¶ Intro
if you can't spend a year of your life in Jerusalem, then please understand and study this article with us, because this experiment absolutely has failed. This idea that we can somehow go from multigenerational family, traditional family to nuclear family, and that this is going to work. We know it doesn't work. Talking about the functional family in a modern context is sort of a punchline. Hey everybody, welcome back to the family teams podcast, fatherhood edition. I've got in the house, uh, two of my good friends, Tyler Graham and Chris Cirillo. Thank you guys for joining me today.
Uh, Tyler's got an awesome project he's working on three mile per hour fatherhood. This is all about coaching dads, how to steward their voice, which is, man, awesome. That is awesome. I love that you're doing that, Tyler. Um, so yeah, really recommend you guys check that out. 3mphfatherhood. com. And then Chris is over there at Mission Fit Dads.
Um, they, they really oftentimes surface voices, um, in a lot of these cultural conversations that I find interesting. Um, that they did a, uh, Jerome has only did an article for them. Um, called the nuclear family has failed. There is nothing conservative about atomization. And I'm like, man, I love that title.
Um, now your Rome is so interesting to me. He's a. Um, he's a philosopher. He's an Israeli American. He's just returned to Israel with his family and nine children to, uh, to live in Jerusalem. And, uh, he's, he's a political theorist. He's the chairman of the Edmund Burke foundation. Um, and he's the president of the Herzl Institute.
And this is super confusing for Christians because there are Christians who are going along with sort of secular culture and diminishing the importance of family. And those who try to defend the family are oftentimes defending the Western ideal, um, the modern Western family, as opposed to the biblical family.
And then I'd love to get Tyler and Chris to, uh, weigh in on, um, on, on this topic. So I'll start, this is a Urom's article. He says, when people talk about the structure of the family, they often find themselves arguing for or against the quote, nuclear family, Which consists, uh, on most telling of a father, a mother, perhaps two or three children in their care for the first 18 years of their lives.
They don't know they're defending a version of family that's that recent. On the contrary, the nuclear family is closer to being an invention of industrialization in the 20th century. And this is again, what Jeff, uh, spends a lot of time teasing out in his book, Take Back Your Family. And there are good reasons to think that this form of family is in fact, a failed experiment, one that has done immeasurable harm to almost everyone, to women and men, children and grandparents.
So what we talk about in family teams is the family team or the multi generational team on mission. Uh, Jerome is talking about the traditional family, that's his, his language in this article. So he's got five principles. The lifelong bond of a man and a woman. The traditional family is built upon the lifelong bond of a man and a woman.
In this way, marriage brings peace to the broader society, which no longer tolerates barbaric scenes of men shedding blood over women and of loose children who know nothing of their father. Instead, these competitive energies are turned to the building up of the household and all its members. This institution of lifelong marriage is indeed the first pillar of what we consider a civilized life.
What is often sacrificed in a nuclear family ideal is that once the year children turn 18 and they leave. So much of the incentive for men to stay faithful to their wife, if they've really struggled with those temptations really erodes. And so that incentive is gone. What I'm not doing this for my kids.
Yet in the traditional family, the principle of honoring one's father and mother establishes a lifelong relationship between parents and children that is much like marriage. By this artifice, the forces of honor and loyalty are turned against the natural tendency of adolescents to grow contemptuous and abandon their parents.
The traditional family also, um, challenges nature when it comes to the way children treat parents and it commands children to honor their parents. Um, and so doing create a lifelong bond between their parents and the children, even though There's sort of a natural tendency to create that, that distance, that that distance is, um, is honored, um, in terms of there being a separate family branch that's emerging, but it is also critical that those children, um, not treat their parents with contempt.
Like that's how I felt when I first read it. It makes me think of I do work in health care technology, implementing new electronic medical record systems. And we always talk about 1 of the most dangerous things that. Uh, when the most dangerous answer somebody can give as to why they do something is to say it's always been done that way and there's no real, uh, there's no like foundation or roots to actually back up the decision to do what they're doing.
It may not be the best way. And I think that's how I view like the atomic family now, especially in our culture where I think this is just, this is the only picture. That people have of what family looks like they don't know that there's something else available this traditional family or this multi generational team And when I first read your book that was when like I said, it was paradigm shifting because I'm like what there's there's there's something else out there There's there's another option and I love the way that he describes it in this article, um, uh, of like presenting how these more traditional methods of family have provided such benefit to, to marriages, to father, son bonds, to father, daughter, mother, son, mother, daughter, like these, these things are actually strengthened by going back to these ways that family used to operate, uh, and, and how the atomic family has really Like negated those things.
And that probably sounds impossible or completely ridiculous or something. And, you know, I, I have believed, you know, for a long time. That there was something really wrong with this thesis that children are designed to fly the coop and live a completely independent life from the previous generation and that every generation is supposed to hit the reset button and that this is there's something natural about this, um, and I think this is one thing that I would challenge a little bit about your own characterization of it of sort of the collision between what's natural.
And if you become overly controlling and treat them like, like young children, then you become an unsafe, a realm or arena for them to differentiate. And so one of the things that April and I became really convinced of is we needed to make our house a safe place for our children to differentiate without violating the relationship between the generations.
You know, Sydney spent three months there in an immersive language school. You know, we went out and visited her, um, and we're missing her like crazy. I'm very close to her during that whole time, but, but I'll, I'll, I'll also just really celebrating, you know, the things that she was exploring, um, and what that would mean, not just for her as an individual, an atomized individual, but also that what you're doing is actually a gift to our entire family.
That create a lot of that breakage. And I really am convinced it's the second, I think, I think we've made a lot of really bad decisions to either be overly controlling and force our children to different, to differentiate in a completely different arena where they need, they feel like they need to be out of relationship with the previous generation in order just to become, you know, whatever God's called them to be, or just some kind of like smothering where it's like, no, you are underneath this family and you know, whatever.
And I think about how so many families, right? Their, their mission is to get their kids to 18 and get out of the house. And if that's the mission. Once the kid turns 18, there's nothing left for them there, right there. They've reached the end and now it's their time to go and start their own thing.
And I think it's so important. Are you holding your breath for when your, your kids turn 18? There's a parenting style that I think that necessitates now, when your kids, especially enter into adolescence and some of these, some of these elements of differentiation start to occur in your family. What I feel like culturally we're told is just hold on.
When they turn 13, 14, 15 and start entering into differentiation, so much of parenting young children is doing it in a way to make sure that when they enter into adolescence, teenage life, that the relationship can handle the, the, the huge impact of differentiation, that process, um, and what the, the relationship does not fracture underneath the stress of that season.
Believe it was probably a more effective process. And that is like when a child is born and they're totally dependent on, on father and mother, uh, that is like the highest level of control over their entire environment and every aspect of their life. And as they grow control should stay high, but slowly reduce as relationship.
Um, and then, yeah, the one primary thing that came to mind with this is even if, uh, someone doesn't have a framework for, uh, multi generational, uh, classical family, we still have to, like, look at this and ask ourselves the question, like, is this actually working?
We have to turn back. We have to start asking the question. And then I think You know, family revision or any other look at the scriptures in, in asking, are these scriptures actually applicable for me? Like I'm a, I'm a follower of Jesus. Do these inform my life? And should I be considering the fact that these have some, uh, influence on the way that I should be doing things.
We're on the wrong road. And if that is, if that is, so we must go back. Going back is the quickest way on. So that, that was resounding in my mind as I'm reading this. I'm like, there's a better way we need to turn back and just admit it. It's not working.
And so when I think about a compass point, like where do we leave and how do we get back? This is, you guys will hear me talk about this a lot because I mean, this is what happened. This was my story. And that is that, that I went from, you know, Seattle, uh, living in the Northwest, like, like Chris does, you know, in a place where there's, there's a real advanced version, I think of this family collapse idea.
Um, people are like, there is no such thing. And, and when people start to become cynical about family, you can either think that The, the idea that the idea of family that God originally had. was inherently flawed I, I think, I think a lot of people think that, like, they believe that God had this idea about the family and it just doesn't work well at all.
Number three, the traditional family is a business enterprise. Because liberal society considers one's, quote, career to be the defining characteristic of the individual. We have largely forgotten that the traditional family was usually a business enterprise. The average family was engaged in farming, commerce, light manufacture, or a profession.
Um, and the whole reason we started that a lot of people have said that someone just posted today, a snarky comment that why did you guys, why would you ever do such a thing? Why would you start a family? Like, obviously just as a money grab, I'm like, no, you don't, you don't know what we think about family.
And so he's pointing this out and it's very difficult to build a household without beginning to create. Uh, economic engines through the family that. Uh, actually create cohesion. Uh, we experienced this dramatically. I had no idea this was true, by the way, that this was something we discovered completely by accident.
I mean, it was like, I was like, what is happening? Like we created a business and it created this vortex of all of a sudden, Reasons to come together. The opposite is what oftentimes happens with so many of the economic ways that we think about providing in our culture, which is that oftentimes when there is no economic engine, um, your children often are forced to find employment elsewhere, like unless you live in a pretty diverse city where there's lots and lots of economic opportunity.
And so the relationship of parents to children continued throughout life. And where there is no rupture between adult children and their parents, grandchildren grow up with grandparents and perhaps great grandparents. Thus, young children were able to learn the skill of honoring their father and mother by watching their parents do it.
And so, you know, Elijah's like reaching out for my dad and, you know, my dad just as a normal part of daily life, just gets to be with his grandson and play with him and talk to him while I'm playing and talking to him. It's just like. It's just normal. That was just a scene that happens every day around here.
But many members of the clan, community, or congregation were not kin relations in this sense. Rather, they were members of an alliance of families who together formed a kind of adopted and extended family, which came together to celebrate Sabbaths and festivals, to teach and train the community's children, to provide relief to those in distress, to improve their communal economic assets, and where needed, to establish security and justice as well.
Like all the things he's describing. Um, happens at that level, festivals, education. Um, so I'll, I'll read his conclusion and then to get your guys thoughts. Of Of course, not every family was successful along all five of these dimensions. Nevertheless, once these principles are examined together, it becomes clear that the traditional Jewish or Christian family was far more active, extensive and powerful organization.
Yes. You see nuclear families is almost like a fragment of a family. And so it's not. It's not surprising that it falls apart. It becomes even more fragmented into a single parent household or, and it continues to degrade in that way. When this conception of the family became normative in America and elsewhere, after the second world war, it gave birth to a world of detached suburban homes, connected to distant places of employment and schools by trains and automobiles and buses.
Yeah, we hand our kids over to. A complete, uh, an educational system oftentimes that we know is opposed to our values. We didn't pay those people to systematically train, um, the young people of our family in values opposed to our family during the most vulnerable years of their lives. That's our design right now.
Instead, spent their days seeking honor among their adolescents. There's a whole rabbit hole there. Um, read, hold onto your kids if you want to understand the nightmare that that's creating and how to, how to fix it. The resulting rupture between parents and their children was poignant. Described in numerous books and films beginning in the fifties, but these, these works rarely touched upon the reconstruction of the family.
Uh, once each week, like a drive in movie. Yes. Yeah. I don't even know if I want to talk about that rabbit hole, but yes, it's unbelievable how we've taken, and we don't have the tools to take what, what was the center of the faith in these times in history. You say like Roman religion or, uh, first century Jewish religion, all, all of it was centered in the home.
There's a lot of feminists I follow, um, because they're saying exactly the same thing that we're saying to family teams all the time. They're talking about how this is terrible for women, that there's a whole nother pathway for women. Um, but they often don't see this sort of, uh, pre war family as being what really, what created a place of thriving for women.
Divorce, childbirth outside of marriage and fatherless households are now all common. So you can see all of those, uh, various metrics that are just, uh, demonstrating how broken this idea is. These and many other indicators reflect a widespread failure to hand down the traditional institution of the family to future generations.
If I had been writing this a few years ago, I would have assumed that most of my readers would have few experiences that confirm my argument. But the COVID 19 pandemic had changed this. The extended closings of businesses and schools, churches, and synagogues have offered many people some insight into the potential power of the traditional family.
Uh, many have had their first glimpse of what a family thrown together and having to rely on its own resources is capable of achieving when it takes on a more extensive array of common purposes. In particular, many have experienced the kind of heightened cohesion that can come of it. In other words, many have had their first glimpse of what a family was like when it was a strong political institution in which generations work together to create a permanent community, very much resembling a little tribe or nation.
Yeah. Kind of going back to the last three bullet points that he talked about. Um, I think help wrap up the full picture. Um, I think I would ask this question for. Myself, if I'm hearing this for the first time, uh, is do I believe that family is a vehicle?
I think he did a good job at the end Highlighting. Yeah, this isn't gonna be perfect and pretty and it's not gonna be easy in fact, it's probably gonna be incredibly hard at times, but You Uh, our pursuit should be on the ideal, uh, with realistic expectations, uh, and Um, thinking if we, if we shift this way, our expectation should be that the ideal is realized, uh, many generations from now, not in our own.
Economic influence and are centered around a particular set of ideals in our case, Christianity. Um, and I would say last piece. This was family, depending on, you know, what you believe in, in the age of the earth, this was the family design for 6, 000 years, at least, if not 10, 000. Um, and what we're experiencing is a hundred, 200 years in the making, right?
And everything, and this is what I began to realize, that business, that education, in that community life or church life are all nested really underneath that, that, that realm, that, that original, um, design of the family. And if you, if your family theology is wrong, you will have a corrupted theology of business.
Like it was a place for a church that, that we understand meeting in the house, the household was the infrastructure. It was what Jerome was talking about here. It was, it was these tribes. It was these clans. It was all of their resources were being, were being leveraged and were being brought into the kingdom of God.
And I think that that's 1 of the main things that that needs to shift that we've seen shift in our own family, uh, where, like, the family does become, like, the foundational part of how we operate is like our home. Working from home, homeschooling here, uh, it doesn't become just the place to, to refuel and go out, but becomes the place from which we, like, operate, which is huge.
And that's just simply not the case. We see it with nuclear families. Here, and then the third thing I think it is almost like a reframing of how we perceive family and you touched on this a little bit earlier. Jeremy, um, where I think the general picture of family has become so broken. And if you read through the comments of this article, they're very illuminating.
It's negative that surely there's something there That's not good. And when reality having my in laws across the street has been Nothing but good. All right. There's been no negatives to having them right there. It's been such a tremendous blessing to my wife and I, to our kids. My parents are 10 minutes down the road.
We, we get it. Um, and so we have to, like Chris had said earlier, we have to be honest about the ideal. We have to be honest about the design so that our children and our grandchildren can experience something closer to this biblical idea of family. So that's why we need to just be honest and talk about it.