The fatherhood traps of advancement and performance

Show Transcripts:

Intro: 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. 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. Go be a father on purpose. Please welcome your hosts, Kent and Lawson.

Kent Evans: Hey, dad. We are in the middle of a four-part series on four fatherhood traps. We’re talking about four things that are these potential traps dads can step into. Last week, we covered the traps of tradition and replication. This week, we’re going to cover the traps of advancement and performance and handily, they are abbreviated with the acronym T-R-A-P, because we think of this kind of stuff, Lawson. We think of it before we go live. How you doing?

Lawson Brown: Good to see you, dude. I was really proud of you for just rattling off T-R-A-P off the top of your head from what the genesis of where we were kind of beginning to go with this thing, so well done.

Kent Evans: I can spell four-letter words. Wait a minute. That’s not what I meant. We’re going to get off track, where we just started and we’re already off track.

Lawson Brown: Crap. No, trap.

Kent Evans: Speaking of that, so crap, once upon a time, I tried to get that word out of my vocabulary and for all the dads listening, quick free bonus tip for you on today’s episode that we didn’t even plan on talking about, I paid my sons a dollar every time I said that word, and I’ll bet you over the course of about, I don’t know, six months, I was probably out a grand total of $250, I’ll bet you. My kids made a fortune. One of my kids got a Ferrari off of… No, just kidding. They literally called it the crap dollar. They called it the crap dollar and it went on for months. Then, man, my use of that word went down by 98%.

Lawson Brown: Did you substitute it or did you just bite your tongue and get over having to have that come out of your mouth all the time? Well, what started that? Why did you care that you… Were you just like, “You know what? I’m saying this too much”?

Kent Evans: No, my wife hates that word. She hates that word. And so, out of both service to her and service to humanity and service to my children, I decided to try to clean up my act a little bit. I don’t think I replaced it. No, it actually was a fairly effective strategy. There you go, dads, if you want to get rid of a word in your vocabulary, pay your 8, 10, 12, 14-year-old children like I did, a dollar every time you say something. When you’re in bankruptcy court, because you now have no cash left, at least you won’t have a potty mouth.

Lawson, we’re talking about these traps of fatherhood and part of the reason that they’re traps is because some of it is actually a good thing. It’s not horrible. If you had a great granddad or a great dad for you to want to pick up some of the lessons, and so, you’re kind of moving tradition down through the family line, maybe you have a cool Christmas tradition that you’re doing with your family, because your dad did it, your granddad did it, or even the trap of replication where you’re just trying to create a little mini me of you, well, maybe you’re really good at budgeting, or maybe you’re really good at staying in shape, or reading God’s word, and so, your kids may be ought to listen to you. Even the apostle Paul said, “Follow me as I follow Christ.” Replicating some of your habits isn’t necessarily a bad thing.

Lawson Brown: Right on.

Kent Evans: Challenge is, we mix them. We take these ideas and we combine them with modern psychology and western capitalism and American cowboyism and your political preference and your economic view of the world and we smash all that together in the stew, and then they become, they sound a little biblical-y, they have like a Bible-ish sort of flavor to them, but they’re not really purely biblical. And so, what we’re going to look at this week are the second two traps that make up the T-R-A-P. We’re looking at A and P and it’s the trap of advancement and it’s the trap of performance.

What I’m going to do is give a one-sentence description of these two, and then I’m going to turn it over to you to get us started on advancement. The trap of advancement kind of sounds like this. “I just want my kids to have it better than I did.” That’s kind of a summary statement and we fall into that trap where that becomes our driving force as a dad, as incremental progress over time, or we fall into the trap of performance where we just say, “I want my kids to be successful. I don’t care what happens, long as they’re successful.” We use that word and it can mean some unbiblical things.

What do you think of when I say the trap of advancement? This kind of incremental approach to life loss and where if I got to a seven, my dad got to a six on some scale, whatever the scale is, education, money, you name it, I got to a seven standing on the shoulders, I want my kids to get to an eight. And so, I feel like I’m in this never-ending chain of slight improvement. If that’s what I hand my kids, I’ve all of a sudden become a successful father. What does that make you think of?

Lawson Brown: Well, I mean, it is accurate. Our children’s starting point is us because we are where we are doing what we’re doing when we have them, that’s obviously where they begin. And so, I think that’s a good analogy. My dad got us here to a six and I went from a six to a seven and now I have children. And so, their starting point is seven. It’s logical. It makes sense. I get that. Like you said, advancement is not a bad thing. Of course, I want for my kids, the Bible doesn’t say, pray for failure. Let’s go back to what we said the last time too, is why is this important and how are you measuring it? What is your motive behind wanting your child having a starting point of seven to go to an eight or a nine? What’s behind that?

And so, if it’s coming from a place, I think in both of these, I’ll start with advancement. I ask myself, especially as my kids and my girls are getting older and really beginning to get toward that time in their life where they’re spreading their own wings for advancement and performance both is, am I wanting more for them because it’s somehow a reflection of what good a job I’ve done or not?

And so, in the case of advancement back to your point, they’re starting at a seven. I hope for them to get to an eight. What I don’t hope for is for them to go to a six or a five, whatever that may mean. However, there’s some societal pressure that I don’t vibe with. I don’t agree with the kind of programmed formula for every child in our modern day society needs to follow the following certain steps.

I think it’s a beautiful thing that nowadays, there are so many different ways of getting education and experience and following your passion, making money and all that. For now, I think we’re talking advancement as far as what the world sees as advancement and that’s okay. That’s not a bad thing like you said, but I’m loving where in our life here recently in those last few months, we’ve really kind of begun to feel a spiritual sort of, I don’t want to say awakening because it wasn’t asleep necessarily, but it’s just a renewed kind of refreshed among the four of us here at home. My daughters are kind of the ones that are more often bringing things up than me as a parent. That is advancement to me and I love it.

Kent Evans: Sure.

Lawson Brown: It’s helping me. They’re bringing new light and new fresh thought into my own life and bring-

Kent Evans: Well, I think for sure, you and I both agree, we definitely want our kids to be more spiritually mature than we are. I mean, come on.

Lawson Brown: I mean, especially at their age, I was completely havoc-led. I think you’ve got a cough. I’m trying not make you-

Kent Evans: My driving force was chaos.

Lawson Brown: It kind of was. I was attracted to it and it was just Christian faith and all that was really kind of zero part of my life almost. They, on this spectrum are already way, way, way, way ahead of where I was and that’s not of my doing. I think it’s partly because of where they came into our life at the time and mostly Audrey and kind of the influences that God put into our life that impacted them as well.

Kent Evans: Well, and I think one of the tough parts about this trap of advancement is if you’re going to advance something, you have to be able to measure it. If you have 100 grand in the bank, then you know what’s more than that, 101,000. Or if you’re my height, you’re 5’3″, you know what’s taller than that, basically everybody, but they had 5’4″. You can measure the things that you want to “advance.” Then, that’s where this gets off track is we start to say, “Well, if I had a home that was a three-bedroom home, then gee, my kids are more successful or they advance better if they have a four-bedroom home or if I made X by 27, they make X by 25.” You start to measure stuff.

However, the challenge is most of the really important spiritual stuff can’t really be measured. You and I were talking before we got on the air and Hunter, our show producer, he said, “Yeah, it’s not like the Holy Spirit has an iOS update.” We’re like, we’re on a Holy Spirit 2022.7, and next year’s Holy Spirit will be better than this year’s. You and I have the same exact Holy Spirit that the Augustine had. We have the same Holy Spirit that the apostle Paul had. We have the same exact Holy Spirit, so some of the things-

Lawson Brown: That’s an interesting thought.

Kent Evans: I want my kids to have some of the things the exact same way I have them. For example, the Bible tells us that we have every spiritual blessing in Christ Jesus, every, every. What am I going to say to God? Well, you only gave me 6 out of 10 spiritual blessings. And so, gee, if I’m a successful dad, my kids will have 7 out of 10. It’s just not biblical. And so, the challenge with the advancement piece is it only tends to work for the things you can measure, but some of the most important things, you really can’t measure and they haven’t changed since the dawn of time.

Lawson Brown: Maybe we aren’t the person to do the measuring. Maybe we’re confused ourselves and it doesn’t all have to be, I don’t think in an advancement context something that, you’re right, it’s easy to do, it’s easy to measure, but it’s okay to have some subjective perspective. I also thought just listening to you just then, there’s some real beauty and learning that comes from struggle and maybe it’s good for our kids to, in some areas of their life, not retain that starting point of seven, because a lot of our growth comes from back when we were a three or a four on something and had to move ourselves through versus just someone, in this case, us, God, whatever, picking them up, just plopping them into a seven on the scale. They’re like, “Oh, great. This was super easy and I’m just here, well…”

Kent Evans: I’ll just start here. I definitely think of my son and his wife, they’re moving into a town home this coming summer and it’s kind of all they can afford. It’s a lot smaller than, well, than our house and it’s a lot less expensive and they can only afford to rent and things like that, where they’re starting at a phase in their 20s where that’s where April and I kind of started. We had a little bit of a leg up in our 20s and then we took steps from there and that growth process of learning how to manage a budget of X, now, I probably manage a budget of 3X or 4X compared to where I was in my 20s. And so, some of that progression is really healthy and some of the damage that we do to people is they start out with so many resources, you take your average 20-year-old millionaire athlete, what do they normally do in their 20s? They make a lot of bad choices.

Part of that is because they get overwhelmed with resources that maybe they have or haven’t quite been ready to receive or know how to manage well. You said something in our notes for the show, Lawson. You said something that I want to read and I want you to double down on. You mentioned it a minute ago, but I think you went past it too quick, because it’s brilliant what you said. You said, “My kids’ advancement can become a reflection of my own influence and therefore I’m rewarded by their accomplishment.” And so, how does that play into this idea of advancement?

Lawson Brown: I definitely have felt that and I’m proud of my children in a whole lot of ways. I do want to test my motive at times because I love some of the things that they’re doing, some of the things that they become good at, some of their spiritual grounding, some of their ways in which they… we’ve always had a saying in our family of look for the overlooked.

Kent Evans: Wow.

Lawson Brown: Keep an eye out, and I love the ways that they do a lot of things. I have found myself in times in conversation with other people, kind of in my brain, I’m rubbing my hands together because I know the question’s coming, “So tell me about your kids.” I am proud of them and I love talking about them, but I got to be careful to question my motive on am I excited to talk about what I love about the lifestyle of my children, because what that means is that I’m a good dad, and that’s a trap. That’s a tricky place to be.

You can find your footing getting in some sticky, quick sand kind of footing and it’s hard to get out of once you’re in it. Back to the original kind of thought behind some of this is what is our motive on wanting our kids to have it better than we did on their degree of advancement and in what ways. What’s that rooted and what is that intention behind it? What’s our motive?

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It’s interesting, in a sense I’m thinking of, for example, I mentioned him a minute ago, my oldest son, he has a lot of musical skill and I think he had a little bit of it wired in. He took to it quick, but man, he’s worked really hard for about 10 years on his musical craft since he was in his, 11 or 12 years old and he’s playing guitar, and now, he’s really good musician, very capable. Upfront last weekend, I went and watched him graduate from college and my daughter-in-law Gracie, they’re both now college graduates, freshly minted. I saw them lead worship, both of them. Gracie was on the cello. Alex was on the guitar and he was singing and leading the worship. I can just see his growth and progression.

I can’t do any of that. Zero. And so, one of the things I want to test all of our dads with is your children may have a calling or a skill set or a job to do that has nothing to do with what you can teach them. I couldn’t teach him a thing about music. I still don’t understand vast majority of music theory he tries to explain to me. It’s just lost on me. In some ways, if I were to say, “Hey, you know what, Alex, if you could just become a slightly better musician than your dad, that’d be great.” But in reality, it’s not even comparable. It’s like he is light years ahead of me and he’s going to be held accountable for that gift, not just being a little better than his own dad.

And so, sometimes we get this advancement thing out where we become the watermark and our kids need to go above us. Man, there may be a whole different mark. For all I know, he’s supposed to be the most amazing guitar player ever in the history of time and that’s part of what God’s called him to do. If he doesn’t hit that mark, he will have failed, not to mention where I started as a guitar player, which is absolute zero. And so, I think we get it all co-mingled because we’re looking to our kids’ advancement as a proxy for our own.

Lawson Brown: I love that. That’s a cool way of thinking about it, because you had very little to do with his God-given talent and his progress, his advancement. It’s like that old saying where if you find a turtle on a fence post, you know he didn’t get there on his own, somebody put him there. And so, you’re watching your kids do this and that can be a very, it’s a bit of a relief, frankly. I had nothing to do with it, it was God did that. Not me. I get to be along for the ride and to watch from the bleacher seats on some of this stuff that God’s doing in the lives of our children. I think that’s fun and great. Dads, talking to myself too, it’s not on us. Everything is not on us. It’s our nature to hold tight and to control and be in charge and help direct and give guidance, but God is driving this train, not us.

Kent Evans: Well, I’m going to overlook the fact that you just compared my son to a turtle on the fence post. Whatever Lawson, it’s fine. You also said something before we started that sometimes the opposite happens in the mindset of a dad where he may feel insecure or threatened by a child who advances beyond their own accomplishment. Talk a little bit about that and then we’re going to move into the trap of performance.

Lawson Brown: I actually think it’s a good segue to performance because it’s both. I don’t think it’s all that common, but there is a bit of like, how did that happen that my kid is more successful than me or maybe we’ve got some dads out there that are… I’ve been in a slump before career-wise and had a child of mine been doing something great in that time. It’s hard to not just be jealous. It’s a sin. It’s a trap we fall into. And so, to ignore that that could even be a possibility I think is naive. In that naivety, you can overlook something that you may be faltering on. And so, I think it’s just a thought, like if your kid is really performing at baseball, or in your case music, or in my case both girls can sing and dance and act and they’re just better at some things than I was or ever will be.

If I’m finding myself going, “I’m jealous of that or I resent them for that.” I think it’s just something to maybe ask yourself and maybe be aware of that that is something that potentially could arise. Then, another way of thinking about it too, Kent, is let’s say you are in a conversation with some other dads and their kids have accomplished this and have this job title and have a certain advancement in the world, whatever you want to figure out to be, and it’s not easy to avoid comparing your children.

Like I said, my girls are doing some… They’re just not following a programmed high school, then college, and then going to getting a job and beginning to raise a family. Their paths are these kind of weaving, flowing, not really sure, and we are absolutely fantastic with that. We are open-handed. God’s going to fill your hands at the right time with the right thing, but for now, you just follow how you’re doing and it’s going to come. We’re very unworried about that, but that is not at all what society expects, I don’t think, in a lot of cases.

Kent Evans: I think of, even though this isn’t a fatherhood example, I think of in the New Testament when John the Baptist was doing his thing, and then Jesus comes on the scene and then John’s disciples come to him and say, “Hey, how about this Jesus guy?” John, the Baptist says, “He must increase and I must decrease.” John was totally cool with giving way to the Messiah. He was like, “Nah, this is great.” I think there’s a principle in there that is he was selfless, he was not prideful, he was really glad that someone “better than him” had come in his lifetime. I think that principle is the same. I would love it if my children had things they were able to do that were beyond my capacity to do them. I think that’d be awesome, which leads us into this last trap we want to talk about, T-R-A-P, advancement and then the last one is performance.

It’s very closely linked to advancement, but the performance trap is basically the trap where we say, “I just want my kids to be successful.” What we usually mean by that is successful by some kind of worldly metric. They’re successful financially, or they are successful in terms of their job or title, or they’re successful in terms of sports. They are currently playing bitty baseball and success looks like the Major League Baseball Hall of Fame. That’s the outlet for success, or popularity, they’re a YouTuber with 27 followers, and now, they’re going to be a YouTuber with 27 million followers or whatever. That trap again is tied a little bit to sometimes we want that for them so that, hey, they can be successful.

Sometimes we want that for us, but usually, man, it’s a worldly metric and we’re going to view their success through that lens. I have a friend whose children are all grown and out of the home and he’s a great guy, but when we get together for lunch, he’s very quick to point out the scope of his children’s responsibilities. “My son is now president of X and all this.” It’s like, that’s great. I mean, to some degree, I love the update, and I think for the most part, it is shared in that spirit, but clearly, he is really happy. I don’t know that he’d be so quick to talk about it if his son was currently still working as a low level manager at that company. And so, I think he’s-

Lawson Brown: That’s interesting. I’ve purposefully, the last year, begun to answer the question of when someone asks about my kids, I start with, “Oh my God, they’re such good people. I just love their heart.” Start with that versus the normal, what I’ve always ever done is, “Well, they’re…” and then you fill in the blank with the current status of certain things, where they’ve advanced, what their performance is.

Second thought myself, I want to double down on that if you’re getting jealous or resent, maybe that’s not what is behind it, but I remember some of the things that we’ve talked about here, Kent, and that is how much damage a dad can do and how much uplifting a dad’s words can do. I’ve got a friend whose son played high school football and then got a full ride scholarship to Rutgers and played and was on TV, and, oh my gosh, this dad was the biggest fan and it was coming from that what you were describing as John the Baptist. John the Baptist recognized that he had played his part and he had cleared away, but now his job was pointing at the Messiah in that case, obviously, but in this case, my buddy. He was so excited for how successful his kid was at that. He was just the number one biggest fan and uplifted his child. You could see it when they were together, when they were talking.

Then, on the converse of that, Buddy’s kid, she graduated from Georgia Tech with honors and they were together telling me about it. She was just, it was graduation, blah, blah, blah. The comment was made, “Well, we’ll see what she can do with it.” You could just feel the deflation from all that went into getting to that point.

Kent Evans: Wow.

Lawson Brown: One phrase. I guess I want to caution this. I guess, I don’t know if it’s a fifth trap or just part of what goes along with this.

Kent Evans: It’s not a fifth trap, because the word trap only has four letters in it.

Lawson Brown: It won’t fit.

Kent Evans: Trapf.

Lawson Brown: You can’t have trap J, jealous.

Kent Evans: Traps. Can you start with an S?

Lawson Brown: I don’t know. I’m sure you’ll come up with that. But my point is dads can do a lot of good and they can also do a lot of harm. And so, I guess I throw that into our mix here today of testing our motive and understanding what’s behind what we want for our kids and why and what we’re doing alongside them. Are we a barrier or are we a boost?

Kent Evans: I like that. The barrier or boost. One of the things, Lawson, we hear from dads all the time and they will say things like they don’t feel like they’re succeeding as a dad. They feel like a failure. They feel like they’re not doing enough. A lot of that is again, back to, is it number of hours a day? Is it the size of the annual vacation or that there is the vacation? What are the things that dads are using in order to either indict or vindicate their fatherhood?

One of the things I want to encourage dads with is, as we’re talking about these traps, and as we’re talking about our kids walking through life, what I’m coming to grips with as a father is I just want to be faithful. That’s kind of the word that God keeps showing me in my… I’m now 52 at the time of recording this one, I’ve got one child out of the house and married and finished college recently. I got one in college and I got high school, grade school. As my kids are starting just now to leave the home, I’m realizing that they may not make every single decision the way that I would make it. They may not choose the exact same path that I would choose, but they’re making wise choices. They’re making thoughtful choices. They’re following what they believe God’s calling them to do.

And so, for me as a dad, what I really want to be is just faithful. I want to be able just to say, as Jesus said in the new Testament, he said, “I’ve not lost any one of them you gave me.” He says in one of his prayers to God, “I have kept all of those you gave me.” It’s this idea that all of the people Jesus was discipling, he discipled them perfectly. Now, I’m not going to do it perfectly, but that’s kind of where my head wants to be. I want to be able to say, “Hey God, the kids you gave me to raise, I raised them intentionally. I did what I thought you called me to do.” We might have a great laugh up in heaven where he’s like, “Oh, remember that time you thought you were doing the right thing and it turned out to be a really dumb thing?” There’s going to be plenty of those.

But for me, man, I just want to be faithful because a lot of the things that dads want to do are things that can be measured through either sports accomplishments or money. We’ve talked about that today, but some of the most important things that we do as a dad just simply can’t be measured. How do you measure physical presence? How do you measure a listening ear? How do you measure the amount of love I have for my children? How do you measure the amount of comfort I give them when they’re hurting? How do you measure… The stuff that really matters is hard to measure.

Lawson Brown: You can’t go into your child’s settings and see what Holy Spirit OS version they’re on and measure it. You’re right and, look, to me, that’s a great resting point that that’s our job is to be faithful. Our job isn’t to ensure that our kids go from a seven to an eight and advance from where we began them to where where we want them to be, or to get the right job, or to make the right money, and have the biggest house or whatever, or even to try to measure their degree of faith growth themselves, because you just kind of can’t. God is doing that. Our job is to do that for ourselves and kind of with them as well. I think that can be like a… like all right. It’s our job is to be faithful and that means relying on God period.

Kent Evans: One of my friends, Jeff, likes to say, “We’re going to do the work and we’re going to leave the outcomes to God.” I’ve heard a lot of people say something similar where my job is not to be in the outcomes business. My job is to be in the faithful business and to do my part. Dad, I hope if you’ve been listening to the last couple of weeks, if you miss last week, go back and listen so that you can get the T and the R of tradition and replication. This week, we talked about advancement and performance. These are traps. They have a lot of allure to them. They are things that in many ways are not necessarily bad things, but over-keyed and when we used the world’s schemes, the world’s measurements and metrics, these become a not so biblical way to raise our and lead our families.

Dad, I hope this has been encouraging to you. Lawson and I have had a blast and don’t fall into one of these traps and we’ll see you back here next week with a brand new episode of the Father on Purpose Podcast.

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Outro: 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 that can 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.