• 8:45
  And then, and so it feels like, oh, this is a great divide and conquer, perfect thing. This is how it should work. The mom, she can go to all the conferences, read all the books, you know, hang out at all the co-ops, hang out with all the moms and make this whole thing like her realm. And, uh, and the dad gets to be like, you know, gets the free pass.
• 9:03
  And so Sarah is a really, really advanced home educator. I mean, she started, I think, Read Along Revival. I mean, she's a very thoughtful woman who's really, and she's going back and saying, if I could do one thing over again, it would be to form a team with my husband and make this an us thing instead of a me thing so that he could have a large influence over the culture of our education.
• 9:32
  And I know that, you know, we struggle with this. Like, I don't think we did this perfectly at all. But I think this is such a great observation. What does that serve for you? Are you talking about schooling specifically or anything? I think I think I think this happens in every realm where the husband and wife's where the wife where they agree to divide and conquer around some core area of the family's culture. This could be the food of the family.
• 9:57
  The entertainment of the family, the location of the family, the work of the family, the schooling of the family, the biblical education of the family. Like this is a very common pattern where the mom has a vision. She does the research and the husband gets more and more passive. Yeah. Yep. Yeah. That is definitely a thing for sure. And we've had our own journey in this.
• 10:28
  You know, when you start out as newlyweds, you're trying to figure out how to, you're having these arguments probably daily on like, no, this is how you take the trash out. No, this is how you take the trash out. No, this is how you should organize things in a refrigerator. No, this is how you load a dishwasher. So like from the beginning, I feel like we're, let alone like.
• 10:46
  big picture, where should we live and how should we discipline our children? You know? Yes. In the beginning, we're trying to, this journey of becoming one is trying to get on the same page about so many different things. And so I would say on one hand, be gracious with the...
• 11:05
  yourself because it's a process and it's a journey but if you don't have the goal or the understanding of we are a team we're in this together we have each other's backs um then I think it can very quickly become very individualistic and uh one preference has to beat out another preference instead of like really trying to understand each other trying to get to know each other better um
• 11:32
  And then, you know, as that morphs into having that first child, I mean, everything from, like, how do you decorate your house? How do you, like, what, do you hang things on the wall? If so, what kinds of things? And I think that when you start having kids, it just...
• 11:49
  That exponentially grows those conversations. You know, do we bathe our kids every night? Is that a once a week thing? Is that like, do we change their sheets every night? Do we like you have to figure out what you so who makes those decisions and how do you go? So I think there's just lots of conversations that need to happen. And so I would say communication skills.
• 12:11
  are huge. They are so important. Learning how to hear each other and learning how to articulate instead of sitting and shutting down, learning how to articulate how you're feeling.
• 12:28
  listening with the, what's that phrase? Desire to understand more than to be understood. Yeah. Being patient with each other as we try to like get over ourselves and like be honest and,
• 12:42
  lay down our pride and be humble. And like that sometimes takes time. And anyway, just learning all those communication skills that you might associate with a newlywed phase or like the beginning of your marriage, you have to keep up on those as life does get more complex because the divide and conquer will come
• 13:00
  Um, and you have to know when you've gone too far with a divided poker. What would you say to like a young mom? So there's these scenarios that I keep, I keep picturing. There's the, there's, I would say that there's the passive mom and the passive dad. That's like the worst one where neither of them are proactively creating a family culture. That's where so many of us start. We just abdicate to the church or the school or the whatever. Yeah.
• 13:26
  Then there's the active mom and the passive dad, right? Which is, I would say in the Christian world, that's very common. I would say in the family teams world, that's probably the largest group that we deal with. Somebody's got to be active because somebody is actually following family teams and is like interested in this conversation. You're listening to this podcast. So that signals somebody's actually cares, but it doesn't mean both of you are that way. It could just be the mom. Then there are cultures of the passive mom and the active dad.
• 13:54
  That's probably the most rare, but the one that is most publicized, or the one we're reacting against the most. The whole culture is like up in arms. How do we destroy this dynamic? It's the most dangerous in the world to our culture. But it's not a great dynamic. You definitely want to have both active. And then there's the active mom and the active dad. So we want to really speak to what I would say is the largest dynamic that I'm concerned about. And I think this can happen even in an active mom, active dad. There's these realms where dad decides, I'm going to abdicate.
• 14:24
  why do I care about how we decorate the house, right? Why do I care about how the kids are schooled? I will lead the family in this way and that way, but not these ways. And so what would you say to the mom who is in a marriage where she's the active mom, she cares a lot, but she has a relatively passive husband? Any thoughts on how to handle that situation? Well, I mean...
• 14:54
  It is tricky and it depends on, um, I think it depends on a lot, but it depends on where is the husband in a place where he is able to receive either like teaching or a challenge from other guys, or, you know, it's very important to encourage your husband to have, um,
• 15:12
  Friendship's where iron sharpens iron and where older men train the younger men. And like those scenarios are vital for your husband's growth because us wives, we can't be the Holy Spirit. Right. We're not supposed to be. We want to be and we keep trying, you know, because all the way back to the curse or we want to control over our husbands. But like I think that.
• 15:36
  We have to walk a fine line. And I think if I was saying it the most extreme way, I would say like the wife and the children will either suffer or thrive in direct correlation to the husband's vision casting and leadership.
• 15:57
  So you're saying she may not, she may feel the pressure to make up the difference and become both the mom and the dad. But in reality, that gap is going to exist one way or the other. Like your kids really, your family needs both.
• 16:14
  And so you can really be an amazing mom, but if you decide you also want to fill in the gap and be an amazing father and become the visionary leader of the family because your husband's becoming so passive, you're saying, look, there's an inevitable, you may think that you can fill that gap and you can save your family and save your children from suffering, but you probably are going to,
• 16:41
  run into a situation where that's just not going to happen. Like your, your family will suffer. Yes, I do believe that. I mean, and I, I'm saying that out of, um, experience and out of longevity, like you can only do this for so long. You can only lead your family. Like, as you're saying, like be the mom and the dad for so long before things start to get really out of whack.
• 17:03
  and out of alignment and there's confusion for the kids and the husband, you're allowing the husband to go further and further into his passivity if you're willing to keep on taking more and more on. And so I know that like for me, I'm pretty high on the capability scale. And so, you know, I call it sometimes like the curse of being capable. Yeah.
• 17:28
  Because I can take it on. And so I should like, so then I do when really I should push back and say like, hey, I'm finding myself making all these decisions or casting this vision or, um,
• 17:43
  Like I'm walking forward and I'm looking back and you're not there and you're not in front of me either. And I'm just like leading the kids in this way. And so holy cow. So I feel like I have done many, many times where I start down like some kind of fork in the road or some kind of choice I make and I'm.
• 17:59
  a good amount down the road before I realized that you're not with us. And, you know, you're kind of, we left you behind because I got tired of waiting for you to make the decision. Or I, I wanted to do this thing and I didn't think you would want it, want us to go down this path. So I kind of like snuck it in there or something like that. And so inevitably I started to be able to feel it in my own self when I'm like, Ooh, I am, I am stepping out of,
• 18:28
  Stepping out of alignment, I would say, with my husband. I just am like taking my own little side trail here. And I'm bringing – because the mom has so much sway over the kids and for many, many, many years you are in charge of what they're doing with their day, you can bring the kids along on that like pathway without any trouble. You just do because that's what you're doing with the day. So I would say that –
• 18:58
  Learning how if your husband is willing to try to learn how to lead or try to step up to let him try and trying letting your husband try to lead can be very painful, especially if you're capable. And you, you know, like she said in the clip, like, I'm the one who read all the books. I'm the one who like I know all these things. And it can be very tricky to let go of that and say, like, hey, OK, OK.
• 19:23
  I did read the book, but I actually would prefer, I think it's God's best for us if you're the one who leads us down this path. Whether that's like a homeschool decision or like an education decision or a decor decision or a location decision, like all of those things. The husband ultimately, I think, would you say this, Jeremy, that like the husband is ultimately the one responsible before the Lord?
• 19:47
  Yeah, this is part of my understanding biblically of authority. We have this obsession with authority in our culture that it's purely a privilege. And because it's this amazing privilege, we need to make sure that it's equally experienced and that we're constantly fighting against creating hierarchies because of that perception. In the Bible, authority is much more a matter of responsibility. Who's going to be held accountable?
• 20:14
  And so there's an amazing verse in Hebrews 13, which says, like, please submit to your leaders because they are working as people who have to give an account. I mean, so the basis, what the author of Hebrews is saying about authority is that you need to have compassion.
• 20:33
  for the fact that that person is going to give an account before God for how they treated that leadership opportunity. And so as somebody who's under their leadership, if you're second in command or if you're under their leadership, you need to support them because they're going to be responsible.
• 20:49
  You're responsible for supporting them, but they're responsible for the outcome of the team. And so that understanding that authority and responsibility have to be perfectly in sync. And therefore, if you have responsibility for something, you need to have authority. Like what good does it do to, you know, basically say to somebody,
• 21:07
  You're responsible, but you can't actually have the authority to make any changes. No, that doesn't work. And what we try to do in our culture is the opposite, which is we give authority without responsibility. Like, I want to be in charge. I would like to have the power to do whatever, but I don't want to be held accountable or responsible for the outcome.
• 21:26
  But those things are really important to have those two things in sync. And in the family, the reason why there is a particular leader in the family isn't so that one person's preferences can can rule over the family. It's so that somebody can be held accountable. Right. This is the reason why if you and there's there's really there's a lot of goodness that structure. This is why you don't.
• 21:46
  tend to see things like, you know, co-coaches on football teams or any kind of sports team that is in a highly competitive situation. You don't see, you know, in an army. They're there. They don't inject tons of confusion and who's in charge. They have a very clear chain of command because.
• 22:02
  There are life and death decisions that have to be made. And then if you are trying to lead your family on mission and you're trying to do very difficult things as a family, multi-generationally, then you need to be clear about these lines of authority and responsibility. And I think that part of what I think she said that I think was really helpful is that when you have a husband who, let's say you believe that he's the leader of this family.
• 22:24
  But he is subtly abdicating the creation of the of the educational culture. Right. He doesn't care. He hasn't read the books. He doesn't want to weigh in. And so the wife tries to make up that gap. What tends to happen over time is what you're saying about longevity. A lot of people like will argue with us.
• 22:42
  because they have another ideal in their mind. They don't understand how this works. They think that somehow magically, whoever takes control or takes the reins is actually gonna be successful in crafting the culture. They don't see what this actually looks like five, 15, 20 years later, which is that over the long term, what begins to occur is whoever actually has control of the culture, their culture actually begins to dominate. And so if the dad has a lackadaisical attitude towards education,
• 23:07
  then, whoa, what happened? All of a sudden, my son doesn't care that much about education. It's like, but I read the books. I did all the right things. I checked all the boxes. I went to all the co-ops. Yeah, but your husband was the leader, and he actually crafted the culture. And in his abdication, that culture is going to seep into your family. And so it doesn't actually work. It doesn't actually work for the wife to take over. This actually goes all the way back to Genesis 3, where there's this, you know,
• 23:35
  crazy verse after the fall that that's a part of the curse, which is that it says your desire will be for your husband and he will rule over you. It's a fascinating, basically saying that inside the fabric of, of the way that the world is now going to play out,
• 23:51
  You're going to desire to, and the New Living Translation even adds, you'll desire to control your husband, but he will rule over you. It doesn't say control, but it does seem to suggest that there's some kind of usurping that she's going to attempt to do, and it's not going to work.
• 24:07
  That's basically what God is saying there. And so if it's not going to work, then maybe we need to take a big step back and say, okay, is there a reason? And this is like, you know, there's a very famous accidental study that happened in Switzerland where they discovered...
• 24:22
  that the family over the long term would follow the religious preferences of the father in some crazy high percentage of the time in a way that completely out of balance to what you would expect his influence is as just another person or member of the household. And even in these hyper egalitarian societies that don't believe in any kind of structure in the family, it still plays out the same way.
• 24:45
  And this is what's so frustrating to so many people because they don't understand that there's a basic creation order, that the father, that's not just a arbitrary decision. The father has a particular amount of influence over the family, and it's an enormous amount of influence.
• 25:03
  And so that influence will be felt one way or the other. It will be felt either in his abdication or is in his active leadership. And so what the wife could do is she could try to use a lot of her strengths, her competencies to attempt to help her husband in the crafting of that culture. But if she tries to overthrow her husband, then it's going to end up backfiring on the family. Right. So how do you see that play out? Any other thoughts on that?
• 25:31
  I would say we overthrow in these micro ways that we would never call overthrowing.
• 25:37
  And that has long-term implications. And I think we're, we do it so often out of fear. So some fears that we might do it out of are like, oh no, our kids will be uneducated. I'm terrified of my kids being uneducated. Oh no, our kids are going to, if we let them eat this food, then they're going to, you know, be overweight and have diabetes and have like awful eating habits or whatever. Yeah.
• 26:06
  okay, if we, um, if we don't do this type of sleep training, then I will be awake for the next year of my life. Or, you know, if we, if, if we, um, I don't know, I, especially with the internet and the information age, there are so many fears to be had fears. We didn't know were possible. And so I, I really attribute a lot of our, as moms, our, um,
• 26:34
  like wanting to take the reins out of due to fear because we're afraid of something. And, um, the way fear has kind of crept in, it can be hidden and, and nasty. But, um, I think that we, we usurp or overthrow our husband's leadership in a lot of ways without even realizing it. So I, I would just issue the challenge, um, um,
• 26:59
  to look at the way decisions are made in your family. Look at the thing that's on your heart right now. You want your husband to care about it as much as you. And I will say from my own experience, sometimes my emotions get the best of me and I care about something way too much. Like I've lost perspective. Like,
• 27:19
  And so letting my husband kind of like calm me down. Sometimes that's what is needed. And I might get upset like, no, but you're not listening. You don't have taken it seriously. And what he might actually be saying is like, I'm just not as afraid as you are. You are afraid of this. And I am. And so we're not going to do that thing. So the balancing out needs to happen. And just because you're freaked out about something and he's not.
• 27:46
  Being as upset and worried as you are doesn't mean that you're right. So I would say like that's one way you can work on being a team is like, hey, I'm feeling really stressed out about this thing, teammate, since we're working together towards the same goal. Am I right to feel stressed out about this? Do you think I'm like maybe exaggerating it or blowing out a proportion? Can you help me get perspective on this? Because I'm like really, for some reason, worked up about this thing.
• 28:15
  Yeah, that's good. Yeah, this is, you know, I think I think a really one of these is really, I think, helpful. And because I've been in these situations as well, where I've been second in command. And, and one of the ways that you can begin to work out a lot of this tension is you really do have to picture things.
• 28:34
  that first and command person, the husband or the person in leadership, as standing before God and taking the brunt of that responsibility. And this is why the garden, you know, it was when Adam and Eve ate from the tree, but God came to Adam first and asked him first, like, did you eat from this tree that I told you, specifically you, because there's no record of God actually telling Eve,
• 29:02
  I told you not to eat from like, I, I gave you the command. I made you the leader. I made you responsible and you blew it up. And then, then the ones, you know, he passes the buck to his wife, you know, and we've been doing that ever since. So this is the challenge I think of, of, of going back and forth. All right. There's one more thing I want to throw into this conversation. Um, cause it's really shocked me. So Nancy, uh, Piercy, a professor who wrote the toxic war on masculinity, uh,
• 29:29
  She was on a podcast and she did. She's an incredible researcher. And she pointed something out about sort of first wave feminism. And she said that there were all kinds of feminists early on. This was before first wave feminism was when women got the right to vote, right, female suffrage.
• 29:51
  And she said there was a whole cohort of a movement of feminists who were against female suffrage. And their reason is fascinating. So I'm going to play this for you. And I think this has a lot to do with what we're talking about here. So, Nancy, I was surprised to learn from your book that you made the point that the vote was not necessarily popular with women.
• 30:15
  back when female suffrage was being debated. That seems extraordinary to our ears, the idea that there would have been women who thought this was not a good idea. Was that somehow part and parcel of this attempt to rein men in that you're talking about and bring them back to the drawing board? Absolutely. Back to the involvement?
• 30:32
  Yes, yes. And I didn't realize how controversial that section of the book would be, but I've had a lot of people contradict, you know, like, what? But so I was very careful to quote people of the time. I have several quotes from the anti-suffragists of the day. And what they argued was they were not arguing male vote versus female vote.
• 30:53
  They framed it as individual vote versus family vote or household vote. Right. And they were very concerned that if men started acting unilaterally as an individual and voting, that he would no longer feel constrained by...
• 31:12
  to represent the whole household. And that was their concern, is that it was reducing the sense of responsibility on men. That was their concern. It was letting men off the hook, right? And saying, you know, oh, you can go vote however you want and not think about their impact on your whole family, your whole household. You remember households were bigger than just a nuclear family then, too.
• 31:36
  Usually it was extended family and possibly servants and hired hands and others, you know, would all. And the father was the head of that small commonwealth and was supposed to vote for the interest of the whole. In fact, the whole notion of authority back then, you know, today we think authority kind of means I get to do what I want. Back then, the concept of authority was you have responsibility for the common good of the whole.
• 31:59
  It came out of classical republicanism. But that was the father was considered not just an individual, but he spoke for the whole. He had responsibility for the common good of the whole. And so that's what people were afraid that would be lost, that it was a much bigger question than we tend to realize, that it was a question of whether we would lose a political philosophy that focused on the common good and making the person an authority, that's
• 32:28
  responsible for the common good. Okay, so get in your time machine, okay, and understand that there was a time in history...
• 32:38
  She calls it classical republicanism. This is not about the Republican Party. This is about what it means to found a republic. The primary way that a republic is represented is through delegated representatives, right? Direct democracy is individual, one person, one vote. But the United States was never designed to be a direct democracy. It was designed to be a republic, which means that you have representatives that
• 33:02
  And that those representatives are not actually trying to and are not supposed to vote for what's in their individual best interest. They represent a group. And so you can imagine imagine if you could wave a magic wand and every the only the only people that would get a vote in all of, let's say, America are people who are, number one, representing a commonwealth of some kind, a family group.
• 33:27
  And their job is not to vote for what is in their best interest, but they were from a young age trained to vote for what is in the best interest of the group that they are representing. OK, that is a totally different kind of governmental system. That is that is the basic republic idea. And so what we decided to do is it devolved into something that is a kind of the worst of both worlds between a democracy and a republic. So we have we have basically everybody getting a vote.
• 33:57
  And that they're actually, and then we're doing everything we can to incite the individual voter to think about their vote as whatever is in their personal individual best interest. It's like such a terrible system.
• 34:14
  And the problem with this is not primarily political. Like we're not a political organization and we're not arguing against female suffrage. What we're saying is there's a culture-wide transformation that's occurred that I think oftentimes starts in the political realm and then ends up destroying the way that God designed the family.
• 34:35
  which is that now that every person thinks of themselves primarily as an individual, this is going, this is, this is happening kind of, we're all an individual political entity designed to fight for our rights. That is primarily what we do as men and women. And so we have, we just had the election where men and women voted differently differently
• 34:51
  than in any other election, I think, in the United States history. And so we're getting into a worse and worse situation where men and women see each other as adversaries politically, and that is going to have massive implications in the way we view family. Because now, inside the home,
• 35:08
  There's going to also be a war between what is in my best individual interest and your best individual interest, as opposed to, oh, no, we're all part of the same team. We're part of the same structure. And there are elements in which the father is going to represent the whole. That was the way that that that family was historically designed. And so that's why it was reflected.
• 35:28
  in the voting system before. And so we picture, we kind of like think back in time, we think, oh, these oppressive men were all voting for what they individually wanted and in order to repress women. Now, I'm sure there were men who did that, but the design of the system was a representative system. And I still believe that in the family, it's so important that we don't let men off the hook. Men need to represent their families.
• 35:56
  We do not want to create a system. It's not in the best interest of women and children to create a system in which men think about themselves as an individual and are fighting for their individual rights. That is an absolute disaster for women and children. The idea that we've somehow evolved past this, this is a nightmare. And so men have a lot of strength and an enormous amount of influence, and they will use that. If you train them to use that to get their individual needs met, it's not going to go well for any of us, but particularly for women and children. Yeah.
• 36:26
  Yes, I agree. Totally. I know it's so controversial. Like our brains are just absolutely trained in our society to be so light.
• 36:37
  it's a good thing that women can vote and all that. And like the, the breakdown now it does make sense because we have such individual lives. You know, you can't go backwards, but to look at where we've come from and to understand why there was a movement against such a thing, like, you know, it's to us, it sounds good. Oh yeah. Votes for women that women wouldn't, weren't able to vote like, wow, that's so sad or so oppressive or something. But to realize what was present,
• 37:07
  and how it did function, and how it's actually shooting ourselves in the foot.
• 37:14
  I think as women to do what the vote did, like you said, because of the, um, you know, taking the responsibility off of the men and saying, actually, you can just vote however you want. Right. Or you don't have to consider anyone else. You can just consider yourself. Right. Yeah. You think of yourself as an individual. And this, this is, and this is what we're advocating for. This is not political. We're saying that, that this pattern that is happening in the world politically is happening in every one of our homes. Right.
• 37:44
  And so what happens is in every realm, how we decorate the house, how we discipline our kids, how we decide where to live and how we decide how to educate, all of these decisions are culture-shaping decisions that the husband and wife need to work together as a team in their diverse, complementary roles in order to lead the family into a positive direction. And we don't invent that structure.
• 38:13
  we respond to it. God has already decided who to hold accountable and what kinds of gifts to give to each member of the family. And so it's really important that we just simply honor what God's already created. So, all right, guys, I know that's a lot, that's intense, but thank you guys so much for jumping on here today. Again, remember we got the accelerator open, so head over to familyteams.com, click on the accelerator if you want to.
• 38:36
  like jump into our whole month of July is going to be about how to create these SOPs for a family and create lots and lots of order out of chaos. So if you find that that's a need for your family, then join us on that journey. We'd love to have you in the accelerator. So thanks so much, April, for jumping on here today. Absolutely.
• 38:56
  Thank you for listening to the Family Teams podcast. If you're enjoying this content or have learned something new, please make sure to leave a rating and review and share with a friend. To stay up to date with our events, new content, and products, you can follow us on Facebook and Instagram at Family Teams.