Latest / The Family Teams Podcast / Ep. 349 | Losing the Heart of Your Oldest Child

Transcript

Ep. 349 | Losing the Heart of Your Oldest Child · The Family Teams Podcast

• 0:04
  What's up, guys? Welcome back to 5-Minute Fatherhood. So I was having an interaction online with someone who was describing how they were losing the heart of their oldest child. And I began to think about, okay, what is happening with the father and that oldest child? What is the dynamic of that relationship? And the mom was like, why is that? Why are you asking that? So I wanted to read this to you guys, and Jeff, get your thoughts about this. But this is what I wrote. I said, I asked because winning the heart of the oldest is mostly the job of the head coach in every team.
• 0:31
  They see this dynamic in sports when a key player is brought onto the team. The coach tries to figure out how to develop a deep bond. It's this bond between coach and captain that gives great strength and unity to their leadership. You can't think of a family as a team and then try to make everything equal. No team functions that way. You don't want to create rivalry, but the oldest has a strategic place in the family.
• 0:51
  In a family, the father's first follower is his wife, but she makes him a leader by enthusiastically following his leadership. The next is the oldest child. I think of winning her heart as the most important way to think about your family's next season. It's the first priority. If she falls in love with the family team, then the rest of the kids will be way easier to win over, and the team dynamic will start happening. If you lose her, it will be nearly impossible to stop the family from devolving into individualism.
• 1:15
  This happens primarily as her father wins her heart, then shares his heart with her for the family, for the family team. And then she, out of love for her father, cares about the things that are on her father's heart. So this kind of dynamic that happens in teams all the time, and we understand it. You would never have a team where there's a new head coach, and then he sort of ignores the quarterback. He would go out with them. He'd talk to them. He'd be like, hey. And so what was happening in this family is that—
• 1:39
  There wasn't any specific effort going on between the father and the oldest child while the oldest child is in the process of disconnecting from the family. And so the fact that this is not intuitive, I think culturally, that he needs to go after the heart of that oldest child and really think about that as really a bridge towards his own leadership in the family as a whole, just goes to show that we don't really think about the family as a team. So yeah, Jeff, what are your thoughts about kind of this dynamic?
• 2:05
  Yeah. I mean, the one thing I would just say that struck me when I was hearing you read it is it's crazy how most parents, most healthy, loving parents are willing to go to great lengths to turn their life upside down if a kid is doing seriously problematic behavior, right? Whether it's drugs, whether it's a bad boyfriend or girlfriend, or whether a string of just bad decisions. I know a lot of families that right about then, that's when they just turn their life upside down. We're moving. Yeah.
• 2:32
  You're breaking up. You're losing that job where I'm taking a different job, whatever it is. Pretty drastic decisions, right? And what struck me is like I don't know many parents who have done that when they feel like they've lost the heart of a kid, when it should be the – that's kind of like the thing before the thing, right? So it's like when you sense that, when you start to sense that of like, oh, I'm losing the heart of –
• 2:53
  this child in regards to connection, bond, attachment. You just, you kind of know, right. You kind of know there's these, these signifiers. Um, you know, it's usually a couple of years before some of these behaviors, but there's also plenty of people who you lose their heart, they get hardened and they're still straight a great behaving, like, et cetera. So that's not really just like, you know, but when you start, start sensing that, what would it look like to just blow every, blow your life up then? You know what I mean? I think it's almost better than is what I'm saying. Like move, break up, lose a job chain. Like it kind of like risk everything for that moment. Right. Right.
• 3:19
  Um, and so I just, I find it fascinating that most parents find that normal in the behavioral way, but don't even consider it in the, in the heart way, which I think is more important. Yeah.