A Dad Can be the Most Influential Person in a Child’s Life

Show Transcripts:

Welcome to the Father On Purpose podcast, featuring author and ministry leader, Kent Evans, and business executive and military veteran Lawson Brown. This is a show for you, dad, if you want to be a godly and intentional father. Unfortunately, you’ve turned to these two knuckleheads for help. Let us know how that works out for you. Before we begin, remember this, you are not a father on accident. So go be a father on purpose. Please welcome your hosts, Kent and Lawson.

Lawson Brown: Hello everyone. Welcome back to our podcast. It’s Kent Evans and Lawson. So, Kent, the other day when I was out walking and we were chit-chatting, you brought something up that I thought was really cool and it didn’t apply to me. The person you brought up, LeBron James, didn’t apply to me because my daughters and I just don’t watch basketball, but the point was valid. And that was that-

Kent Evans: You have heard of him, right?

Lawson Brown: I know who he is.

Kent Evans: Are you aware of who he is?

Lawson Brown: I do know who he is, and I’ve even seen some funny memes here and there since he tweeted what he did, which was the point, which is what you brought up, like why would he have such influence? When you asked me that I went down the normal road of well, he’s well-known, he’s a big stud, people look up to him, he’s respected. But I really kind of missed the point. Reinforce what that was.

Kent Evans: Well, I don’t know if you missed it as much as I think there’s dimensions. For example, what we’re talking about, and I don’t know when you’re listening to this podcast, but every now and then famous people from some walks of life, whether it’s an actor or an athlete or whatever, they get well-known and they have a big following, and then they’ll wait into waters. Whether it’s you got an NFL guy kneeling for the national anthem and sparks all this controversy, or you got someone like LeBron who tweets about police and what’s going on with racial issues. What’s interesting is I want to just come at it from a different angle.

Lawson Brown: They all want to have their… Everybody’s like, “Oh, I’ve got a platform. I’m going to plant my flag.”

Kent Evans: Well, and what’s interesting about that, at some degree is like more power to them. I’m glad, hey, go for it. If you have a voice and you can affect change, there’s been a lot of real positive change from guys who have taken their platform and go, “Man, I’m carrying around a whole heck of a lot of influence right now. Think I’ll use it to do X.” We may not always agree with whatever that X thing is, but I do think, yeah, hey, if you’ve got a platform, leverage it. What I find really interesting is, however, I have a theory, okay, and I don’t have a ton of data to back it up, exactly. But here’s the theory. The theory is there’s a group of people who go, “Oh man, well, if so-and-so gets famous, they should use their platform to do X,” and they got all kinds of pressure on them, whether it’s from conservatives or liberals or men or women or whatever, they always have this pressure on them.

“Now that you’re famous, you really should care about… ” Well, Bob Barker, back in The Price is Right days, right at the end would always say, “And remember to have your pets spayed or neutered.” You just thought, wow, this is interesting.

Lawson Brown: Where did that memory come from? Oh my gosh.

Kent Evans: I don’t know. But it’s like Price is Right, the host was a man of influence and he chose to use his influence to talk about some kind of pet safeties issues, and I’m like, all right, hey, whatever, rock on, man. More power to you. What I think is interesting is there’s a group of people who want to scream and rant and yell at people like LeBron for how they use their influence. As if I ought to be able to decide, hey, LeBron, you got to have a pet issue of-

Lawson Brown: Right, because I don’t agree.

Kent Evans: … AIDS awareness or hunger in Africa, whatever your issue is. But I want to go back one step before all that happens, before all that happens. Why do famous people in kind of one genre, whether they’re a musician, an athlete, an actor, a game show host, why do they get so much influence? Here’s my working hypothesis.

Lawson Brown: Three minutes in and you are finally answering the questions.

Kent Evans: Golly, man, I need a little buildup. Okay, my working hypothesis is that nature abhors a vacuum. Remember that from physics. The influence vacuum has been created by dads not being influential. So what’s happened is over the course of say the last, I don’t know, 100 years, 50, 75, 100 years, and this is statistically, we could back this up, as dads have moved out of the picture… So back in 1960, there was maybe, oh, I don’t know, one out of six or seven kids were born to an unwed mother. Today, it’s more like one out of two, one out of three, depending on which stat you look at. So the fact that there are more kids growing up without fathers is documented and not up for debate, not up for debate.

What I can’t totally connect that I think is true, that I think is true is the reason that guys like… just use him as an example like LeBron or, or Bob Barker or whoever, Bono, when he was doing the AIDS awareness stuff, the reason those guys get so much influence is because there’s an influence vacuum that has been created over the last 50 years because of absentee fathers. So you have a 12 year old, 14 year old, 16 year old who really wants to look up to their dad. They really deep down, they want to have someone guide them through life. It’s like this inborn natural tendency for us to learn how to live from someone who’s gone before us. The best examples if they’re both alive or your mom and dad. Wouldn’t that be great? When we don’t do that, voila, those kids look for somebody.

Lawson Brown: Yeah. That vacuum is going to be filled.

Kent Evans: Absolutely. Absolutely. So what I think’s interesting is we’ve almost as a society put people… I’ll just again use LeBron as an example, which I mean, I’d love to him one day. I bet he’s a great guy. I’d love to learn about discipline and teamwork and study and he’s smart, smart guy, good business guy. I can learn a ton from LeBron James. I’m not against him. What I think we’ve done accidentally is we’ve put him in a really tough position. Here’s what we’ve said to guys like LeBron. “Hey man, go be an NBA all-star Hall of Famer, do that for 10 or 15 or 20 years. Then by the way, while you’re doing it, would you please parent my children, because I’m not going to do it? I got to go do something else. So while you’re busy being an NBA all-star and also being a husband and a parent of your own kids, could you also be the primary means of influence for my children?”

I mean, none, no dad would say out loud he woke up yesterday and that was his parenting strategy. But when we leave, that’s kind of what we’re doing, and so I almost like feel bad for these guys who are in this position where they’ve got 20 or 50 or a 100 million followers, so to speak and social media-

Lawson Brown: And all the pressure.

Kent Evans: … which is interesting we use that language, right, that social media has followers. I think that’s what Jesus said, is he said, “Follow me.” Okay, anyway, so we use that language following to indicate, basically we’ve asked LeBron James to be like a rabbi. Would you please lead everybody and let us follow you. I think if you want to be an NBA Hall of Famer, of course, what a great guy to follow. However, just because he’s great at basketball, does that mean I want him teaching ethics or money management or whatever, nuclear physics, right, to a generation of kids? Maybe not, right? Probably not.

I think we’ve put him in an awkward position because we’ve said, “Hey, look, I’m going to abdicate my job as a dad. And so when I do, and then I’m going to hold you accountable for it. So if you don’t use your influence the way I like, I’m going to go on social media and scream about you because… ” And here’s the tension. What we’re really angry about is we’re angry about the fact that why do people like that have so much influence? I think, my hypothesis is, it’s because dads have willingly and accidentally handed it over.

Lawson Brown: Yeah. So you ask yourself who it is doesn’t matter. But when something like that happens is your instinct like, oh no, I hope my child doesn’t follow that, and I think they probably will. If your answer is yes, then I think it’s time for… you got to think about that. You got to dig into yourself and why… whatever, in this case, LeBron tweeted, I did not have the thought like, oh no, what if Abigail sees that? She’s going to go running off the rails with him on that topic. That’s just that one example, but you know what else you made me think of is dads themselves, forget about sons or daughters, we as dads ourselves are very susceptible to being influenced. So it’s like, you don’t have the thought of… well, I said that too strongly. It’s not that you don’t have the thought of it. It’s like you’re caught up with it, caught up in addition to your child with it.

Kent Evans: Yeah, yeah. Right. You sure can be. You sure can be.

Lawson Brown: Well, it’s so easy for the marketing to happen. The marketing of that influence today is it’s so widespread. It’s so easily available. It’s always on, it’s always coming at you. Back in the Bob Barker day, I mean, six channels on the television and you maybe watch that show and a couple of things.

Kent Evans: I mean, how many people were really watching The Price is Right? I mean, let’s be honest.

Lawson Brown: But there’s zillions of channels and pages and Instagrams and Facebook and Twitter, and it’s just always coming. So it’s…

Kent Evans: Well, you what’s interesting, in your and my lifetime, there has been a new job defined as part of our culture, and it’s called the influencer, the influencer, right? It’s a person who almost by definition… Okay, if they’re a musician, they’re called a musician who has a lot of influence. If they’re a race car driver, they’re a race car driver who has a lot of influence. If they’re an influencer and I’m doing the air quotes on the video, if they’re an influencer, this is unfair a little, it’s almost like they don’t really do anything other than influence. They’ve actually figured out how to take maybe a product, a tennis shoe or a certain frying pan and convince people to buy it. So their job is actually just to convince people.

What are they good at? Convincing. That’s actually by definition what the influencers these days do for a living. What I think is really interesting is, if we look at it biblically and we look at it from how did God design the system as it’s supposed to work, we should be the influencers. Like, “Hey dad, guess what? If you’re a dad and you’re listening to this podcast, number one, what are you doing with your life? Why are you listening to us? But secondly-

Lawson Brown: They won’t, for long, the handful that are left.

Kent Evans: Now it’s over, yeah. If you’re still tuned in after that. No, but seriously dads should equal influencers. None of us want to… Well, none of us, that’s not fair. I think secretly deep down, you want to be a social media influencer. That’s actually your life’s ambition, isn’t it, Lawson?

Lawson Brown: Me?

Kent Evans: That was a great… Oh, that’s fantastic.

Lawson Brown: You totally lost it.

Kent Evans: That is fantastic. The pause, the pause was beautiful. Just, “Huh? Are we still… Is this recording? Is this on?” But I think at a certain level, every dad that I know, that I’ve ever met, and I’ve met, I don’t know, a thousand. I mean, it’s a lot in what we do at Manhood Journey. I’ve met them a bunch. They all want to be influential in the lives of their children. Now, in some cases they want to be hyper-controlling in every little, like, influence every decision they make, whether it’s should they put two hands at 10 and two? Every single decision, musical choice. I tried so hard to get my oldest son to not like country music. I mean, I really, really tried. However, it didn’t quite stick. It didn’t quite stick. So we disowned him. We wrote him out of the will. He’s out.

Lawson Brown: He’s gone.

Kent Evans: I’m just kidding. He’s actually taught me some things about country music I didn’t know that if you play it backwards, you get your car back and your woman back and your dog comes back to life. It’s amazing if you play them backwards. But okay, influencers. I have, when I think of the term influencer, I have kind of this negative perception. I have this perception that is they’re kind of shallow, they’re playing the game. They don’t really have any skill beyond just the ability to convince people, and they’re great at taking good Instagram pictures and making them no filter, and that’s what they do for a living. But you know what? It’s like everything else that God invented society wants to steal and then repackage it. We’ve done that with sex. We’ve done that with money. We’ve done that with lots of stuff. We’ve kind of done that with influencers because, hey man, if you’re a dad and you’re listening to this podcast, guess what, you either are or should be an influencer.

Lawson Brown: That’s what I was about to say.

Kent Evans: An influencer.

Lawson Brown: Maybe after the break, let’s-

Kent Evans: Yes, I said it first. In your face, Lawson.

Lawson Brown: Let’s dig in deeper on that-

Kent Evans: In your face.

Lawson Brown: … and it’s not like I don’t want to be the influencer of my children on my thoughts alone. I want it to be what I get from prayer, and when I get out of the Bible and what I hear God speaking in my own life. I want to be the convincer for them to be following the appropriate and only person to follow, in Jesus.

Kent Evans: Man, what a great word. Let’s end there. Let’s go to the break. On the flip side of the break, we’ll talk about a few ways that dads can maximize their influence with their children. We’ll get to that right after this.

Audio: Hey dad, do you ever wonder where you are on the godly father journey? It’s like, you want to be a more godly father, but you’re not totally sure where you’re standing right now and you’re not totally sure how to make meaningful progress. So what we built to help you and to help us is the godly father assessment. It is a 28 question survey that you can take that will help you assess your fatherhood in seven crucial categories. It will help you know whether you’re just starting out in this journey or you’re a pro who ought to be helping others on their journey. Go today and take this free godly father assessment so you’ll know two things, where are you now, and how can you make meaningful next step progress? Do this today at manhoodjourney.org, that’s manhoodjourney.org.

Kent Evans: All right. So we’re back, Kent and Lawson here. So Lawson, as we were talking, we were starting to like get into this space of spiritual influence. And you were talking about wanting to influence your children, not so much to control all their decisions, but in a way that aims them toward things that do matter. You want to be influential. Now your kids, for reference, if someone’s new to the podcast, tell us the ages of your two daughters.

Lawson Brown: 23 and 20. And yeah, you know what I thought about when we were talking before is it’s okay, like it’s okay for LeBron to be of influence. There are people in my life that I look at Instagram or whatever, and get a good thought. I may even take that thought and have a conversation with Audrey or Olivia or whoever, in our family. But I ultimately want to pass on what I hear God through prayer, what I get out of the Bible and have those kinds of conversations be the dominant in all things, way that I influence in my family. So it’s not easy. There’s a lot of white noise in this world. You’ve got to carve out that space, like we’ve talked about before, you’ve got to dedicate the time. Manhood Journey is a fantastic roadmap, a lot of tools, but it ultimately comes down to, is God the influencer of your life, dad? And then therefore, are you also bringing your family, your children into that?

Kent Evans: Man, it’s great. It’s almost in a sense what you just made me think of that I didn’t plan to say. This may throw you off, apologize in advance. But it’s almost like when you look at the moon and you realize that the moon is not a light source, it doesn’t emanate light at all. All it does is reflect the light. But when you see the full moon, your six, seven year old goes, “Gosh, look at the moon up there glowing.” What the moon’s actually doing is reflecting, and for us, for us to have-

Lawson Brown: Dude, is that the first time you’ve had that thought, in this kind of context? That’s pretty cool. You read that somewhere. You didn’t-

Kent Evans: I don’t know how to answer that. Wait a minute, I’ve got to scroll down on the Wikipedia page called moon reflection, moon reflecting. I mean, no, for me, it is interesting because I think this will sound maybe perhaps a little bit out there or metaphysical. I do think the way God set up nature is in many ways him revealing himself. I mean, it says it in scripture that he revealed himself through nature to make himself known. I think one of the things is if you… Again, I want to get overdone on this, but I have thought about before where you think there is one source of light in the universe.

Now there’s stars and they glow and they bright, but that the most magnetic source of light that actually holds the universe together, at least our Milky Way galaxy, is the sun. And so you just think about everything orbits around the sun and that whole like system of there is a central figure in our universe and it emanates light. Then you go, that sounds a lot like Jesus. There’s this central figure or God himself, there’s a central figure that is a light source. He is the light it’s called. So I have thought about that before, just how, in some ways I think you can overdo it, but in some ways, the way nature is set up. And I think fatherhood is a good example. I just thought, Lawson, I can’t even say-

Lawson Brown: Yeah. Your next book, Fatherhood is the Moon or You Dad Are Moon.

Kent Evans: Yeah. I just thought don’t… I just don’t want to say don’t moon your children. I think that’s such a bad father… I’m going down a path that would be very bad on a podcast. But I do think as a reflection that we go, man, what am I influencing unto? Right? So again, we’ll go back to the example of kind of a modern day social media influencer. Usually what influencer means is they’re aiming people toward some thing, whether that thing is an event or buy this concert ticket or buy this product, where the source, if you will, the actual end goal is the product. It’s Nike or Milky Way candies, or some concert for Taylor Swift. And I’m an influencer and I’m supposed to aim people to that, where for us, we are influencers in that same way and that we should be reflecting and directing our kids toward the actual source, which is God himself.

Lawson Brown: Yeah. Almost like reflecting, yes, but also redirecting like, “Hey, don’t look at me. I’m reflective of that.” Like let’s together look at the source.

Kent Evans: Yeah. Yeah. Because at some point I want to have influence to some degree in the lives of my children the whole time I’m alive, even when my oldest is 21, he’s married and right now I love to have at least some degree of influence in his life. I don’t want to have to make every decision for him, like how do you wash the clothes and make your coffee and go to school? That’s all the stuff I spent 18 or 19 years trying to get him to learn before he left here. Now that he’s gone, when he runs into trouble or when he has a question or if his young marriage is a little tense, I love for him to call me and go, “Hey Dad, man, Gracie and I are working through this thing and I could use your input.” Or “We’re considering a financial decision.” Man, I’d love to have influence in their lives.

I don’t want my influence to ever completely come to an end. However, I do hope it changes over time, right? I mean, if you have a 21 year old kid and you’re still telling him how to bathe himself, yeah, I’m assuming he’s not somehow handicapped at all. But if he’s got his wits about him and you still got to tell him everything, it’s exhausting to have to be in the source of everything in your kids’ lives. Which is why, to your point, I don’t want to be the source. I want to be a director, like a traffic cop. You know what, I’m like, “Hey, over there, over there, that’s where I want you to go.” Then over time they learn how to do that, and then it’s really powerful when you see them start to influence others. I just think what’s interesting… Well, go ahead. What do you think about that, Lawson?

Lawson Brown: I was thinking and some of it turns around where you become each other’s influence.

Kent Evans: Yeah. That’s the model, isn’t it? I mean like at some point… Well, with some notable exceptions and that is, I am a 100% resistant to my son’s attempt to influence me to like country music. Just to kind of go back to that topic, there are things I’m willing to let him influence me on. That’s not one of them. It’s like immediate hangup moment on the phone. “Hey Dad, about country music.” Click. What I would love for dads to be getting out of this episode is a couple things. Number one, when we see cultural influencers, we tend to bristle or we’re like, “Golly, how come people care what that actor thinks about politics or they care about what this athlete thinks about money or whatever?”

You just kind of go, that’s odd. Part of the visceral reaction to the frustration in some of that is not just because they’re using their influence in a way we wish they wouldn’t. It’s because we’ve given it over and deep down, deep down, we’re probably frustrated about the fact that as a society, I think dads, and to a less degree moms, because I think moms do this way better than we do. But I think dads have kind of handed over the influence to athletes and CEOs and senators and movie stars. Then in the end we go, “Gosh, I’m not sure I liked that equation. I don’t like where that ends up.” I think that’s part one.

Part two is, as a dad, biblically speaking, I should be the primary influencer in my kids’ lives as long as possible. There’s always exceptions. There are prodigal children. God himself was perfect, and his own kids rebelled and his grandkids murdered each other. I want a dad to hear if you do this right, dad, your kids will never get out of line. That’s not, that’s not the moral of this story. The moral of this story is to your point when things like that happen in the media, and some people are like, “Oh, they’re all up in arms about so-and-so using their influence in a negative way.”

Lawson Brown: [crosstalk 00:23:39] ask yourself, why does it bother you so much?

Kent Evans: I’m not freaking out. At my house in Louisville, Kentucky, I got two teenage boys in the house, neither of which are in danger of going off some cliff right this second because somebody tweeted something on social media. It’s not because I’m such a perfect dad. It is because I recognize and my wife recognize, and God’s blessed us with kids who are not magnetically pulled into that equation, right this minute. It could change next week for I know.

Lawson Brown: Yeah, that’s right. It’s ongoing, yeah.

Kent Evans: But what I do know is I want to give dads hope. Number one, let’s discern the real problem, and the real problem is we’ve given this over. The second thing is, dad, you can have influence and you can have a tremendous amount of influence. I’d like to suggest a few thoughts. Let me turn it over to you, Lawson, to kind of start to land the plane, and then I’ll suggest a couple of ways I think dads can have a lot of influence. So kind of a closing thought from you.

Lawson Brown: It has made me, since our conversation, when I went on that walk, be more aware of it just in general and give it more thought. I’d say, just start by having a conversation about it. Start by talking to your kid about it, and ask, ask questions, be ready to listen, and also have some thoughts ready about what they could replace that influence with and who, and bring your Bible to the conversation, bring Jesus and how he has affected your life into that conversation and just kind of help them also become more aware of all that’s coming at them, all the influence that is constantly being barraged into their eyeballs that they too can resist.

Kent Evans: Yeah. Yeah. Man, that’s amazing what you said. In fact, I think you said everything I was going to say, which now I don’t know what to do.

Lawson Brown: Whatever. I’ve never seen you speechless nor will I.

Kent Evans: [crosstalk 00:25:33] list off… he said that, he said that, he said that. Well, remember to have your pet spayed or neutered, and that’s all I got, the Bob Barker sign off. No, I think you hit on questions, dialogue, listening, bringing scripture, Jesus in, bam, home runs. The only little thing I would add and we can wrap this one up is I don’t think we replace an influence vacuum with a bigger influence vacuum. What I mean by that is we can’t just tell them, “Hey, stop listening to celebrities. Don’t pay attention to athletes.” That’s not going to work. What is going to work is a more compelling form of influence. So as opposed to trying to say, don’t do that, let’s get down to do do this. So for me, what’s interesting about this whole dynamic is I like to bring this stuff up at the dinner table. Let’s leverage it. Let’s leverage it.

“Hey, did you guys see what LeBron said on Twitter? What do you think about that? What do you think about influence? What do you think about him having influence? What you think about the 50 million people who are all going to jump off a cliff if he tells them to? Let’s have that whole conversation and help our kids be discerning customers of messages in society, not critics, not critics, but critical consumers of information. Because I really think influence is the dad’s game to win or the dad’s game to lose in most cases, in most cases. I hope we’ve done something today on this podcast to help you, dad, learn how to win that game so you are the most influential voice in the lives of your children, especially while they’re still in your home.

Lawson Brown: Well said.

Kent Evans: God bless you guys on your manhood journey. Go get them. We’ll be back next time. Look forward to it.

Audio: Hey Dad, thank you for listening to today’s show. If you found this episode helpful, remember you can get all the content and show notes at manhoodjourney.org/podcast. If you really liked it, please consider doing three things. Number one, share this podcast with someone. You can hit the share button in your app, wherever you listen to podcasts, or just call the person up and tell them to listen in. Number two, subscribe to this podcast so you get episodes automatically. That helps us as well to help dads find the show. You can do that through your favorite listening app, whatever that is. Finally, review this podcast. Leave us a review, good or bad, wherever you listen. Those reviews also help other dads find the show. You can always learn more about what we’re up to at manhoodjourney.org or fatheronpurpose.org. We will see you next week.

You’ve been dozing off to the Father on Purpose podcast, featuring Kent Evans and Lawson Brown. Now wake up, head over to fatheronpurpose.org for more tools back in help you be a godly, intentional and not completely horrible dad. Remember, you are not a father on accident, so go be a father on purpose.