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How To Raise Kids Who Want To Become Parents · The Family Teams Podcast

• 0:00
  This is a very countercultural thing to do, to raise your kids to want to be parents. We kind of tend to raise our kids today with this idea that, no, you want them to be hyper individualistic and fiercely independent. And therefore, if they choose to not have kids or whatever, that's totally, all those paths are equally legitimate. I have a problem with that biblically.
• 0:22
  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'm here with my lovely wife, April. The spring is springing. How are you doing today, April?
• 0:46
  Good. It's my month now. Yeah. Happy birthday. Thank you. Time to confuse people all over the place. That's right. I confuse people this time of year. Yeah, because they always say April. You don't know if they're talking about year or the month. Right. Yeah. Yep. That's one of the costs you have to pay when your name is named after something. Yep. As common as the month, but...
• 1:11
  This is your month. Do you look forward to this month? How do you feel about this month every year? I love it. I love the spring. I love that I was born in the spring. I love the flowers. In our family, we did breakfast in bed on your birthday. And my mom always put a daffodil on my tray, on the tray. So I always knew. I always associate daffodils with my birthday, even though sometimes they come a little bit sooner than that. Yeah.
• 1:40
  The daffodils are in bloom. They're about to come out. It's awesome. Yes. And so today, I want to talk to you, April, about this topic of how do you raise kids who want to become parents? I don't know if you've noticed this, but our kids really want to become parents. We didn't know that was going to happen until they got older, but that seems to be the trend, would you say? Yes. Yep. We're trending in that direction.
• 2:09
  Yes. And I would say that
• 2:12
  you know, this has been something obviously we value a lot as a family. And I want to talk to you guys kind of in detail. I think I'm going to kind of process through some of the things that are really, I think really have helped our kids get excited about becoming parents. And some of the things we had to resist to like, I think help them to get excited about this. So yeah, I think this is a really important topic and just one that rarely gets air time because I think we live in this culture that just says, Hey,
• 2:41
  hands off, whatever your kids want. Do not attempt anything, even in their childhood or as they're growing up in your house, to influence their values in this area. Like this is kind of in the realm of hyper-individualism.
• 2:55
  Yeah.
• 3:18
  I want to talk to you guys about something that's happening today. So this is coming out on, this will be coming out on Thursday, April 3rd. And today's a special day in the family teams world because we are, it's been months and months since we've opened the cart to Family Inc. So this is one of our kind of our premier coaching products that we do within family teams to help families who want to start businesses, who want to start working together as family teams.
• 3:45
  and doing productive work, building assets. And so one of the things we love to do is coach families into that. And so it's a year-long coaching program. You get about 40 videos that are kind of walking you through our whole philosophy of how to start businesses, a seven-step process for making this happen for your family. We give you access to this 30-plus videos
• 4:07
  videos for different ideas that are working for other family teams that can work for you. So if you're like, I don't even have any idea what we would start as a family, we give you a library for you to hang out in. And a lot of those are also linked to direct relationships you can have with people that have started similar businesses. So you can jump into that. So yeah, if you are interested in ever starting a business as a family, you want to transition out of maybe a typical career path,
• 4:31
  into something that's more asset building. Family Inc. is the place to hang out for a year. So we do eight coaching calls every single month. April, you just were on a coaching call, right? Just a couple hours ago with the moms. So six of those are business coaching calls. And then we do a fatherhood coaching call, which I'm doing actually this afternoon. And April does something called Coffee with April on Motherhood. So what was that like? What is it when you guys, what kinds of things do you guys talk about in there?
• 4:57
  It ranges a lot. Sometimes it's about like...
• 5:03
  siblings aren't getting along if it it's about like how to best support your husband while he's making a transition from you know a typical career path into this scary world of entrepreneurialism um how to menu plan to um every once in a while we talk about like if someone has a question about
• 5:29
  homeschooling or wants to start looking down that path that has come up from time to time.
• 5:36
  Okay. So a lot of it's around like how to run a household, different ways to handle chores with kids, how to handle, you know, a strong willed child. We'll kind of talk through. It's very individual to who shows up to the call and a question that they have on their heart. So I encourage the ladies to come with something that they want to discuss in a like-minded group. It's
• 6:00
  oftentimes hard for women, I think a lot of us anyway, to find like-minded people around us. So these, um, the kind of aggregates people who are mothers, who have some types, some type of family teams mentality and have the desire to, um, start down this path of starting a business. And so there's a lot of commonalities there. Um,
• 6:25
  of where people are at. They're having young children and have a lot of questions about things like that. So it really varies as to who's on the call and what questions they bring.
• 6:35
  Yeah. So part of what we do in Family Inc. is we don't want to just talk about the business side. We also want to talk about the implications to fatherhood and motherhood. We've even had people after they've launched their business re-up for a whole another year of Family Inc. just to be on the motherhood and fatherhood calls. So I think those are really valuable for people that, like April said, are if you're looking to have those conversations. But most of it's about business coaching. Like that's what we spend most of our time doing.
• 6:58
  I just want to highlight one family, one story that I love from this last cohort. So we had lots and lots of different businesses get launched. But I would say one of the best students I've ever seen in the Family Inc. world. Wow.
• 7:13
  is this couple, Josh and Gina. They just were amazing. They were on, I would say, 80% of the business coaching calls. And so they got coaching from me. We have three other coaches, Chris, Brian, and Ian, who are all very experienced entrepreneurs and have started many different kinds of businesses. And so they are also on those calls helping them. And so Josh and Gina, Josh started out, he was working as a maintenance man for an apartment complex and he was working as a maintenance man for an apartment complex.
• 7:40
  And about three months into Family Inc., three or four months, he quit that job. And they started over the course of the next nine months, really three businesses. So this is kind of how we coach people to create multiple income streams. They started a vending machine business as kind of a scale business. They started, he started his own maintenance kind of contracting business. So he could really double the rate that he was making as a W-2 employee. We kind of coach him through how to do that. And now they just launched...
• 8:06
  a, a sleep consultancy that Gina and Josh are doing together as a couple, which is so cool. Such a huge success story for family Inc. when we see families actually getting to work together. Um, and so anyway, they were just such great students, you know, came on the calls, implemented what we suggested and were able to start all those income streams in under a year, which, um, yeah, it was really remarkable to watch. So, um,
• 8:29
  So if you guys are interested in that, the card is only open for like a limited time. And as soon as we fill up spots, we have to close it down. So if you're interested, go over to familyteams.com, just click Family Inc. And we'd love to see you there. But we are here to talk about how to raise your kids who want to become parents. So we're going to transition. This is actually a talk I gave at Integrated.
• 8:47
  Um, the, the, the group of successful entrepreneur dads that Jeff and I, the mastermind Jeff and I lead. Um, so we just got off a whole week in Franklin, Tennessee, got to spend half the time at the Bethke's new house in Franklin, which was amazing. Their hospitality was legendary. Um,
• 9:04
  Um, and Jeff got introduced to some of his fun friends that are living in Franklin, as well as just getting to like have some deep conversations about some things. Um, so we're not going to go into as much detail as I did with those guys, but I do want to give a few highlights and mostly April, just get your take on some of this stuff. Because I do think this is, this is a topic I love to stir up because this is a very countercultural thing to do to, um,
• 9:25
  raise your kids to want to be parents. We kind of tend to raise our kids today with this idea that, no, you want them to be hyper individualistic and hyper, like fiercely independent. And therefore, if they choose to not have kids or, you know, whatever, that's totally, you know, all those paths are equally legitimate. I have a problem with that biblically. So
• 9:43
  Anyway, I started the talk and I'll, if you guys are watching this, I'll show you guys a couple slides and I will share this with you. And, but you'll, if you're just listening, I will read these for you. So you don't have to go to YouTube to watch this, but I'll share my screen. So I started by how much do you care if your kids want to have kids? And we're really almost trained in this hyper-individualistic culture to not care about that. Like,
• 10:07
  There was a kind of a famous article I referenced in a podcast recently from the New York Times just a couple weeks ago where it went viral and it was all about these grandparents or these parents who were realizing that all of their kids they raised, none of them want to be parents and that they'll never get to experience being grandparents. And they were kind of grieving that but saying, well, what can you do? That's their choice, right? It's very much an individual thing.
• 10:37
  you'll likely care much more. I don't think this is primarily a personal preference question. If your kids grow up not wanting to have kids, that might sound like an individual preference. And that's the primary category we put it into. Like we have this obsession with...
• 10:53
  kind of the value of individual self-expression. That's the highest value our culture worships right now. And it's a high value. It's something that I care about. I care, I think individual self-expression is a good value, but I think there's things I care way more about than that. And so these theological categories are more important to me and more important to our family. And so we see this primarily as a theological question. Desiring children or considering children a blessing is something the Bible actually definitively answers. Yeah.
• 11:22
  And it doesn't kind of leave it open to, oh, that's just, you know, different people have their preferences. That doesn't mean that, you know, everyone's called to get married. There's a whole world of singleness we can get into for why someone might choose that. But really what we're dialing into is because probably 98% of your children are going to desire to be in a long-term relationship, get married. Their desire to have children actually matters. And there's a lot you can do as a parent that can really work on that. So that's the first thing I think is important to point out.
• 11:52
  Our culture says no one should try and convince other people to have kids. That's the first thing. If I ever post anything about this, they're like, whoa, hands off. That's not appropriate. You should never try to convince other people to have kids. Now, this is created. And here's this.
• 12:07
  this chart just blows my mind, um, the, a fertility crisis. Once we've decided to put this into the arena of personal preferences, what we notice is that in every Western country, every consumeristic, every individualistic Western or developed nation on earth, you see the, um, fertility rates plummeting with one massive exception. I don't know if you can read this April, but can you see the exception there?
• 12:34
  Like which country is having way more kids? Yes. There's one country that's... Looks like it's Israel. Yeah. So if you look at this chart... Way above the other one. Yeah. The bar chart. So the next highest birth rate right now is France. It's hovering around 1.8. Whereas Israel is almost double France. So it's close to 3%.
• 12:53
  three children per woman. Um, and United States is hanging out way down here at, um, you know, right around 1.6 children per, per woman. Um, so that's the fertility crisis. In other words, if you don't, if you're not above 2.1%, you are in a population decline. We've never seen a good example in the history of the world of a country going from below fertility rate to above fertility rate. We don't know how to do that. Um,
• 13:20
  Israel is the one interesting exception to this rule where they are a developed nation. And so all of the different ideas that people have around why the fertility is collapsing everywhere in the world doesn't really apply to Israel. People oftentimes will say, well, it's economics. It's more expensive now than ever. It's really not.
• 13:36
  Um, and if you compare it to times in the past, it was, it was, uh, far more expensive to have kids in many parts of the world. They did it. Um, Israel is one of those places that's just like every other developed country where kids are more a liability considered a liability today. They're not an economic necessity or.
• 13:51
  economically advantageous in their childhood. Also, another theory that people have is urbanization. They think, oh, it's because people are moving into cities, but Israel is a very urbanized country relative to other developed nations, and they're still having children. What we really discover, the real reason
• 14:09
  that Israelis have children is really theological and cultural. So they have a theology within Judaism that really values children. And so every time you have this sort of trend occurring, and this trend, as I would describe it, is basically anytime there's this where it used to be that
• 14:29
  Out of just natural life, people would just have children because they didn't have access to birth control or they saw kids as an economic advantage because they were living on farms. Over 70% of Americans were farmers at the turn of the 20th from the 19th to the 19th to 20th century. That...
• 14:50
  That has obviously changed. Now it's less than 2% of the population. However, so if you go through this transition where it's not necessary anymore, you have to have a vision. Like you have to fill that gap with why do you believe that children are a blessing?
• 15:06
  And Israelis have within Judaism a really solid means of understanding the importance of children. You really through Abraham, through what the Hebrew scriptures say. And so even though you have secular Israelis who are not observant Jews, they're still culturally Jewish. And so they're very influenced by the theological convictions of Orthodox Jews.
• 15:26
  And that's where you see this groundswell of desire for children that overcomes all of these obstacles that are being created by modern affluence and causing people to choose to have smaller and smaller families or to forego having children altogether. So, yeah. So that's the first observation is just we're in a fertility crisis. This is something that if you don't actively...
• 15:49
  really and theologically train your family to care about children, then your family will be an inverted pyramid. Like it's just inevitable. It's happening everywhere. Your children will choose to put any kind of their, their desire for self-expression, any kind of elements that are attached to what they want. Their personal preferences will just steer them towards having fewer and fewer children or none at all. Right. So this is, you have to, and this is, this is hard news for a lot of people. You have to proactively,
• 16:19
  promote this value. And it has to be, I think, have a theological dimension to it. So I'm going to talk through how we do this as a family, but April, anything that that stirs up for you, this sort of collision we're having with the past, the way that they used to be, and then also what's going on in Israel versus all these other countries in the world.
• 16:36
  Yeah. Yeah, we are living in the consequences of decisions made some decades ago about birth control and the sexual revolution when everything totally changed about how to handle birth.
• 16:52
  you know, sex and children and, and, um, the way God set things up, his design was for the sexual union to, to bear fruit of children. And when we prevent that from, from happening, um, oftentimes because we think we know better or because we want to indulge ourselves in other ways, then, um, yeah.
• 17:14
  It just has this whole cascade of effects. And I think because it's an experiment and that's gone on for decades, we haven't known what the effects are going to be. But to watch, here we are and we're swimming in the soup of these animals
• 17:30
  this experiment and now that one of the biggest indicators of where we're at is the um the birth rate plummeting quite and we've influenced the world through um you know our the internet has made everything very uh access with information and all that stuff and so it's become a worldwide problem um
• 17:55
  And so I think if you have a whole entire country, Israel's unique because you have a whole entire country that, um,
• 18:03
  even though maybe not everyone in the country is practicing a particular religion, but a lot of them are, that values children. And so as a country, compared to the rest of the world, it is noticeably different. And so I think that that's just an indicator of, I mean, it's just a fact when you look at that bar graph. You can't really argue with the facts. Yeah.
• 18:33
  It's so shocking to me, like just to look at that graph and say, wow, every other developed nation in the world is below replacement rate except for Israel and Israel's way above. Like, like teams, hordes of demographers and sociologists should be descending upon Israel right now to figure out what the heck is going on.
• 18:52
  Because this is so important. And that's why I really think it's important to promote this. Now, as believers in Jesus, how does this impact us? What's our theological conviction for having children? And it really comes from the very first page of the Bible. If you look at the Hebrew scriptures, both the first page and the last page make this case.
• 19:11
  better than any other part in the, I think, in the entire Bible. So the first page of the Hebrew scriptures, you start with Genesis 1, and you read when God created the first family, he gives them a mission, be fruitful, multiply, full subdue, and rule. Then over and over again, to Noah, to Abraham, to Jacob, to Rebecca, to all the way through, he reiterates this command to be fruitful and multiply, to be fruitful and multiply. Okay.
• 19:32
  And so this command is so important. And for some reason, so many Christians, and I think it's not because we have some theological, biblical reason for diminishing the importance of this command. It's really just out of personal preference that we just dial it down. I mean, people talk all the time about the verse above that, which is that God created male and female in his own image. But then they don't want to talk about the next verse that gives...
• 19:55
  the family, its purpose, its mandate, its mission, and its really basic structure and design. And so we see Genesis 1, 28 is absolutely critical to understanding the nature of the family, that God made the family for this five-part mission to be fruitful and multiply fields of doing role to be fruitful is to have children to multiply is to have grandchildren. And so what we're really focusing on in this conversation is that command is
• 20:16
  is a command to raise your children in a way in which this family line multiplies into the future. And that means that we have a theological reason for training our children to want to be parents. That's what this is all about. Now, if you go to the very last page of the Hebrew Scriptures, the prophet Malachi, right? In chapter 2 of Malachi, he talks about the importance of children. In chapter 3, he talks about the importance of the connection between fathers and children.
• 20:38
  One of the things we read in Malachi 2 is it actually gives us a reason for why God created marriage and family to begin with, which is an absolutely remarkable thing. He says, and what does God want?
• 20:54
  What does the one God seek? Godly offspring. So be on your guard and do not be unfaithful to the wife of your youth. That's Malachi 2.15. So the first page of the Bible talks about the importance of family and building families, having children and having grandchildren. The last page of the Old Testament, the Hebrew scriptures tell us the importance of having children and that God desires godly offspring to be multiplying from our family line. So that's the theological case. Now you turn the page of the New Testament and you get a really fascinating story.
• 21:20
  kind of riff on that Genesis 1-28 mandate, where Jesus in Matthew 28 gives us the Great Commission to be fruitful and multiply, pills of dew, and rule through the making of disciples. We have a whole course on that that April and I help walk people through at 1kh.org, where we have life-on-life discipleship, which is how do you become fruitful and multiply? It's interesting. It is the same command, by the way, to be fruitful is to make disciples. To multiply is to make disciple makers, which is a part of that command. If you're reading it carefully, it says teach them to obey everything.
• 21:50
  It's also the command to subdue, right? To fill, first of all, because he says, go to all the nations, then to subdue where he tells them to teach them to obey. And then he ultimately tells them to rule, right? That, that he is going to rule through the church where at the very end, he says, teach them to obey everything I've commanded you. That is kingly language. Um,
• 22:10
  Jesus has come to rule. And the way that he rules is through his church and through the making of disciples, the multiplying of disciples. Okay, that's the first piece of this that I wanted to emphasize is that there's a theological reason. And you have to be very convinced of that to choose to do this next thing, which is to actually raise your children in a way that they're going to desire to have children. So I want to talk about...
• 22:32
  There are a number of massive defeaters, things that are going to infect your family and cause your children not to want to have kids. And that you have to be aware of these and you have to understand how do you counteract each of these things. Okay. So the first one I would say is hyper-individualism. So your kids are going to naturally desire to think about their lives as, as a kind of a canvas on which to,
• 22:56
  to express themselves in the most hyper individualistic way possible. I think the best example of this is hard to talk about today, but I think the best example of this that exists is what occurred within the LGBT. So you started, you started with the LGB, which is, you know, the lesbian and the LG, the gay and the, and the bisexual. These, these were, you know,
• 23:20
  sexual orientations that people were arguing very, you know, very adamantly, like are things you can't control. And we're not going to go into those details, the whole podcast on, on where that comes from. But that was somewhat understandable. There are clearly orientations that, that people experience that isn't something that they're directly choosing. I think there's reasons why it's happening. But then it started, we started adding these choices at the end,
• 23:50
  Q or what it means to be queer. And if you ever go online and really watch videos of people trying to explain what this is, how trying to define what it means to be queer, usually you'll constantly hear them say, look, this is just a choice. Anybody can choose to be queer. And they really resist giving any kind of definitive description of what it means. And so, but if you drill into it, I would say that this is, this is how, as I've understood it, what it means to be queer is take, take the most non-gender conforming elements of your personality.
• 24:18
  and preferences to form the core of your identity. To be queer means to basically look at the way that you're built, things that you feel are most non-gender conforming, elements of your personality or even elements of your preferences, and say, I want to identify yourself.
• 24:34
  Primarily with that part of my personality, you can still be totally heterosexual and be queer. So this is why it's incredibly confusing for people to even understand what this is. How is this different than being gay or anything else? Well, it's really an extreme example.
• 24:52
  of hyper-individualism, basically saying, I want to take these elements. And that's become increasingly cool. There was a video that went viral a couple of weeks ago of Will Smith's son getting out of a limo. And he was wearing basically like an eight-year-old's dress, you know, like an eight-year-old girl dress. And he's like, I don't know how old he is. He looks like an older teenage boy.
• 25:13
  And so this is, this is what's so cool. Like if you want to be really cutting edge in our culture, you basically, you want to take some shocking element of the other gender and then assimilate that into your, your kind of preferences, your style. If you do that, that kind of, kind of queer expression is.
• 25:33
  uh, is considered increasingly cool. Um, and it just, it helps you to fully express yourself as an individual. Now, the problem with that is it makes it much less likely that you're going to, um, get married to, uh, the opposite gender. You know, when both genders are basically, you know, moving towards one another in this way, the idea that we're going to, uh,
• 25:57
  understand and identify primarily as male and female, which creates families and creates strength and creates clarity, all of that gets blurred. And so you have to be aware that these things are coming for our kids. And so one of the things that you have to choose to do if you want your kids to want to become parents, to get married and want to have children, is you have to actually not just be neutral with regards to the gender binary, but you have to love the gender binary. You actually have to think, wow.
• 26:26
  It was incredibly good that God created male and female. We want to look at our sons and say, look, it's awesome that you're male. God designed you to be male for a reason. It's great to be a boy, and it's going to be great to be a man. And then when you're looking at your daughters, you're saying the same thing to them about being a female. It's amazing that God made you a female.
• 26:47
  I love the fact that God made you a female. It's amazing to be a girl. It's going to be amazing to be a woman someday. These are positive things. These are gifts from God. These are not things to reject or to play with in some kind of way that's going to make it much less likely that you will get to fully experience the gift of your gender. And so you have to see the gender binary as essentially a good thing. And this, of course, goes all the way back to that first page in Genesis where we do see God create the male and female.
• 27:13
  So that's the first thing I think you have to be aware of and you have to choose to do is to say, we're not trying to assume that individual self-expression is more valuable than embracing our God-given gender and our God-given gender roles. So that's the first thing. It's important.
• 27:33
  This is being challenged everywhere in culture. But I think if you go to Israel, by the way, you will. There's certainly elements of culture within Israel that have tried to embrace some of this kind of recent gender ideology. But within the Orthodox community, they're extremely resistant to this idea. They're very, and I think this is part of, they have within their culture the ability to really, within their faith,
• 27:57
  culture, an ability to resist that I don't see as strong in the Christian world. But April, what do you, what did that kind of stir up for you? Well, I just want to emphasize how new all this is. I feel like everything you just said from the time the listeners hit play, you had to just give one massive caveat that did not even exist when you and I were teenagers. Yeah. I mean, it maybe existed in like...
• 28:25
  the outer limits of, you know, society or something like that. But it was not mainstream. It was not talked about. It was not a topic of conversation. It wasn't in politics. It wasn't on the news. It wasn't advertised. It wasn't nothing. It was nothing. So,
• 28:43
  You all who are raising young children these days, you are up against a whole lot. And I just want to say it's a whole lot of new. And so we're told in Scripture to go back to the ancient path where the good way is and to walk in it.
• 29:00
  And enough of the new, new, new, new. No, it's causing us so much damage, so much harm. So I just want to emphasize how God's ancient paths is to be taken seriously. And it's the direction that we as believers need to be turning and making sure. And we as parents have to be confident that that's what we believe in because the world's voice is loud. Yeah.
• 29:28
  you know, as your kids get older, voices start to infiltrate into the family different things, you know, as they're, you know, 10, 11, 12, and they're maybe outside of...
• 29:42
  the family confines a little bit, the world somehow infiltrates, you know? And so we have to be very bold and be willing to swim upstream because this is a very against the flow thing
• 29:58
  It's become very against the flow to talk about, to encourage your kids, to set a good example of parenthood, to make it desirable and to counter what is being thrown at them from every other influence in their life.
• 30:14
  Yeah. To your point, there's something happening that we have to be aware. And that's why I like, I actually like the language of kind of like viruses. There are idea viruses, right? Ideologies that are directly attacking our children's desire to be parents. And our culture sort of looks at that and says, no, that's just a total preference.
• 30:37
  Without acknowledging the fact that you spend the last 10 or 15 years of this child's life denigrating motherhood and denigrating this choice, denigrating what it means to be female in many cases, or what it means to have a gendered identity.
• 30:52
  And then you're surprised that when they become adults, they don't desire to have children. You lift up individual self-expression is the most important value. You train children in that. And then you're like, oh, well, it's just their preference that they don't want to have kids. It's like, no, it's not just their preference.
• 31:09
  You infected them with ideology after ideology that has sterilized their desire to have children. There's a quiet crisis among Christian men building businesses. They're succeeding, but they're doing it alone. No brothers around them, no shared vision at home, no framework for how business can serve the household. Integrated is built to change that. It's a mastermind for men who take both business and family seriously, who want to grow a company without sacrificing the very people they're building it for.
• 31:39
  In between, we stay connected with monthly coaching and ongoing collaboration. It's not cheap and it's not meant to be. But if you're ready for that kind of brotherhood and that kind of growth, go to familyteams.com slash integrated.
• 31:55
  And so if you, so it's, I think a lot of, a lot of Christians are incredibly naive about this. They assume that there's sort of some kind of like a neutral playing field. And as children get into their twenties and thirties, they're, as they become adults, they, their desires are somehow, um, they are, they're, they're, they're, they're, they're, they're, they're, they're, they're, they're, they're, they're, they're, they're, they're, they're, they're, they're, they're, they're, they're, they're, they're, they're, they're, they're, they're, they're, they're, they're, they're, they're, they're, they're, they're, they're, they're, they're, they're, they're, they're, they're, they're, they're, they're, they're, they're, they're, they're, they're,
• 32:15
  being created within a vacuum. These are just personal preferences that are just arising from within as if these ideologies haven't done a ton of work to shape their desires, to shape their preferences and to shape their values. So we have to be aware, yeah, this is something we have to engage in directly.
• 32:33
  Okay. Now, another element of this I find interesting is I think that, you know, obviously feminism has been an ideology that has really impacted particularly a daughter's desire to have children. And since we have four daughters and all of them seem to really, really get excited about having kids, I know that one of the things that has, and you've really, I think especially recently, gone deep into, how do we create a uniquely feminine culture in our family?
• 33:02
  where, where actual, um, femaleness is, is lifted up as a positive thing. It's good to be a female. It's good to be a girl. Um, and I think what, one of the things that is happening to so many kids today is they are really raised in androgynous environments, right? Where there is no real distinction between male and female, many, many schools, you know, there used to be lots of girl
• 33:32
  Oftentimes what happens is a girl enters puberty and she's been competing with boys her whole life. She's been in an environment in which both sexes are just, their elements of their gender is being diminished. And this oftentimes to the advantage of.
• 33:50
  you know, uh, maybe being competitive in, in this environment. And all of a sudden she has this, you know, monthly cycle that comes upon her. And it's just really like, I don't want this. Like, I, it doesn't help me actually achieve what I want to achieve in, in my life. Um, and so this, this like incredible superpower that women have,
• 34:09
  to reproduce is just considered a net negative. And so how do I get rid of this? And it's not surprising that when the sort of the transsexual ideology started to infect society, that it really took off more than any other group with middle school girls, right? The social contagion, the transgender world was like something like 90% boys that were struggling with wanting to be girls.
• 34:35
  And it was a tiny percentage. And that's really when people saw it as this clear sort of gender dysphoria that was really rooted in something that was going on with boys, especially younger boys even. But it was very rare, but it was certainly something that had happened.
• 34:52
  But it was almost nonexistent within girls. And then when the transgender movement took off, it just erupted as a social contagion within middle school girls who were coming to puberty. So I know that one of the things that you guys have been talking a lot about as kind of the women of our family is like, how do we create...
• 35:09
  a positive female culture. You guys just had this amazing 80th birthday party for your mom where all the women of the family got together and started to just really celebrated what it meant to be a female. So yeah, what would you recommend, especially for young moms who have girls or dads listening to this that have daughters, how do we create sort of a pro-female culture, not just for them as individuals, but no, it's good to be a girl. It's good to be a daughter. It's good to be a woman.
• 35:37
  Yeah. Well, I think I got to experience a lot of this growing up because I generationally come from a family line of,
• 35:47
  The women in my family are very crafty and like to do sewing projects together and quilting and things like that. And so culturally growing up, there was always a hand project that the women were working on together. So when we would get together for different holidays or occasions, that was oftentimes how we would kind of pass the time.
• 36:13
  Or visiting or, you know, entertaining ourselves. But for now, like now fast forward to now we have four daughters and then now we have a daughter-in-law. So our girl circuit is complete. We have all five daughters now. And so, but when, before we had our daughter-in-law, it was just the girls were like early teen girls.
• 36:39
  And then lots of teenagers. I've had a teenager. I was doing the math the other day. I think I've had a teenager in the house for 12 years. So one to five teenagers in the house for 12 years. So this has been quite like a
• 36:58
  baptism by fire kind of a thing where we had to figure this out. But, you know, part of what is so hard for girls is when their cycles start, it becomes such a negative, it can be such a negative thing. And so we've had to have many, many, many, many conversations over years to talk about the positive side, like what it actually is, what's going on, that we have a superpower that God has
• 37:27
  the different ways to handle the pain that can come with it and the discomfort and how we can serve each other during that time.
• 37:37
  has become real fruitful or like very girl bonding, I guess you would say. And when the kids were younger, I very much would emphasize the differences between boys and girls. I think that's very good to do. It's crazy that that's a taboo thing to say because that is so basic.
• 38:07
  just different things that we would do that were, this is for the girls. And then the boys are going to do this thing over here. And not everything, but sometimes things were pretty clear that we were trying to. And then as my family grew, we had lots of nieces. And so my mom would kind of have these different things. Tea parties became a big thing in our, like the one time that you get to use your china and things like that. And so yeah, we just had an 80th birthday party for my mom and it was for all the
• 38:34
  women of the family. So the daughters, the daughters-in-law, the granddaughters-in-law, nieces, daughters,
• 38:42
  granddaughters so we had probably i forgot to count but maybe like 30 females 25 or 30 females present across four generations um that was pretty powerful and we got to make some yummy food and and celebrate my mom in a very girly way we all dressed up and we all some people were funny hat or like pretty hats and things like that so very girly um
• 39:09
  But within that, I will have to say, like, not everyone, like, you can, there is a spectrum of girliness, you know, and that's okay. Some girls, you can dress up without going all the way to the, you know, the hilt. You can be fancy without having to be sparkly, things like that. So just encouraging the femininity within the different personality types and personality.
• 39:35
  in a love of frills or not love of frill. So I think that being comfortable within that, you know, those different tastes and preferences and things is fine. But I think that we should not be afraid to emphasize the differences. I recently saw a little boy who was wearing nail polish and I was shocked. I was like, wait, no, no, no, no. This...
• 40:03
  Girls wear nail polish. And that's just funny to me that that is becoming a thing that has to be said. So there are these little things, little messages that are being sent that I feel like we're going to have to become more and more.
• 40:21
  we're going to become more and more obvious in this world by the things that we allow and don't allow. And it kind of, unfortunately, kind of causes you to be a little more dogmatic because where there was gray before, it's way too gray. And now here we are dealing with these things. Yeah, man. Yeah, it's interesting. In Leviticus, it specifically calls out like...
• 40:44
  the importance of men not wearing women's clothing or women not wearing men's clothing as an abomination. This word is really tricky for I think English listeners. It sounds so incredibly like the worst thing ever. But abomination is a kind of thing that is sort of like culture destroying type of sin. Like one of the things that I just read Genesis was that when Jacob was moving all of his sons to Egypt,
• 41:12
  Joseph said, hey, make sure you tell Pharaoh that you're shepherds, and then he'll let you have all this land because shepherds are an abomination to the Egyptians. It doesn't mean that they, if you keep reading the story, it's not that they hated Jacob and his family. It was simply that in Egypt, there are, there's this culture of agrarian culture to be an Egyptian. Actually, part of the culture is that you are.
• 41:36
  agrarian that you're attached to the Nile river. And so we don't want this foreign culture coming in. It's, it's something that would, it's a, it would destroy our culture to begin to open the door for the possibility that, um, people in our culture could be shepherds or something. Right. So, um, so they just, they had a, had kind of a cultural allergy to, um, to being kind of, uh, shepherds, but, and, and, and,
• 42:02
  God said, look, it's important that you create this very strong, clear distinction between male and female, because there's something that's going to infect the culture if you don't. That's what he means by an abomination. There's a cultural contagion that you're going to start within. And I think that's what we're seeing now, is that this kind of gender bending is, we think it's cute and fun, and it's just part of our way of celebrating somebody's individual self-expression. But it's actually going to do something with the culture. And this...
• 42:31
  plummeting fertility rate, this lack of desire to have children, this lack of appreciation for our God-given gender are all really symptoms of this movement that's occurred, right? Where we think that there's kind of an endless spectrum as opposed to just a narrow spectrum or a clear spectrum within what it means to be female or male. And part of this is really a work kind of collision with work.
• 42:57
  And in home life that has become really confusing, I think, for our culture. You know, this, for example, like Margaret Thatcher, who was the prime minister of the UK, the first female prime minister, you know, she was kind of famously called the Iron Lady. She was she had a very masculine edge to her personality. She was very good negotiator. But she would say repeatedly that when I go through the doors of my house, I am all woman.
• 43:25
  Like I want to be taken care of by my husband. I want to be totally be a female in my home. But when I leave the home, I do engage in this fairly masculine kind of work situation. So there was just a really clean line that she sensed between home and her work life that allowed her to kind of experience or express maybe some more masculine, traditionally masculine characteristics at work without it infecting her home life, her ability to be a wife and a mother at home.
• 43:55
  We don't have that anymore. In fact, we encourage women. Like if you are expressing masculine characteristics in the workplace, bring those right into your house, you know? And likewise, if you're a man and you have maybe a traditionally female element or feminine element of your personality, like you're in the caring professions, you're, you know, in counseling or something.
• 44:14
  Then take all of those elements that you're expressing in work and then bring those right into your home and just flip roles with your wife or husband. And instead of saying, no, the home actually exists as a sacred space in which the male and femaleness needs to be really, really clearly defined. Yeah.
• 44:33
  For the sake of, for your sake, for your family's sake, for your children and for your future grandchildren. Like we need to really care about where these lines are. Our ability to talk about this fluently is being demented by a culture that is obsessed with this kind of hyper individualism. So that's been, I think, really, really hard to figure out for our culture.
• 44:55
  So in terms of like really practical elements, so we've talked about having a exclusive male, female culture that's being celebrated in the home. For young children, I think, like you said, actually like embracing the kind of traditional male, female like elements of as your kids are young. You know, we just we're having this experience with our grandson who's like he's not even two years old yet. And he happened to see his dad shoot a gun and now everything's a gun.
• 45:24
  Um, that's not surprising. Um, that's very normal, uh, for boys to want to emulate their father. And so part of what you want to emphasize or is just like, that's a good thing. And you want, you want girls to emulate their, their mother. Um, and I think, um, the other practical element of this is when you're parenting your children, um,
• 45:47
  What you're constantly thinking about if you are parenting with your eye towards the future, towards those future grandchildren, toward that future role of mother or father, is you're constantly thinking about their character qualities from the perspective of how is this going to impact parents?
• 46:03
  their family in the future. If this son is exhibiting character qualities that are going to make it really hard on him to be a father, those are character qualities we want to correct in his childhood. Right? And if that girl is exhibiting character qualities that are going to make it very difficult for her to be a future mother, that those are character qualities we want to address. And I think that's very confusing today. Oftentimes.
• 46:26
  The modern parent asked the question, is this authentic? Is this authentically coming out of who you are? Maybe this character quality is just an element of your life. And therefore, there's so much hesitating that happens with parenting today. We're very afraid to correct our children, to train our children, because we don't have a compass point that we're pointing at and saying, okay, I'm trying to train you to become a future father or mother. That gives us a lot of clarity because it gives you confidence.
• 46:56
  in parenting your children. So, and I probably talked about that a lot. Like it, like there is sort of a, almost like a parenting confidence crisis going on. And I think it's being really fueled by this obsession with individualism. Uh, and so how, who am I to ever say that some kind of character quality my child is exhibiting is something that needs to be corrected. So how have you thought about, especially with moms, um, mothers trying to figure this out, um, how have you thought about that challenge?
• 47:25
  To me, that's just innate. It's very in everything I do. I'm assuming my son is going to become a husband and a father someday. And I'm assuming that my daughters are going to be married and have children someday. So everything comes from that framework. I think, again, it goes back to what do you believe about this topic?
• 47:51
  And so within our home, there's no confusion. It's very clear. And so I will pass on to them a lack of confusion about who they are as an individual person that God has created them into the idea of family life.
• 48:07
  And so I'm training them in things like, you know, I want all my kids to know how to cook at least a little bit. I want all my kids, regardless if they're boys or girls, to know how to do laundry just so they can function as an adult as they, you know, I don't know what exact details of their life is going to be like in the future. And I want them to be prepared. I'm going to teach them how to manage their finances. I'm going to teach them how to fill up the air in their tires, regardless of their gender. And, you know, these kinds of things that are important.
• 48:35
  Um, I would say a functioning adult would need to know, you know, adulting type things. Um, but then I am going to get a little more specific on the daughters. I'm going to make sure they have kind of a repertoire of recipes that they can go through and that they feel more confident in. I'm going to make sure that they understand how to grocery shop well, how to price compare. We physically go grocery shopping, um, and do a lot of our...
• 49:04
  setting of a grocery store, picking out our produce, developing an opinion and preference about the shape of produce and what it should look like and what you should not choose and all these different things. So I'm going to teach them how to
• 49:19
  mend clothes, how to make clothes, how to make blankets, how to make quilts. I'm going to teach them those things that I think that they will need in their future in running a household. And then, of course, cleaning is a big part of everyone's training as well. But then with the girls, I might go a little bit deeper into the beautification of the home.
• 49:41
  So my son's going to do chores alongside the rest of us doing cleaning and all those things. But then when it comes to, should we pick flowers from the garden? Or should we, you know, maybe pick out a scent that we want to have in our house? Then that will be more something I'd have the girls do. So a big part of my educating my children, you know, wasn't just math and spelling. There was, I would spend time on these other things when we talk about
• 50:10
  how to hang pictures on a wall to make it more beautiful, how to, um, you know, um,
• 50:18
  bake cookies so that when people walk in, they can smell the smell of something fresh baked good when they walk into our home and things like that to create a home environment so that they feel prepared when it's their turn. Now you do all of this with some version of a risk or not even really a risk, but just the unknown. You don't know the future. You don't know the choices that they're going to make when they get older. And, you know, as a parent, that can feel a little bit scary or a little bit intimidating. But, um...
• 50:47
  Allowing God to work within that and be,