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The Case For Spoiling Your Kids To Build A Stronger Family · The Family Teams Podcast

• 0:00
  Did you know that you can spoil your kids rotten and it'll do nothing but strengthen your family and grow your kids' character?
• 0:06
  A lot of people don't know this.
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  You can spoil your kids and they will become other-centered.
• 0:11
  There's just one catch.
• 0:13
  You have to wait to spoil your kids until they have kids.
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  That is a transition that we are really bad at as a Christian culture, and I want to call this out.
• 0:23
  There's a famous saying that if you raise your kids, you can spoil your grandkids, but if you spoil your kids, you will raise your grandkids.
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  There's a lot of truth to that statement.
• 0:31
  And what oftentimes we don't unveil is that when your kids become parents—
• 0:37
  you can spoil them, and they need you to.
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  And the more you help do that, the more they will become the kinds of mothers and fathers, husbands and wives that God has called them to be.
• 0:48
  Pastor Sky Anderson pointed this out.
• 0:50
  I don't think I've ever heard a pastor say this before.
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  Listen to what he says.
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  It's so interesting, so dead on.
• 0:56
  We've said this a lot of family teams, and I want to talk to you.
• 0:59
  How does this apply to young families right now?
• 1:01
  If you have young kids in the house, how do you start to parent in a way that honors this dynamic?
• 1:06
  And what do you do if you actually have adult married kids that are having kids?
• 1:11
  Make your adult kids life easy as possible.
• 1:14
  I see so many parents that they just take their hands off the wheel when the kid gets married.
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  Like, there you go.
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  And then all of a sudden everything transitions to all about the parents, right?
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  The grandparents needs a need when I get the kids.
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  Absolutely not.
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  My job does not stop when they get married.
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  That's when it begins.
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  It's when I start making your life as easy as I can.
• 1:32
  Marriage is already hard, already difficult.
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  And I see so many times, right?
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  The parents are making their children's life harder, their marriage harder, when marriage is already difficult.
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  And it's all about them.
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  And when I get the kids, no, no, no.
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  everything that me and my wife do is to make their life easier.
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  We make sure they get a date night and we make it easy for them.
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  If we have need to come over and pick up the kids, we have to do, like we work around them and we do our very best.
• 1:54
  If you need help with the kids, we're on it.
• 1:56
  I mean, you can call me and say, Hey, in 10 minutes, and we'll do drop everything that we possibly can to make your life easier.
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  We don't make their marriage harder.
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  If they can't come over for family time, we're like, Oh, that's all.
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  We just make family time so good that you don't want to miss it.
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  We don't add stress to their marriage.
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  We don't talk bad about their spouse.
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  We don't have conflict for their spouse.
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  We treat their spouse like you're part of the family.
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  We make them feel loved.
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  We make them feel accepted.
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  Everything that me and my wife do.
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  is to make their marriage easier because here's what we know.
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  We remember marriage is hard.
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  Marriage is difficult.
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  When you have a couple kids and three, four kids, everything gets more difficult.
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  And you don't need another burden in your life.
• 2:35
  You need your parents to take the load off and make life easier.
• 2:39
  All right, guys, if I could somehow wave a magic wand, I would love to just see this completely reversed in the Christian community.
• 2:46
  We have this exactly reversed culturally.
• 2:49
  We spoil our kids when they're young, and then we neglect our kids once they become parents.
• 2:53
  We need to challenge our kids when they're young, and we need to spoil them when they become parents.
• 2:58
  If we did this, I think that the whole world would look at the kinds of families that would be produced in the Christian world and could see something dramatically different.
• 3:06
  They would see so many more families staying together, husbands and wives having energy for each other.
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  They would see us having large families and thriving while we have large families.
• 3:15
  But because we keep hitting the reset button every generation, because we just, we buy the same unfortunate ideas that our culture has that...
• 3:21
  Once your kids get married, it's completely on them.
• 3:24
  I talked about it in the last video, the kind of leave and cleave idea that we constantly are struggling with as a Christian culture.
• 3:32
  We don't understand that the Bible is advocating to create multigenerational families.
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  Because of that horrible leave and cleave theology, because we don't even understand what that verse is about, we have gone right along with the culture and just cutting our kids off from the support they desperately need at the moment they most need it from us.
• 3:50
  And so this is such a beautiful thing that Pastor Scott Anderson is describing.
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  So what does this look like?
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  What does this mean when you start to really embrace this dynamic?
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  And so the first thing is, if you have young kids at home, there is obviously one massive caveat to this whole way of thinking, and that is that your kids need to have kids.
• 4:06
  And so when you spoil your kids when they're young, when you don't challenge them, when you don't get them excited about being future mothers and fathers, part of what happens is that as they're getting older, they're not having kids.
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  They're not getting married young.
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  They're not having kids right away.
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  They see their whole life as being unmarried.
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  over once they do that.
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  They're being told that by the culture, that they're going to be completely out on their own.
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  They're going to be exhausted, and they're not going to be able to get any sleep, and they're going to have struggling marriages.
• 4:27
  A lot of that is true, but the main root cause of that, you guys, is because their parents have not created the kind of lifestyle where they exist in that season to help their kids raise the next generation.
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  This was so normal.
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  This is
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  all throughout the Bible.
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  This is what was happening for thousands of years.
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  We have this very strange culture today where we hit the reset button every single generation.
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  So we've talked a lot about that in previous videos.
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  I'm not going to get into the theology of that.
• 4:55
  If you want to look at our whole family teams course, we can walk you guys through exactly why that theology is not in the Bible.
• 5:01
  The Bible advocates for multi-generational families.
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  So part of what we want to do if you have young kids is you want to raise them in such a way that they are being challenged so they would take on that responsibility and get excited about the possibility of becoming mothers and fathers.
• 5:14
  So we're not just saying, hey, you know, do you want to become an astronaut when you get older?
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  We're saying, isn't it going to be amazing for you to get to be a dad someday, to get to be a mom someday?
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  Like this is incredibly high calling that we hope for all of our kids.
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  And yes, that doesn't mean that there aren't kids that might have the gift of singleness.
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  They don't have a desire to get married and God has set them apart for everything.
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  for very specific kind of assignments in the kingdom.
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  But by and large, 98% of our kids are going to be future mothers and fathers if they are raised in a way where that is championed, if we're excited about that and we get them excited about that.
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  Now, if they take on that challenge and they decide, okay,
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  I'm going to get married as soon as I find the one that God has for me, and we're going to have kids right away.
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  We're not going to put that off.
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  That is when you need to step in as the upstream generation, not to control at all.
• 6:00
  This is not about control.
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  Again, this is not about getting your needs met.
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  What Scott Anderson said here was so helpful.
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  He's saying, look, it's not about you.
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  your giving, there's something incredibly beautiful that happens in a family when everybody's giving to the family.
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  We live in a culture where everybody is negotiating to get what they want.
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  You know, moms are saying, we've got to fight for female liberation.
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  And men are now reacting to that, saying we need to fight for our rights as fathers.
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  And grandparents are saying, I'm done.
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  We're heading to Florida.
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  We're done with, we did our job.
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  We're going to get to live our golden years.
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  We don't want any responsibility.
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  Everybody is sort of fleeing away from the family and leaving this, the family, the husk of what it was designed to be.
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  And you can really stop that in your generation by number one, raising your kids to be excited about being parents, about being future fathers and mothers.
• 6:49
  And then as your kids are getting older, you begin to think of ways to help support them
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  and help them really succeed in this next season of their life.
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  He gives some great examples of things that he is advocating for.
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  Date night, do everything you can to help your son or daughter bond with their spouse.
• 7:09
  Like we want to help our sons and daughters, our son-in-laws and daughter-in-laws.
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  We want to help their marriage.
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  And so, yes, we should be the first place you think of when it's like, how can we help you have a date night?
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  Like if you can't afford that, we're going to step in and immediately help, whether it's helping pay, helping watch the kids, training the kids while they're gone, not making their life miserable by, you know, giving them the kids back completely filled with sugar.
• 7:32
  And so we're all aiming at the same thing, which is what we are trying to raise the young kids to be really good future parents.
• 7:39
  And we're trying to support the parents to have a thriving life while they're raising the children.
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  That is the basic way that you build a multi-generational family.
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  I love how, um,
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  Pastor Anderson said, hey, my job doesn't end.
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  It just begins.
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  What begins when your kids start having kids?
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  What begins is your—it's the beginning of the creation of a multigenerational family because you are now a team.
• 8:00
  You are now forming a team with your kids and your in-laws to help raise that next generation.
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  Of course, they have the authority.
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  They're making the decisions, but you're available.
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  You are supporting.
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  You are asking, how can we help?
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  How can we make your life amazing?
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  How can we help you thrive?
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  How can we make things easier?
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  You guys, marriage and parenting is hard enough.
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  It's already on hard mode.
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  And so part of what we need to understand is the young kids live their life in easy mode today, and parents have to make their life more challenging so that they become other-centered and get excited about being future mothers and fathers.
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  We are taking kids that are already living life on easy mode and making it even more easy today.
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  And then we're saying, and if you decide to become a parent as you get older, not only are you going to enter hard mode, but then we're going to step back and not help you at all.
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  Again, we're getting this exactly reversed.
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  We need to be stepping in to help our kids and understand that they're already living life on hard mode when they get married and start having kids.
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  We're there to make it more sustainable for them and also help them thrive.
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  So...
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  Have you thought about this?
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  Have you thought about what it looks like for you to help your kids as they're having kids?
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  So I've got questions for each of you guys.
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  If you're a young family, how are you preparing your kids to want to be future parents?
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  And if you are older parents that have kids that are married and having kids, how are you helping your married kids life be easier?
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  If you've got ideas for any of these things, please jump into the Family Team School Community, SKOOL.
• 9:24
  It's a free community.
• 9:25
  You can jump in there.
• 9:25
  We're going to list these questions.
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  I want to really understand with you guys, what are you doing as young families to really prepare your kids to embrace the challenge of being parents?
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  And then what are older parents doing to make sure that their kids' lives are easier and not harder?
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  So I would love to see you guys there in school.
• 9:43
  By the way, if you guys jump into school, one of the cool things...
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  that exists inside that community is there is a map feature where you can see all the other family teams in your area.
• 9:51
  And we are traveling all around the country all the time.
• 9:53
  So, uh, in other parts of the world as well, but I'm about to take a trip down South through Tennessee, through Georgia.
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  So if you guys are down there, please jump into school and click on there.
• 10:01
  We have other trips planned to California.
• 10:03
  We just get back from Wisconsin.
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  So if you're a family team, that's like, man, I want to meet other family teams.
• 10:07
  I want to interact with family teams online, but also in person, then go to school S K O L. This is our school community.
• 10:13
  Um,
• 10:13
  Join family teams.
• 10:14
  It's free.
• 10:15
  We'd love to see you guys in there.
• 10:16
  We'd love to talk about how can we help each other build family teams that actually go multi-generational.