Latest / The Family Teams Podcast / Ep. 206 | What is the Joseph and Mary School of Parenting?

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Ep. 206 | What is the Joseph and Mary School of Parenting? · The Family Teams Podcast

• 0:00
  You had the support of extended family, the support of community, and they all were reinforcing the same identities.
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  What's up, guys? Welcome to another 5-Minute Fatherhood. So if you were studying the best child that ever lived and you wanted to reverse engineer what his parents did, Jesus' parents, what is the Mary and Joseph school of parenting? What was their method? And so we have really like one story really from Luke chapter 2 of Mary and Joseph and the way that
• 0:34
  They parented Jesus. Now, this story doesn't reflect particularly well on Mary and Joseph for a lot of modern Western families, right? So if you guys don't know this story, they were traveling to Jerusalem for Passover, and Jesus goes and hangs out at the temple, and then Joseph and Mary head back to Nazareth, where they're from, and they don't discover for three days that they're missing Jesus, and they have to run back to Jerusalem and look everywhere until they find him in the temple. Yeah.
• 1:03
  And so a lot of people look at this and they're like, what in the world kind of parents are these? How do you not notice that your child's gone and how do you lose them for three days? And there's a really interesting quote that I just read from Robert Keeley about this. He says, the spiritual life of the family in first century Israel was not limited to the small nuclear family unit as we see it today.
• 1:21
  The festivals reminded the people of God's faithfulness, were national affairs, and their celebrations were community events. Both Jesus' family and the larger community took responsibility for His spiritual development. With American families so isolated from extended family and heritage today, belonging to and connecting with a faith, tradition, and community takes on a radical importance in giving us and our children the ability to develop our identity, purpose, and direction.
• 1:47
  I think what he's saying here, you guys, is that what probably Mary and Joseph really cared a lot about and what just in their culture, what mattered a ton was identity and that this was being reinforced by their community and by the extended family. And that was such a strong part of their parenting.
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  that they live life so much, going three times a year, families would travel to Jerusalem for these pilgrimage festivals. This was such a constant and common thing that it made sense why, when you have a large family, it wasn't like you were constantly burning out. You had the support of extended family, the support of community, and they all were reinforcing the same identities. And so you might look at Mary and Joseph and say, they're failures as parents, but that's hard to say when you think about...
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  Jesus and his siblings, which are awesome. So maybe they knew something, or maybe we've lost something in the way that we think about parenting. Maybe we've gotten so fixated on the nuclear family, and we've really missed out on the other roles that really shape identity in powerful ways. But Jeff, what do you think about Joseph and Mary's parenting methods?
• 2:53
  Yeah, I love it. And I think it goes to show too that like, you know, I think sometimes we just think like, oh, how could they? They must have just, how did they forget their kid and all that? When like you said, back then there was actually a lot more trust for the broader community, right? Or the family or the extended heritage. And so I just think that's really an interesting thing to think about, right? They didn't think that their kid was just like by himself doing nothing or whatever, right? They just knew that kind of the...
• 3:15
  the whole tribe they went with, you know what I mean? And the whole kind of caravan they were with was kind of all at some level mutually responsible. So I would almost say, you know, another thing I would say too is to flip that on the parents, not just thinking about your kids, but do you kind of see yourself as responsible for every other kid in your community, right? At some level, right? For like the shepherding, the discipling, the mentoring, how you act, how you treat people. Are you a good example for kind of that extended relationship?
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  area of people, whether it's family, which it probably was in this context, right? Extended family, or if it's more just communal community or friends. I think that's really, really important to be thinking about that, that we kind of have such a isolated individualist, privatized vision of that nuclear family that, man, I just think that runs, we run into some roadblocks with that. And so, yeah, what would it look like to have, to let that vision be a little bit broader and specifically challenging on that reverse version of that, of like, man, us thinking about that as
• 4:12
  to other people in the community and how we're mentoring and how we're discipling and how we're shepherding. Hey guys, if you like this short content on 5-Minute Fatherhood, then you're going to love long-form interviews that Jeremy and I do with other dads just like you over at Dads Building Teams. We go much more in-depth hearing the stories, challenges, and journeys of different dads who are trying to build multi-generational teams on mission. Just go to whatever podcast platform you use and search for Dads Building Teams.