Being a great father takes a massive amount of courage. Instead of being an amazing leader and a decent dad, I want to be an amazing dad and a good leader. The oldest dad in the world gave you this assignment, which means you must be ready for it. As a dad, I get on my knees and I fight for my kids. Let us be those dads who stop the generational pass down of trauma.
I want encounters with God where he teaches me what to do with my kids I know I'm going to be an awesome dad because I'm gonna give it my all. But if you can enter into the mess with grace and patience, but also truth and authority, and this is the way Jesus enters into our mess, then you're gonna find lots of moments to disciple your children. Those moments for reconciliation and for relationship building are in the mess. They're not out of it, and they're not from controlling it.
You gotta be in it just like Jesus came into our mass. Welcome back to Dad Awesome, this is episode 382. Buddy, we're taking over the podcast. My dad's not gonna be in it this week. Today we're talking about the book, The Big Mess. Just me and my three sisters. And we're interviewing Justin Whitman-Early. He wrote a kid's book, and it's called The Big mess. Hi Mr. Justin. Thanks for being a guest on The House of Awesome. It's your third time.
Thank you for having me back and trusting me with the third time here. I never played this with dad.
I'm glad you asked I have because I probably the first time I got on my kids were around like Two four six and eight can't quite remember but now that now they're six eight ten and thirteen and I've thought a lot about with the older ones moving More from structured rhythms, which is a lot of what I talk about habits and rhythms to the structuring of space Which is still requires structure and still requires intentionality but structuring space where they will talk to me.
Because I had a really interesting one about a year ago where there was something going on at school that I found out about and I was like, I can't believe he didn't tell me this. Fortunately, it wasn't a big deal. It was actually just a crush. I was, I can believe he hadn't told me this and another dad was like well, when are you asking him about it? And we'd talk about it at the dinner table every night. He's like, he doesn't want to talk in front of everybody else and so.
I started this thing where I let him stay up a little later, maybe once a week or so, and I just sort of like sit on the couch and be like, hey, so what about this or that? Structuring space. And in that space, literally the first time I did it, he started talking to me about the thing that I was wondering about. And I was like, oh, he does want to talk. So yeah, from structured rhythms to structured space in terms of like starting to get older with your child a little
bit. So I've been thinking about that a lot. We're so excited to talk to you about your book, The Big Mess. But first, we want to talk about your other books. Our dad-awesome dads would love to hear a quick overview about your others books. Can you tell me about your books that common rule. Well, a lot of our life is about the ordinary things that we do every day.
And though they don't seem important, like the ways we scroll our phone or rush off to work or work on Saturday morning, even when we don't want to, those are actually some of the biggest parts that shape the way we follow Jesus or don't. And they're some of the most spiritual parts of our lives. So in fact, I think those ordinary moments of all of our lifes, kid or adult... Are some of the most extraordinary parts of how we walk with Jesus.
And so my first book is about how to see those ordinary habits as really important parts of our relationship with Jesus Can you tell me about your book, Habits of the Household? Lots of things happen between moms and dads and their kids in the ordinary churn of the household, like bedtimes and waking up times and times when we get in trouble or have to say sorry to each other when we play, when we eat together.
And habits of the household is how to look at, that book is about how to looks at all those moments of the day and ask, how can we be more like Jesus would be in each moment, when go to bed and when we ate, because it turns out he did all these things too. He went to bed. He woke up. He had a mom and a dad. And so I'm trying to ask, how can we be more like Jesus in those ordinary moments of our everyday life?
And by the way, that's a really good question from a six-year-old, so thank you for asking. Can you tell me about your book, mate? People.
Oh this one's easy because four-year-olds and dads all need friends and whether you're four or 40 you know that the best parts of your day are when someone is nice to you asks you about your life and you get to hang out and play and talk and as it turns out we need that at four as much as 40 but the problem is all you four- year-olds get it like you know that you love playing with friends and that's mostly what you want to do every day.
And all us 40-year-olds tend to forget it, and we think the most important things in life are all the responsibilities we have to keep up with. But I'm trying to tell all the dads that the most important thing is to do life alongside friends, just like your 4-year old does. So make sure you keep friendship in your habits and in your parenting. And really, a 4- year old can understand that.
This last one's not a book, but my dad was telling me about the Hang Ten movement and how you didn't want me to have a cell phone. Okay, well I hope you're not mad at me because I'm trying to tell moms and dads that they should wait until like 16 because that's when you're in 10th grade, so hang 10.
This whole idea is that parents should wait till 10th to give their children access to smartphones and to social media because it turns out when we give smartphones and social to 11-year-olds or even sometimes 10 or 8-year olds. Really... Bad and sad things happen. It's very confusing, we don't know how to use it, and then kids start to get physically and mentally and spiritually unhealthy because of this. So I know my son, who's 13, he's funny about it, but he's also humorously
mad about it. Because he's like, dad, you're making it so that me and none of my friends now, none of their parents will let them have phones until you're 16. And I'm like. Sorry, buddy, I know, but it is going to be better for you because it's dangerous. For a long time, we've been given 11-year-old smartphones and I realize it's not healthy. Here's the way to understand it because I know if you're 11, I knew one day you want to drive and one day, you want a smartphone.
I'm just saying those are more similar than that. We need to train you how to use it and give it to you at a time and almost with a license that lets you know how to us it. And we realize if we give you a car now while you're 11. You're going to hurt somebody and hurt yourself, and the same thing's going to happen if we give you a phone. So we're going try to be smarter about it and give it to you at a time where it's going to be healthy for you to learn how to use
it. And for all the dads listening in to that, you know, the big impulse here is that we move towards an apprenticeship model where we really take seriously how to apprentice our kids into healthy use of technology so we can send them out of the house as disciples of Jesus who know how to interact on technology, not people who are being discipled by technology. Congratulations for writing this book. We read this book on the big mess just last
night. Can you tell us about this book and why you wrote it? I love having fun with my boys, and I love seeing them smile, and the delight of children. So part of my abiding passion, which might not be seen or noticed in people who read my non-fiction book on Christian habits, which can seem very serious, is the delight in the imagination of children, far more physical, mental, and spiritual healthiness comes from laughing, being tickled.
Playing with your parents, doing fun things together, and that sense that you have a dad who loves you and smiles with you and will throw desserts around once in a while with you. So that idea that children are made for delight and parents are made to engage with their children in delight is I think actually a deeply Christian view of the world. And part of the big mess is just delight. Like it really is just a delight with kids. I picked a book that was about building enormous desserts and then
smashing them. And so it's supposed to just be fun for your kids. Period, full stop, that's an answer by itself. Now, there is also another answer. And that is that the big mess is about sibling reconciliation. And because it's about a little brother who is very clumsy, nicknamed Moose, and his big brother named Mouse, and his Big Brother builds a lot of fancy, larger than life desserts, and Moose accidentally. Wrecks them all the way, sometimes little brothers and little sisters do.
And it's about Big Brother Mouse coming to terms with the fact that maybe I can make a dessert that's not meant to be big and fancy and looked at, but actually made to be smashed. And then everybody can participate in this big wreck of a creation. And so Big Brother mouse has to forgive his younger brother, he has to reconcile and he has figure out how to play with them again. And if you have children. They fight a lot.
They make each other mad a lot, and one of the key parts of parenting is learning how to teach them to reconcile. But the big mess is not just to teach your kids how to reconcile, it is. You'll have some lessons that they can learn from it. It's also for parents because a lot of us have a vision of how our house is supposed to be, our kitchen is supposed to be our life schedule, our morning routine is supposed to be.
And then little beautiful image bearers called children come in and they mess it up. And we look up one day and we're like... My house is a huge mess, my life is a big mess. And so I'm trying actually to talk over the parent's shoulders here and say, hey, you too, mom and dad, realize that the grace of God, the extraordinary moments of forgiveness and relationship come entirely out of the mess of family life. So don't run from it, find God in it. And this book helps you think about that.
Part of the reason we love this book is we love throwing food as a family. On Fridays, we have Flap Jack Friday, and my dad chucks pancakes across the room onto our plates. And when my little sister was a baby, we would catapult bananas into her face. That is amazing. Can I, I'm gonna steal this. I'm just gonna tell you right now. I'm going to steal this I'm curious, why did you choose Mouth and Mousse as the characters? Okay, so originally they were different.
So this is a story I started telling my kids when they were young, young. Because as a parent, stories are a key part of life. I mean, I encourage anyone to read more and tell more stories. And one of the things I would do all the time is if my kids were upset, I would say, hey, let me tell you a story. And I just started making something up. And then when one clicked, right? I would go back to it, like, hey, let me tell you the story about the big brother who makes desserts
again. And I think originally it was actually an elephant and a moose and they were brothers and that didn't really make sense. But eventually as we made the story, we're like, how about mice? I don't know why we came up with that. So there's a big brother mouse and then there's little brother mouse who likes to wear a moos costume. And this is partly inspired by my youngest son who just loves to dress up as anything. And that was...
The answer to how did these characters come to be was really just from telling stories over and over to my kids. And unsurprisingly, the ones that catch their attention tend to have giant desserts in it where I'm like, hey, imagine that Big Brother Mouse was making a cake. How tall do you think it would be? And they'd be like, well, how tall can it be? I'm, like, as tall as you want. How tall you think is gonna be? You know, and they're like, how about to the ceiling? I'm perfect.
So that's page one of the book, if you open it. And I'm gonna do it right now for everybody watching on video. Big Brother Mouse making a cake that's as tall as the ceiling. My sisters and I are curious. Does your family have dessert all the time, or is it just on special occasions? Very much the opposite. It is not regular, it is a special thing. My wife sees sugar as our society sees smoking, like to be like, oh, that should not be regular. That should not be every day.
So we are pretty regulated on dessert. So it's not an everyday thing, but it is a multiple times a week thing. So when we do our family devotion night. We usually bring some treat to the table. And sometimes this will be like a boring dessert, like orange slices or watermelon, but sometimes it'll be ice cream or a piece of candy.
But my wife is like, I think really, not I think, I know, she's very like natural health and like, and so it's always like, you know, good ingredients and like corn syrup is her greatest enemy. So when my kids see something sweet, they get super excited. So, but it's not, you now, we also probably. Every weekend at our Sunday family lunch, have a dessert and there's gotta be some other time in the week where they're getting like candy or cake at school or something.
So it's not every day, but it's enough to be fun. Have you ever climbed up to the roof of your house to eat a snack or dessert with your family? No, because right now we don't have a good roof to sit on, but we used to at our old house, and we would sit on it once in a while for a sunset, but we haven't actually eaten on it. Why have you? We haven't gotten on the roof yet, but my dad said because of this book and because of you, we're gonna plan a time to go up on the rooftop.
It's a good bucket list. One of Big Brother Mouse's enormous creations in this book is making a giant oatmeal cookie on the roof because he thinks finally he'll be able to escape his little brother from smashing it. Of course, somehow his little brothers got in the hold of a plane and he flies it right through it. Kind of larger than life and fantastic, but eating a dessert on the roofs sounds appealing I think probably to any kid. When you were a kid, did you have brothers and sisters?
And did you guys make a lot of messes? Oh yeah, so I'm one of six and I look back and I think this is on more of a serious note. I think, I was like, wow, our house was so messy. I just regularly think about the idea that like we lived in this chaos. And I remember as a kid, Jeff thinking, I think my mom's just one of those people who's like kind of messy. You know, she just doesn't pick up as much as other moms and dads. Which I realized is totally false.
It was because she had six kids and you just can't keep up. Because as soon as we all got out of the house, I remember I'd start coming back during college and now as a adult, she's immaculate. She picks up so much stuff. She's always clean. And I think so often about how much of a mess she put up with to raise us. And she was never mad about it. I mean, she did tons of cleaning days with us.
And I remember all the time, it was part of our chores and she would make us clean up and we would be like, this is unfair. This is basically slavery that you're making us clean all the times. I think about this because I think one of the virtues of my mom was that she was so willing to tolerate the mess that it was to raise children. She never made us feel like it was the children's fault or we were doing something wrong.
I think of that a lot. I don't want to be more like my mom because as it turns out, it's messy to have kids in the house, literally, like just there's a lot of mess. But I love the theme of this book. The real mess is the relational mess. I mean, it is hard. There's constant moments of conflict and discipline.
And a lot of the theme of this book and what I try to write about in Habits of the Household and talk about to dads everywhere is that if you're running away from that, you're not going to find times to disciple your kid. And if you are just barking at that and try to control behavior and always mad, you're going to not find time to disciple you kids. But if you can enter into the mess with grace and patience, but also truth and and this is the way Jesus enters into our mess.
Then you're gonna find lots of moments to disciple your children. But the whole theme of this silly book is that those moments for reconciliation and for relationship building are in the mess. They're not out of it and they're not from controlling it. You gotta be in it just like Jesus came into our mess. Some dads, dads like my dad, can get annoyed by the messes in their house. What advice would you have for the dads that are having a hard time with the mess? I just want to say I relate.
There's so much frustration in my regular life with my kids because they're not up to my standards. They don't pick up their room to my standards, they don't finish their breakfast on time to my standard, they pour milk to my stand, and I could go on. It's like nothing is to my status. They don' take their stuff out of the car. There's one rule in the car, it's like don't kick other seats and don't touch your brother's. Think not one car ride is that obeyed, you know, it's like, so look.
The reason I write and talk about this stuff is because I've realized it's such a problem for me. Without help, I'm just an angry, yelling dad all the time, every day. And so I really started to think about this when I had four young boys where I was like, why am I snapping all the times? It is not their fault that they are children. And I don't want God as my Heavenly Father. Snapping at me every time I make a
mess of life. In fact, when I turn to the Lord in prayer, when I mess up, I expect grace and patience, and I'm so glad for His kindness, right? So really, I'm like, how can I just be more like Him? But Jeff, you know from our other conversations, it's one thing to think about this. It's another thing to put it into practice, right? It's one to know in your head, you want to be a more patient Father like your Heavenly Father. It is another thing, to put into habit so your house feels
different. And so, a couple really short things that I think about. One, I think about pause prayers a lot. We've talked about this before. But before I go into disciplining my children for something they do, I pause and I say, Lord, help me be more like you than me in this moment. And sometimes that means, you know what? Let it go, Justin. You don't need to discipline right now. It's just spilled milk. Sometimes that means I come at them more gently, but always, always.
I'll tell you, I'm really serious about this. It's really hard to yell at your kid after you've just prayed to your God, period. It's real hard. So the more you incorporate small moments of prayer into your moments of frustration, the more likely you are to be like God in that moment and not come with yelling, but just come with loving authority because you've got to correct your kids a lot. I'm not saying you're not doing that, you're doing that a lot, and that's my biggest one,
Jeff. But I'll get one more, I would say, is I also think a lot about after any meal, any moment of discipline, any interaction with my child. Can I get them to laugh, smile, be tickled, be hugged, something like that? Because if I'm correcting them constantly, they don't want to play with me. If I'm disciplining them harshly, they do not want to receive my tickles or my hugs.
So one thing I think about is a litmus test for am I acting with gentle loving authority instead of just authority is can I tickle them? Can I make them laugh? And if I can make them laughing, it's a good sign. It's a sign that we're moving in and out of saying, I am your dad. I am the authority here, and you do need to listen. If they can laugh with me and be tickled by me, then that's a check to say, okay, it's loving authority right now, which is good.
Yeah, two little ways to put that into practice, but mostly just pray over and over, how can I be more like my heavenly father as a father? After the airplane crash into the chocolate chip cookie on the roof, little brother Moose came and gave a hug to big brother Mouse. Have you ever had a time where you were frustrated with one of your boys, but then you realized that you could invite them to join you?
Yeah, I once had a very wise older mother tell me, if you do it alone, then you'll always do it. And she was talking about chores. She was talking how to get kids involved in the help of the house because when they're little, they don't know how to load a dishwasher and they get a little older and you teach them, but they do it wrong. And they get older and you teach him and they can do it right, but the complain about it. And so you're sort of like, you know, let me just do it by myself.
You know, just do all the things by myself and then there's like the ... Yeah, you're building a bookshelf, and this was a big moment for me, where I was building a book shelf one night, and my second son wanted to help. And my initial thought was like, this is going to take so much longer. And then I heard that wise older woman's voice in my head saying, if you do it alone, you're always going to do it along.
And I thought, don't I want to have a life with my children where they're working on projects with me. And I thought, yeah, this is going to take longer. And as it turns out, we put one of the things on backwards, and it's still on backwards. The bookshelf still has a minor flaw in it that probably only I noticed. But I always think about that night where he was so happy to pull the drill, like he was allowed to pull the trigger every time, and he would find the screws and then lose
the screws. And I'd have to spend twice as long. But that moment for me has given rise to now a number of years. I think that moment was about five years ago. Where any time I'm doing something now, any time, it could be loading the dishwasher or mowing the lawn or something in between, I ask and invite my children, like do you want to help me? And sometimes I just don't, and many times they do, and I see not only the virtue of me learning to let them.
Be messy, that's okay, that they don't know how to do it, but also the fact that relationship is built in shared activity and a lot of the turn of the children's book as you mentioned. There's deep themes here, it's just a fun rhyming book, but then one of the things I'm trying to get parents to do is think about books, think about what they read.
When you see Big Brother Mouse invite Little Brother Moose into his project, you see the beginning of relationship because now we're no longer avoiding that younger child who messes everything up but saying, let's bring him into life and it'll be a little messy but I bet it'll fun. And that's so much of the art of parenting. And it's so the art being an older sibling too. So something good for dads and something good to teach your older children.
At the end of the book, the two brothers make a mess on purpose and the whole neighborhood has fun enjoying dessert. How can dads help their kids and their kids' friends have joy together? So much there. Love is generative. I think about that a lot. Relationships are generative, as in when we love in our household, there's something generative about that that not only spills out of our household but also invites the neighbors in. And this is literal and also spiritual.
So literally speaking, in the book, Big Brother Mouse finally says to his little brother Moose, let's make something made to be smashed and then they get the whole neighborhood together. Smash this enormous tower of ice cream and it rains ice cream sundaes for everybody and the whole neighborhood, mom and dad included, are delighted and as it turns out, you know, the reconciliation of two brothers and their project together is generative and feeds, so to speak, literally, the whole neighborhood.
Is a real truth, as in, at the time of this conversation, Jeff, you and I know that I've been preparing for this book to launch. People will listen to it after the book is launched, but one of the ways we've been having fun preparing is we've be launching a dessert every night in our house and we've grown bigger and bigger. It started with just a little cake and then it was like a bunch of ice cream and last night it was root beers.
And the whole neighborhood came to help, like the whole neighbor, like five other boys from the neighborhood, literally, because they were like hearing about this and they were, like, can we play? And we had like, I think nine little boys between. Four and 11 in our driveway last night, launching root beers and the moms were laughing and like, you know, we're gonna have to all take showers and do all this laundry before the next day of school.
But literally we're having a small neighborhood party, just having fun together. Such a relational truth that when we do that, when we enter into our kids' lives, like other kids are like, I want a dad like that, I wanna neighbor like that. I want to brother like that and you can, like you become a family to your neighborhood. But it's also just literally the spiritual truth of Jesus that he comes into our mess and by joining us in it, he makes us a blessing to everybody
else. And that's the fundamental outward turn of the Christian life that by God's blessing to us, we become a blessing for others. So again, you know, there's some deep theology here. In a ordinary kid's book that doesn't even mention God on the pages, but that's because God made the world, and all stories are His stories, and All Truth is His truth. You can find this stuff everywhere. I wrote it, after all, so I am trying to be kind of pointed with it.
Thanks so much for having this conversation. We're really excited for your new book. Can you say play for the dads? I will. Thank you so much. Let me pray for us. I thank you that you are a God who did not just give us words, but you came embodied to us in Jesus. You literally took on a body and entered into the messy, difficult place of our lives and our world to love us. And I ask that you would help us be fathers that are a little more like
you in that. That we would enter with gentleness and love and authority and fatherliness into our kids' lives with our bodies and learn how. To delight them, to shepherd them, to disciple them, to correct them, but to do it in ways that generate love. So let us enter into their mess and Lord teach us to become comfortable with the fact that your grace happens in the mess of life. So make us a little less frustrated about all that and a little more like you and being patient and
loving in it. It's in your name we ask this, amen. Thank you so much for listening today. This was episode 380 tip. You can find out more at that awesome data log. Thanks for being the awesome dad.