2023-04-19_934-How_to_Invest_in_Your_Children_at_a_Very_Young_Age_Part_15-Invest_Into_the_Emotional_Stability_and_Sense_of_Significance_of_Your

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00:00:30.000 | Welcome to Radical Personal Finance, a show dedicated to providing you with the knowledge, skills, insight,

00:00:34.200 | and encouragement you need to live a rich and meaningful life now,

00:00:37.200 | while building a plan for financial freedom in ten years or less.

00:00:40.200 | My name is Josh Rashidz, I'm your host.

00:00:41.800 | Today we're going to start the process of winding down this series we're doing on how to invest in your children at an early age.

00:00:48.400 | At the moment I have three shows planned to wind down this series.

00:00:51.600 | We're going to wrap it up this week.

00:00:53.200 | And in this particular episode I want to continue on the theme of how to invest into the spirit of your children.

00:00:59.800 | My loose organizing theme was invest in their body, invest in their mind, and now invest in their spirit.

00:01:05.200 | And in the previous episode I spent a lot of time talking about the idea of installing a high-quality operating system into the mind of your child,

00:01:12.000 | an operating system of success.

00:01:14.000 | We talked about grit, and a growth mindset, and passion, and learning to fail, and having a robust philosophy, etc.

00:01:21.200 | Now, granted, we should quickly note that these subjects are fairly fluffy, and that can be a little frustrating.

00:01:28.800 | One of the great advantages of investing into your children using financial products is that we can use numbers.

00:01:37.400 | They're precise.

00:01:38.600 | This is one of the things that is so incredibly appealing about financial planning.

00:01:42.200 | It's a semi-precise science.

00:01:44.200 | As a financial planner I can ask you, "Well, dear Mr. Client, what kind of college do you want your child to go to?"

00:01:50.200 | And you'll tell me, "I want my child to go to an Ivy League," or "I want my child to go to a state university."

00:01:54.600 | So we'll pull up an example college, we'll look at what the tuition rates are, we'll calculate that to a discounted present value,

00:02:01.800 | and I'll tell you how much you need to invest into your son's 529 account.

00:02:06.000 | Great!

00:02:08.200 | And then your son arrives at age 18 and has lots of money for college.

00:02:11.800 | Great!

00:02:14.400 | But does that mean that your son is going to be successful?

00:02:20.800 | It's a lot harder to predict.

00:02:23.400 | College does not per se make your child successful.

00:02:26.400 | And if you had to choose between a child who is successful in life, however you define it, versus a child who went to college,

00:02:35.200 | what we want is success.

00:02:36.600 | Now, college is an important component of that, but what we want is success.

00:02:40.200 | And in order to deal with that topic of success, we have to deal with these fluffy things,

00:02:45.000 | because although we may not be able to measure this precisely, there's truth there.

00:02:51.800 | It may be one thing to say, "I'm going to look at the investing in the body."

00:02:55.000 | Okay, well, we can do blood work and find out how healthy is a child's metabolism.

00:03:00.400 | We can study his weight and his BMI, is he a healthy weight?

00:03:03.600 | We can take a look at his gym numbers, how much are his lifts?

00:03:08.800 | We can take a look at his physical shape, does he exude health in some way?

00:03:14.000 | Is his skin clear or his teeth straight?

00:03:16.200 | Is he well-formed?

00:03:18.800 | We can measure these things with some precision.

00:03:21.600 | With regard to the mind, we can measure this with some precision.

00:03:25.200 | We can administer IQ tests, or we can study the data that shows that,

00:03:28.400 | "Hey, if your child plays music, then he's likely to be a little bit more intelligent or have varying levels of intelligence."

00:03:34.200 | We can look at how your child does on standardized tests.

00:03:38.400 | But when we get to this space of investing in the spirit of your child, it's imprecise.

00:03:44.800 | And yet, it's important.

00:03:47.200 | We know it's important, we just don't quite know how to get at it.

00:03:50.800 | We know that those soft skills that I talked about in the previous episode are really important,

00:03:55.200 | but how do we do that? How do we get at it?

00:04:00.000 | So, I have two more themes that I want to explore with you in terms of investing in a child's spirit.

00:04:04.600 | They are the themes of stability and significance.

00:04:10.000 | Let's begin with stability.

00:04:13.200 | At every level, a healthy child is one who is stable.

00:04:20.900 | And stability can be expressed in multiple dimensions.

00:04:25.400 | At its core, I think emotional stability is something that we're looking for.

00:04:30.600 | We want our children to be emotionally stable.

00:04:34.800 | If you study children or adolescents who are emotionally unstable,

00:04:41.200 | it's one of the most frustrating experiences you can have,

00:04:44.500 | because this emotional instability seems to affect every other part of their life in a really profound and impressive way.

00:04:53.500 | And yet, it's not necessary. It's not necessary that a child go through these incredible extremes.

00:04:59.900 | We know that some change is going to be necessary.

00:05:02.700 | As your child starts to experience hormones, go through adolescence, and everything is changing,

00:05:08.200 | life circumstances are changing, there is a degree of instability that can enter in from that.

00:05:13.800 | But at its core, if a child is stable, then the child can advance through life in a fairly consistent and productive way.

00:05:22.900 | I am convinced that while certainly there is a fundamental element of hormonal change, etc., that children go through,

00:05:32.900 | I'm convinced that a lot of the angst, the teenage angst, and all of the other stuff is pretty optional.

00:05:39.400 | And a lot more of it is produced by how we parent and the expectations that we establish for our children

00:05:45.900 | than by any directive that this must happen.

00:05:49.000 | Now, I do not have teenagers yet, so I can't speak yet from personal experience,

00:05:53.200 | but having tried to listen to a lot of people all the way through, from studying my own life and my own process of maturity, etc.,

00:05:59.700 | a lot of that stuff is just unnecessary.

00:06:02.500 | And if you can avoid your child going through extreme emotional waves and becoming hyper-extreme in his approach or his philosophy on life, etc.,

00:06:15.500 | you can just have an overall more successful person.

00:06:19.300 | So where does that come from? Where does emotional stability come from?

00:06:23.600 | At its core, I think most of it comes from the circumstances in which the child grows up

00:06:30.800 | and the amount of love and affection that the child experiences throughout his life.

00:06:36.500 | When I think of... I think here it's helpful to talk about extremes.

00:06:41.000 | Now, on the negative extreme, let's use an example of, say, someone like a child soldier

00:06:47.300 | or somebody who's been abused as a child, you know, rescued from sex trafficking, something like that.

00:06:54.700 | I don't know... I haven't known personally of the experiences of children.

00:07:00.000 | I haven't talked to children who were child soldiers, but I've always been gripped by the images that you'll find

00:07:04.700 | when you see a nine-year-old boy holding an AK-47 and you recognize what he's doing and the hell that he is living in.

00:07:12.700 | I've read stories of children who have watched their parents murdered in front of them,

00:07:18.300 | and then they've been abducted and kidnapped by those who murdered their parents and taken away to serve as child soldiers.

00:07:26.500 | And they're raised in these... they grow up in these circumstances of extreme... just extreme living.

00:07:33.500 | And, man, is there a more screwed up adult human being than that?

00:07:38.000 | I mean, that's a good recipe for destruction. That's a good recipe for destroying an adult human.

00:07:46.300 | And there's so much that happens when a child faces that kind of trauma and faces a complete lack of normalcy in his life

00:07:55.900 | that makes it very difficult for the child to overcome as an adult.

00:08:01.600 | I have spoken both with people who have been abused as children, as well as with counselors and rescuers who work to rescue abused children.

00:08:11.900 | And I think we see the similar thing. If a child is orphaned or is abused in unspeakable ways,

00:08:19.800 | it traumatizes the child in a way that is very hard to ever overcome.

00:08:26.700 | You can be interacting with a guy who's in a 50-year-old body. He seems like he should be a normal adult.

00:08:34.000 | And yet, when you get into his life a little bit, you realize he has no impulse control.

00:08:38.500 | He can't control his spending. He can't control his substance use.

00:08:41.900 | He just has no emotional regulation. You trace it back. And it's really fascinating to study the psychology of it.

00:08:48.500 | It's my understanding that when a young child experiences intense trauma or intense levels of abuse,

00:08:56.500 | that quite literally it stops the growth process, the emotional growth process of the child's brain.

00:09:02.500 | And so you're dealing with adults in body, but you're dealing with little children in brain.

00:09:08.400 | And it makes it difficult for them to handle normal things.

00:09:12.700 | Now, if you contrast that with somebody who's never experienced that trauma, somebody who's never experienced that abuse,

00:09:22.200 | they just don't struggle with the same things at all.

00:09:25.700 | Here, I don't want to try to push myself forward, but I can speak to this from a personal experience

00:09:32.900 | because of the very charmed and privileged and blessed lifestyle that I grew up in.

00:09:38.300 | Some months back, a young friend of mine, a young teenage friend of mine, asked me a very perceptive question.

00:09:44.800 | He said, asked me something about my own perspective of encouragement and emotion.

00:09:49.900 | I can't remember the specific question, but he asked me a question.

00:09:52.300 | And as I thought about the question, actually, I do remember the question, excuse me.

00:09:55.800 | He asked me, he said, "Joshua, how do you feel most loved?"

00:09:59.500 | Or like, "What are the things that cause you to feel the most loved?"

00:10:03.700 | And we were talking about it loved by God and how do I experience that?

00:10:07.600 | And I thought about the question and my answer to him was, "I can't even really relate to,

00:10:15.100 | I can't really even relate to the question because the question would imply that I know what it's like to not be loved.

00:10:23.800 | And that is something that I have never known.

00:10:27.500 | I have never known what it was like to not be loved, to not be accepted, to not be appreciated, to not be,

00:10:38.000 | I'm repeating it, but to not be loved."

00:10:41.100 | And when I commented that and I explained further, I said, "As a child, I've known nothing but unconditional love from everyone around me.

00:10:51.200 | My parents loved me.

00:10:52.700 | They were grateful that I was there.

00:10:54.600 | I wasn't an accident.

00:10:55.800 | They were thrilled that I came along as their child.

00:10:58.300 | They showed me and showered me with love my entire life.

00:11:05.400 | That love was expressed in many ways consistently throughout my entire childhood.

00:11:11.600 | I'm the youngest of seven children.

00:11:13.200 | All of my elder siblings loved me.

00:11:15.000 | They treated me well.

00:11:16.000 | They never bullied me.

00:11:17.000 | They never were unkind to me.

00:11:19.900 | I've known nothing but kindness and love from all of the communities that I've been involved in in my entire life, the church that I grew up in, the friends of the family, etc.

00:11:30.700 | I've always been surrounded by love.

00:11:34.200 | When I was in high school and in a traditional high school, a Christian high school where they had good controls on bullying, etc., I was never bullied.

00:11:45.900 | No one was ever unkind to me, probably because I'm large.

00:11:49.800 | And so I never experienced what it was like to be bullied or to be criticized in some way.

00:11:54.600 | All through college, I avoided people that I didn't like, but no one was ever unkind to me.

00:11:59.000 | Again, I've always had respect of being a large, physically large guy.

00:12:02.100 | No one does anything to my face.

00:12:04.300 | It wasn't until I was an adult that I actually had people not want to be in relationship with me, people who they met me and basically just went their own way.

00:12:15.100 | And as an adult, I was able to handle it emotionally.

00:12:18.400 | So I never dreamed that I'd never had a relationship that was cut short, with the exception of a couple of times that happened when I was in my late 20s that I can specifically identify,

00:12:31.100 | where people have said like, "I don't like Joshua. I don't want to be like him."

00:12:35.000 | That was a new experience for me.

00:12:37.600 | Those people who cut me off were not people that I was particularly close to.

00:12:41.900 | They were just casual relationships, and it's perfectly fine.

00:12:45.500 | And so it didn't hurt me deeply.

00:12:46.900 | I've never been rejected in that way.

00:12:50.000 | And so it sounds a little weird, right, for me to talk about this stuff in public, but I want to say that what I have experienced personally is that gives you an intense level of emotional stability.

00:13:00.900 | I've never worried.

00:13:02.000 | I've never known what it was like to be rejected by people.

00:13:05.500 | And because I've never known what it was like to be rejected by people, then I've never worried about people rejecting me.

00:13:13.000 | I guess there was perhaps some experience in sales.

00:13:16.900 | Certainly people rejected me as a salesman, but I never took that.

00:13:21.400 | After the initial, I quickly learned that it's never personal.

00:13:24.500 | It's just sales.

00:13:25.200 | It's no big deal.

00:13:26.400 | And the fact that somebody doesn't want to buy your insurance policy doesn't reflect anything on who you are or what kinds of friends you can be.

00:13:35.100 | And so I've always had a strong level of emotional stability.

00:13:40.800 | And as I've reflected on my life, that emotional stability pours itself out in other areas of my life.

00:13:47.700 | Having a strong and healthy sense of self, self-esteem, and being emotionally stable, knowing that everyone from my wife to my children to my parents to God in heaven love me, it just gives you a strong base to work from.

00:14:01.600 | And, you know, I guess the other, forgive me, a little bit introspective here, but I guess the other thing that the other times I've experienced rejection were never for me, but they've always been for my ideas or my opinions.

00:14:16.500 | So there have been times in radical personal finance where I have learned I share something that somebody disagrees with and they don't want to, they don't like it.

00:14:25.300 | They leave a nasty review or something like that.

00:14:27.200 | But again, all of that stuff happened as I was an adult and emotionally mature enough to handle it.

00:14:33.300 | My wife loves me and my children love me, then who cares what some random weirdo on the Internet says.

00:14:38.500 | Anytime I meet a random weirdo on the Internet in real life, we always have a kind and productive situation.

00:14:45.200 | So I see no reason, so the point is that when you have that foundation of emotional security, it can lead to being able to weather the storms of life in a very strong way.

00:14:56.900 | And so I see this as a fundamental core thing that we want our children to know.

00:15:01.700 | We want our children to be emotionally stable.

00:15:05.700 | And while I can't articulate all of the specific things to do, I think that basically it means surrounding a child with a positive and stable environment.

00:15:17.500 | And at its core, emotional stability is going to flow to a child from those who are around.

00:15:24.200 | Now, different people will have different natural characteristics.

00:15:29.000 | One of my great challenges as a parent is that some of my children are very emotionally intense.

00:15:35.100 | And so it's been quite challenging for me to know how to love them and nurture them in the midst of their emotional intensity and teach them how to dial it down.

00:15:46.000 | But there's no doubt in my mind that whatever their natural bent for emotional intensity is, that in the fullness of time, if I can create the healthiest possible environment around them,

00:16:00.300 | then in the fullness of time, they will develop those skills of emotional regulation, etc.

00:16:05.900 | And so the strong, stable foundation of children being loved gives them an incredible advantage throughout all of their lifetime.

00:16:14.900 | So at the most basic level, I think the way that you invest into your children to build emotional stability is you have and you demonstrate unceasing, unconditional love.

00:16:32.300 | And you seek to surround them with an environment in which they have unceasing, unconditional love.

00:16:40.400 | I could probably preach a sermon on what that means for quite some time, but I don't think this is the time for it.

00:16:48.500 | But this needs to be consistent throughout someone's life.

00:16:53.100 | And this is especially important from fathers.

00:16:56.500 | The love that children receive from fathers is so fundamental to their self-image.

00:17:02.300 | It affects their lives massively to the point where you can draw strong correlations between absent fathers, uninvolved fathers, abusive fathers, and a whole host of social issues and antisocial behavior.

00:17:21.500 | This affects men and women differently.

00:17:23.900 | Girls, teenage girls especially, we call them daddy issues.

00:17:28.000 | They're much more likely to engage in promiscuous sexual behavior and destructive relationships if they don't have a close relationship with their father.

00:17:36.200 | In men, homosexual behavior is highly correlated to poor father figures.

00:17:41.900 | Atheism, highly correlated to men who have bad relationships with their fathers, who have absent fathers, etc.

00:17:49.300 | And so you can see these strong correlations to these antisocial lifestyles and behaviors versus simply the lack of love, the lack of a presence of building emotional stability into a child.

00:18:02.200 | At its core then, the first thing you can do to build emotional stability is simply to love a child consistently, comprehensively throughout all of his or her life.

00:18:14.000 | I think special care and attention should also be given to environmental factors.

00:18:18.600 | So if you want to invest into the emotional stability of your child, I think you owe it to your children to create a stable environment around them.

00:18:29.000 | A stable environment that is cleansed from all profane influences.

00:18:34.600 | You don't want to have your children surrounded by arguing parents and parents who disrespect each other and bite each other and are nasty to each other.

00:18:42.900 | That destroys the confidence they have in their parents and their parents' love for one another.

00:18:49.200 | You want to eliminate divorce and the emotional damage that can come from divorce among parents where they see the most important relationships break down around them.

00:19:00.500 | You want to maintain a stable and protected home environment.

00:19:04.100 | And so you look at the data, for example, of the abuse that children have when they're raised by a single mother who allows men that she's not married to into the home.

00:19:12.700 | And the disruption of watching, in some cases, a parade of men come through.

00:19:17.500 | The physical and sexual abuse that children receive in those scenarios very frequently.

00:19:22.900 | And just the whole context of a fractured home and fractured relationships and how that damages the emotional and psychological sense of security of the child.

00:19:33.600 | I think we want to be careful about the home specifically that a child is raised in.

00:19:37.700 | A child who is raised by very poor parents where the home, you know, where am I going to live next year is uncertain and is unknown is at a much higher risk of experiencing this sense of instability than a child who lives in one house for a very long time.

00:19:54.300 | And if there are moves of the family, then those moves are planned in advance.

00:19:58.400 | This is something that I personally have thought a lot about.

00:20:01.600 | And there are a lot of misconceptions I've learned from talking with many of you.

00:20:07.000 | There are a lot of misconceptions in the Radical Personal Finance audience about how I live and how I have lived and what I advocate for.

00:20:17.100 | Because of my wanderings and my pursuit of weird, interesting international things over the last few years, people think that I'm advocating for some kind of detached nomadic lifestyle or existence.

00:20:32.900 | What is usually unappreciated by those who aren't long-term listeners is simply that prior to 2018, I lived in one city my entire life.

00:20:46.900 | I traveled a bit, but those are just conventional trips for the sake of traveling.

00:20:50.600 | I lived in one city, in one state, and lived an extremely consistent, stable life.

00:20:59.800 | Then I decided to travel for a time, and while there has been some instability, which I'll come back to in a moment, during the travels, and even some instability for my children in the travels, my lessons and learnings are simply that stability is better.

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00:21:50.400 | That I don't think that nomadic living or perpetually moving around and changing houses and whatnot all the time, I don't think it's a good lifestyle.

00:22:00.200 | I don't think it's great for adults.

00:22:01.700 | I don't think it's great for children.

00:22:03.100 | I think having stability and having a centeredness, even a centeredness of place, is superior.

00:22:10.000 | Now, I'm one who likes to test things.

00:22:12.300 | I'm one who likes to try things out and see how it works.

00:22:15.500 | I believe what I read, but I'm much more inclined to believe what I experience.

00:22:21.400 | And I enjoy variation.

00:22:23.500 | I'm personality-wise, I'm not the kind of guy who just wants to do the same thing forever.

00:22:29.200 | And part of that perhaps could be from my very stable upbringing.

00:22:32.400 | Because I experienced such stability, it's kind of fun to wonder what's instability like?

00:22:37.000 | Well, I've tried both.

00:22:38.300 | I've tried stability and instability, and I'm here to tell you stability is better.

00:22:42.200 | And I learned that very quickly.

00:22:44.100 | I have received criticism for, and people who are concerned about my children, of instability.

00:22:49.800 | You know, "What do you, Joshua, if you're traveling all the time, what are your children going to do?"

00:22:53.500 | And I think that is a valid criticism, and it's something that I'm very careful of.

00:22:59.300 | I have sought to address that potential harm by maintaining quite a lot of stability in our lifestyle.

00:23:09.100 | So the example I use with people is when we were traveling around the United States in an RV,

00:23:14.800 | while there was never any predictive, "Here's what's going to be out the window tomorrow,"

00:23:21.500 | I think that my children still experienced a high degree of stability.

00:23:26.300 | That with their mother and father, 24 hours a day, we had the same basic schedule every single day.

00:23:32.900 | We eat three meals together every single day.

00:23:35.400 | We do the same basic activities at the same different times of day.

00:23:39.200 | And so, and even in traveling in an RV, then you're in the same bed every single day.

00:23:47.900 | It's just something's different outside the window.

00:23:50.000 | So I tried to maintain stability for the children in that sense.

00:23:54.300 | When we have spent a total of about 12 months over the last few years traveling full-time,

00:24:01.400 | out of suitcases and hotels and houses, etc., again, I've tried to maintain a sense of stability.

00:24:07.600 | So what is that stability?

00:24:08.800 | Well, you're with mom and dad and your brothers and sisters every day.

00:24:11.800 | We have the same basic schedule every day.

00:24:14.300 | We eat meals together. We do schoolwork. We do excursions, etc.

00:24:18.700 | And so while there's instability in where you sleep and what hotel it's in and what Airbnb, etc.,

00:24:23.800 | I've tried to maintain stability.

00:24:25.700 | And I don't think children are so fragile that they can't go and travel for a time.

00:24:29.900 | But other than that, we've had a pretty stable lifestyle in many ways.

00:24:35.300 | The thing that is always the hardest though about those times, I will say that as a parent,

00:24:41.700 | there have been expressions of, minor expressions, I want to be honest,

00:24:48.800 | but I can't be specific, that the times when I had the most difficult job as a father

00:24:55.000 | were those times when there was the most instability in my children's lives.

00:25:00.500 | And I think the biggest challenge of this is because of the instability of our situation,

00:25:06.200 | of, okay, we're in this Airbnb, now we're in this city, etc., traveling a lot,

00:25:10.300 | it made proper training very difficult as a father.

00:25:13.800 | As a father, you're trying to train your children effectively,

00:25:16.900 | but you need to be very sensitive to what they're going through.

00:25:20.500 | And so, if you know that your child has had a great night's sleep, and a great nap,

00:25:26.400 | and a great day, lots of time to play, etc.,

00:25:29.800 | and your child has a nasty attitude at 4 o'clock in the afternoon, you say, "Fix your attitude."

00:25:34.800 | On the other hand, if you had a rough night of sleep because you were on an airplane,

00:25:37.900 | and you had no nap because you're jet-lagged, and everything's out of whack,

00:25:41.600 | and you have a child that has a nasty attitude at 4 o'clock in the afternoon,

00:25:45.100 | you want the child to fix the attitude,

00:25:46.800 | but you're not going to require the same level of attitude adjustment as you would

00:25:51.200 | if you knew that everything was okay.

00:25:53.100 | And so, as a father, my experience with traveling was that it made it very difficult

00:25:58.000 | to effectively train my children, and help them to overcome the areas of weakness in their life.

00:26:04.200 | So, I'm here to say, having done both, stability is better.

00:26:07.600 | Stability is definitely better.

00:26:09.800 | I don't think that an ideal lifestyle for raising children

00:26:14.000 | is a nomadic, constantly-wandering lifestyle.

00:26:17.300 | I've never thought that, although I've tested it to see,

00:26:20.500 | because it seems very attractive to someone like me.

00:26:24.400 | But it's mostly a matter of attractiveness to something that's different than what you grew up with,

00:26:30.600 | and I don't think it's a superior lifestyle.

00:26:33.200 | So, I think that one way we can invest money is into making sure

00:26:36.800 | that our children experience a stable environment.

00:26:41.000 | This is the house. This is the house that we live in.

00:26:43.800 | This house is secure.

00:26:45.100 | There's not a bunch of random weirdos passing through the house constantly.

00:26:49.300 | We're not staying at this place here, and then a few weeks later,

00:26:53.100 | we're staying at this other place, etc.

00:26:55.000 | No, everything needs to be consistent and stable.

00:26:58.600 | It's better for a child to be in a poorer-quality house,

00:27:03.400 | in a stable environment, with stable family, stable friends, stability,

00:27:08.800 | than it is to be in a fancier house and bouncing around because,

00:27:12.200 | "Okay, we got rich and then we went bankrupt, then we got rich and then we went bankrupt."

00:27:15.500 | So, build stability in terms of the actual surroundings of the child.

00:27:21.100 | Next, I think it's important to teach a sense of emotional detachment.

00:27:25.000 | I believe that proactively, it's our responsibility as parents to teach children

00:27:29.600 | to appreciate emotions for what they are. Emotions are like the frosting on a cake.

00:27:35.100 | They're the thing that can enhance the overall experience,

00:27:38.500 | but they are not the substance of life.

00:27:41.100 | And as such, I believe that they deserve to be,

00:27:44.200 | that it's important to acknowledge the emotions that we experience.

00:27:48.800 | I believe it's important to teach children good names for emotions,

00:27:51.900 | so that they can be precise in their language.

00:27:54.200 | We need to want to acknowledge that emotions add to life.

00:27:58.100 | The joys and the sorrows add to our experience of life.

00:28:03.000 | But I see no benefit whatsoever to ever being controlled by emotions

00:28:08.500 | or ever making decisions based solely on emotions.

00:28:12.900 | And so, I think having a measure in which we teach children to be the masters of their emotions,

00:28:18.700 | rather than the slaves of their emotions, is an extremely important thing to do.

00:28:26.200 | And I thought about this because there are some people who,

00:28:32.000 | they seem a little bit emotionally wooden.

00:28:34.500 | And you sometimes wonder, "Does that guy really enjoy life?

00:28:36.600 | Like, he's just so wooden all the time."

00:28:39.000 | But when I compare people who have these,

00:28:41.800 | just this level of emotional intensity about their life and their lifestyle

00:28:46.000 | to the benefit of not being a slave to your emotions,

00:28:50.200 | I think there's real benefit in that.

00:28:52.000 | And there's real practical benefit.

00:28:54.100 | Don't, and when people are driven by emotions,

00:28:57.700 | they make foolish short-term decisions that often come with massive levels of long-term pain.

00:29:04.200 | And so, emotions are best indulged in within the context of safe, logical, rational thinking.

00:29:11.100 | And a lot of this stuff is taught.

00:29:13.700 | The thing that I always observe is when you watch a show where there's some kind of surprise,

00:29:20.300 | and you watch a contestant on a show bouncing up and down and clapping his hands,

00:29:24.100 | "Oh my God, oh my God, oh my God, oh my God, oh my God, I can't believe it, I can't believe it," etc.

00:29:28.700 | This kind of absurd, kind of emotional expression, to me, is something that is learned.

00:29:36.200 | You watch parents and children do the same thing, and I can't imagine ever doing that.

00:29:41.900 | I can experience all of the joy of surprise and appreciation

00:29:48.000 | without acting like a foolish, immature, giddy eight-year-old girl bouncing up and down.

00:29:54.100 | But in our, at least just on that TV culture, you know the scene that I'm saying,

00:29:59.000 | we've somehow tried to make that the standard,

00:30:02.200 | and people think that in order for them to express appreciation,

00:30:05.400 | they need to behave in this immature form.

00:30:07.600 | And you see it in adults, and it's disgusting, it's very off-putting.

00:30:11.300 | And so, teaching emotional stability means teaching mastery of emotions.

00:30:19.400 | This is what it means to be mature, is to master your emotions,

00:30:24.200 | to acknowledge that there's a time and a place for experiencing emotions,

00:30:28.600 | and there's a time and a place in which it's not right to experience emotions.

00:30:33.200 | I personally have a very hard time respecting adults who cannot master their emotions in the moment,

00:30:39.100 | because it minimizes their ability to do good in the world, to put a pretty sharp edge on it.

00:30:44.700 | Just imagine that you are, I don't know, you're on a hike, and you get caught in a mudslide,

00:30:50.500 | or you have a, there's an accident, and you're in the car with your children.

00:30:55.100 | And one of your children is killed in a horrific and awful way,

00:30:59.100 | and one or two of your children is injured.

00:31:02.200 | And in that moment, if you look at the child who is dead, who's clearly dead,

00:31:08.100 | like no question about it, this child is dead,

00:31:11.000 | and you sit down and you break down in tears because your child is dead,

00:31:15.800 | that may cost you the life of your other child who is severely injured,

00:31:19.400 | who needs you to be a master of your emotions and to think,

00:31:22.600 | and to find medical aid and save the life of those who can be saved.

00:31:27.300 | Now, there's no question that none of us know how we would react in those circumstances until we're tested.

00:31:33.000 | And those of us who aren't first responders or something aren't ever going to receive training in it or be tested.

00:31:39.100 | But I put a sharp point on it to demonstrate that if you are controlled by emotions,

00:31:45.500 | and you're not the master of them, it limits your capability and effectiveness as a human being.

00:31:51.000 | There's a time and a place to grieve your dead child,

00:31:53.700 | but that time and place is not when the child is clearly dead,

00:31:57.600 | and you have another child that might be saved.

00:31:59.800 | The thing to do then is to ignore the grief, ignore the emotion,

00:32:03.100 | set it aside to the best degree possible, and focus on saving those who can be saved.

00:32:08.900 | Now, that's an extreme example, but this is why it's important to teach children emotional domination.

00:32:14.800 | And so never too high, never too low. Same thing on the negative side.

00:32:18.600 | We talked about kind of the euphoria.

00:32:21.600 | When we allow children to live their lives based upon how they feel,

00:32:27.400 | we set a very bad precedent for them as adults.

00:32:31.400 | As an adult, the way that you feel doesn't matter to anybody except you.

00:32:36.700 | And so it's fine and healthy and useful to acknowledge your feelings.

00:32:40.100 | Great. Okay, this is how I feel. So what? Nobody cares.

00:32:44.500 | Nobody cares how you feel except you.

00:32:46.400 | It's not a legitimate basis for changing anything in your life.

00:32:52.300 | As an adult, you acknowledge, "I feel really bad today."

00:32:56.500 | And then you go on and you do the work because people are counting on you.

00:32:59.200 | That's what it means to be a mature man or a mature woman.

00:33:03.000 | If I wake up as a father and I don't feel well, it doesn't really matter.

00:33:08.100 | I still have five people that depend upon me.

00:33:10.700 | I still have a wife that needs me.

00:33:13.000 | And so the way I feel doesn't matter.

00:33:16.000 | It's completely irrelevant to—it should be completely irrelevant to anything in my decision-making,

00:33:22.900 | unless there's a direct connection. Okay, I'm a runner.

00:33:25.100 | Well, today I feel that a muscle is not doing well.

00:33:28.600 | Is it wise for me to run even so because I'm a runner?

00:33:31.800 | Or is it wise to me to take it easy and make sure that muscle is relieved?

00:33:36.200 | This is adult analysis, not based upon how we feel.

00:33:38.900 | And so we should teach this sense of stoicism and mastery and domination of emotions to children from an early age

00:33:46.700 | so that as they proceed through life, they won't be manipulated and controlled by their feelings.

00:33:50.700 | They won't wind up in a toxic, destructive relationship because I've got the feels for that person.

00:33:55.400 | They won't wind up making stupid life decisions because I just felt like it.

00:33:59.700 | All of the chaos that you—when you look at chaotic lives of young men and women,

00:34:06.600 | and you look at the hell that they live and the bad results that they get,

00:34:10.900 | a lot of it is due to this basic sense of stability that's in their psyche,

00:34:15.500 | and also based upon them learning the lessons of controlling their emotions and controlling their behavior

00:34:22.600 | and disconnecting emotions from behavior. Fundamentally important.

00:34:28.100 | I think another expression of stability is that of character.

00:34:32.600 | And here I have a real passion for teaching character skills.

00:34:36.900 | One of the teachings that I've heard when I was a late teens, early 20s,

00:34:44.300 | is for me of fundamental importance, and is simply this,

00:34:49.500 | that virtue or character is an element of skill, not of a sense of giftedness.

00:34:58.600 | Specifically, this came from a Zig Ziglar seminar that I used to listen to over and over again.

00:35:04.700 | I probably still have the CDs, but I was really big into personal development when I got into my teen years and early years.

00:35:10.600 | I spent thousands of dollars on audio courses from motivational speakers,

00:35:14.600 | and Zig Ziglar was the one that opened the world up to me.

00:35:16.900 | I found a Zig Ziglar podcast. I had never known much about the world of personal development.

00:35:22.900 | I found a podcast, back in the early days of podcasting, and I liked it so much,

00:35:27.100 | I started buying his programs and whatnot. He died a few years later.

00:35:30.400 | All this stuff was recorded many years earlier.

00:35:32.800 | But I used to listen to these seminars, driving back and forth to work,

00:35:36.000 | and he did this seminar on character skills.

00:35:40.400 | And he proved to me that all character qualities or virtues are skills.

00:35:47.200 | They're not things that you either have or don't have. They are skills that you exercise.

00:35:51.700 | So an example would be laziness, right? A guy might say, "I'm lazy."

00:35:56.800 | And if you talk to him and he says, "I'm lazy," you say, "Okay, let's assume that you're lazy.

00:36:02.300 | Do you mean to tell me that there's no time in your life where you've ever been hardworking?

00:36:07.900 | There's nothing that you've ever cared about, that you've ever been hardworking or dedicated or industrious, etc.?"

00:36:14.300 | And invariably, everyone can identify a time in life when they were very industrious.

00:36:21.000 | It may be five minutes that they were industrious, but this was the time that they were industrious.

00:36:26.100 | And so if you recognize that, then it's right and proper to say,

00:36:31.400 | "I am industrious because I have shown that I've been industrious in the past."

00:36:36.800 | And so if you have the potential to be industrious or to be hardworking,

00:36:41.300 | let's use a more normal word, hardworking, then that's something that you can develop.

00:36:46.000 | That is a skill that you can develop. So you're not born either hardworking or lazy.

00:36:52.300 | These are skills that you develop based upon what you focus on.

00:36:55.100 | You either develop the skill of laziness, called the anti-skill, right?

00:36:58.800 | Or you develop the skill and virtue of being hardworking.

00:37:02.400 | So these are things that can be grown in. And so all virtues are skills.

00:37:07.200 | Our children are not born with empathy.

00:37:11.600 | Sorry, they're not born empathetic or non-empathetic.

00:37:14.800 | They're not born honest or dishonest.

00:37:18.700 | They're born as humans, as tendencies to either direction.

00:37:22.900 | And our job as parents is to teach them how to overcome the negative sides of their personality and their character,

00:37:29.200 | how to dominate that, and how to build virtue within themselves.

00:37:33.900 | And this is something that begins in a simple way early in life,

00:37:37.400 | and it continues for all of a man's life, for his entire life.

00:37:43.100 | Virtue is something that must be forged and formed and strengthened continually throughout all of life.

00:37:51.000 | And it's something that is strengthened through practice, through actual putting into practice.

00:37:58.700 | And so we practice these skills again and again, and we get better at them.

00:38:02.500 | Then we get into a positive feedback loop, where the more we practice these virtues and these skills,

00:38:07.700 | we get better at them. And then we want to practice them more.

00:38:10.100 | We get better at them, and we want to practice them more.

00:38:12.300 | But I think an element of stability is to acknowledge and teach children explicitly that in your life,

00:38:18.900 | you're going to have the opportunity to practice virtue or to ignore it,

00:38:23.600 | and that this is going to lead you in various directions.

00:38:26.600 | We want to accustom our children to practicing the development of virtue,

00:38:31.800 | so they can grow in the specific skills of virtue.

00:38:36.800 | How to do it? It's difficult.

00:38:40.200 | But I would say the few things that I think are—that I'm trying to do.

00:38:44.500 | Number one is we practice those skills.

00:38:47.500 | We teach our children about those skills by modeling them.

00:38:51.100 | We demonstrate them to our children.

00:38:54.800 | I am convinced that being a parent, for many people—I want to say most, but for many people—

00:39:02.400 | that it's a transformative event.

00:39:04.500 | There are high correlations between people who are married and who have children

00:39:10.900 | and between their overall financial success, the amount of money they earn,

00:39:15.400 | the amount of wealth they build, etc.

00:39:17.900 | And the question is, is this a correlation or is there a causal relationship here?

00:39:24.700 | I believe that these virtues can be developed by people who are not married and who don't have children.

00:39:29.000 | But if you have children that you're trying to invest into,

00:39:31.800 | there is a very clear causal experience that I've had,

00:39:35.800 | where I want my children to be courageous.

00:39:38.600 | And I know that in order for them to be courageous, I have to show courage.

00:39:43.000 | I have to be faithful to it.

00:39:45.000 | My children are going to be like me, at least in the early years,

00:39:51.000 | until they enter into adulthood, where they have to decide for themselves who they are

00:39:55.000 | and separate and detach from me.

00:39:57.000 | So if I want them to be like me, I want them to be like my highest and best version of me.

00:40:02.600 | And so we have to model these things in front of them.

00:40:05.800 | We have to model the behavior that we want.

00:40:07.700 | It's very humbling as a parent when you see all of your weaknesses reflected in your children.

00:40:13.800 | And you recognize they talk like me, they act like me, for both good and for bad.

00:40:19.000 | And so it puts a strong sense of motivation to say,

00:40:22.600 | "I want to embody these virtues that I care about

00:40:25.600 | and show them how to do these skills so that they will get strong in it."

00:40:28.600 | So number one is we want to set an example.

00:40:30.800 | Number two is I think we need to do, engage in explicit teaching.

00:40:35.000 | And on these character qualities.

00:40:38.100 | I have several books that I've found that specifically teach character qualities.

00:40:43.500 | And I use them as part of our weekly routine to talk about it

00:40:47.600 | so that we can put names on these things.

00:40:50.100 | If you can name something, that's the first step to identifying it as a distinction.

00:40:56.000 | And so in emotional training, we want to train children to name their emotions

00:41:01.300 | and give them a rich vocabulary so they can identify the difference

00:41:05.300 | between feeling emotionally stressed versus tired.

00:41:08.700 | The difference between feeling happy versus feeling satisfied.

00:41:12.700 | These are all, there's such a texture here that can help to identify emotions

00:41:17.400 | so that you can control them.

00:41:18.400 | Same thing happens with virtues.

00:41:20.100 | We want to specifically teach virtues

00:41:22.400 | and we want to explicitly instruct our children in the vocabulary of virtues

00:41:26.700 | and then call them out and praise them when they're doing well,

00:41:29.900 | exercising those virtues so that they can continue that process of developing those virtues.

00:41:35.700 | So there are, you can go and find books.

00:41:37.700 | There's books that work on this and just reading them through.

00:41:40.800 | And this week we're working on the habit of empathy.

00:41:44.700 | You can talk about him as habits or as virtues, as character qualities,

00:41:47.100 | whatever word you want to do.

00:41:49.200 | And so this is the week we're going to be focusing on empathy.

00:41:51.600 | And you can do an activity where every day we're going to talk about empathy

00:41:57.800 | in a slightly different sense, read a story about empathy, discuss it, etc.

00:42:01.600 | And then we're going to put a sticker chart up.

00:42:03.100 | And every time we notice each other behaving empathetically,

00:42:05.900 | we're going to recognize that so we can call out that behavior and get more of it.

00:42:10.400 | So those are components of it.

00:42:13.500 | The final comment I want to talk about on stability just has to do with overall financial stability and career stability.

00:42:20.200 | I thought a lot about what I would do differently

00:42:24.000 | if I were starting Radical Personal Finance over again today.

00:42:27.500 | And I would have a hard time using the word radical as freely as I did in the beginning of the show.

00:42:33.900 | And this has to do with the fact that while I appreciate certain aspects of the word radical,

00:42:40.400 | I think that by using the term radical so freely,

00:42:45.000 | I have underappreciated so many of the benefits of conventionality.

00:42:50.700 | There are tremendous benefits to living a financially stable life.

00:42:57.500 | When you look at, say, the difference between somebody who pursues a safe

00:43:02.400 | and stable route to financial success, perhaps somebody becomes a highly skilled professional,

00:43:07.500 | gets a great job, proceeds to become partner at a firm, saves money, etc.,

00:43:11.800 | lives in one place where he has a broad base of clients, etc.

00:43:15.200 | And you compare that to perhaps the adventures, the euphoria and travails of an entrepreneur

00:43:22.900 | who has a string of failed businesses before he finally hits the big one and makes a hundred million dollars on it.

00:43:30.200 | I'm not sure that the life of the entrepreneur is better than the life of the person who lived the conventional safe path.

00:43:36.800 | Both of them will find themselves envying the other's experiences.

00:43:41.100 | The guy who's a partner at his local law firm will be able to list everything that's wrong with his stable lifestyle

00:43:48.500 | and he'll look with envy upon the entrepreneur who's bouncing around the world,

00:43:53.200 | having meetings here and has potential, etc.

00:43:56.700 | On the other hand, the entrepreneur can carry such a tremendous load of stress

00:44:01.700 | that he's bouncing around the world, racking up credit card debt,

00:44:03.900 | trying to figure out how to keep his business afloat and how to make payroll

00:44:06.900 | that it literally costs him years on his lifespan and a very small percentage of them get to the hundred million dollar payout.

00:44:13.700 | And so there's this balancing act where we tend to celebrate the heroes who pursued their dreams

00:44:19.500 | and we only remember those who were successful.

00:44:22.000 | We have such an intense survivorship bias in the way that we tell these stories

00:44:26.900 | that we remember the one guy who was successful and we forget the 19 who destroyed their families,

00:44:31.200 | destroyed their marriages, destroyed their houses, went bankrupt, lost their house,

00:44:34.900 | their children bounced from one house to another, wound up being drug addicts or something.

00:44:40.200 | And when looking back, you wonder, wouldn't it have been better that they'd had more stability in their life?

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00:45:17.200 | So when it comes to career planning, financial planning, etc.

00:45:21.200 | Stability is something to be encouraged and praised.

00:45:25.200 | It is not the controlling factor.

00:45:28.200 | Someone comes to me and discusses and says, "I really have this desire and passion to do something."

00:45:34.200 | And it's something that leads to potential instability. Great. That's fine.

00:45:39.200 | As human beings, we need to make sure that we live our life and pursue the calling that we feel called to,

00:45:48.200 | regardless of whether it's difficult or not.

00:45:51.200 | But we need to give great thought to financial stability and career stability because these things are genuinely and deeply important.

00:46:00.200 | They impact our lives and they impact the lives of our children very, very deeply.

00:46:06.200 | A lot of these modern things that we sense, right?

00:46:10.200 | I just got to go and pursue bouncing to the other side of the world.

00:46:14.200 | We create these desires in ourselves by what we expose ourselves to.

00:46:18.200 | Throughout virtually all of human history, they weren't possible to achieve.

00:46:23.200 | And so we should be very careful about what we expose ourselves to and what we expose our children to.

00:46:29.200 | Just a simple example because what we expose ourselves to is going to affect us.

00:46:35.200 | When I was a youth, I was super into lifted 4x4 trucks.

00:46:41.200 | I subscribed with my own money to 4x4 magazine, 4WD and Offroad.

00:46:46.200 | I don't remember the names. 4Wheeler, etc.

00:46:48.200 | And I had three or four magazine subscriptions.

00:46:50.200 | And so I was super into these big lifted trucks and I had dreams and ambitions of,

00:46:55.200 | "This is the pickup truck I'm going to buy and these are the 35-inch tires I'm going to put on it and how I'm going to get it all set up."

00:47:01.200 | I knew everything there was to know about trucks.

00:47:04.200 | What's funny though is I would go to the grocery store and look at the magazine rack.

00:47:10.200 | And right next to the 4WD and Offroad magazine, there's a Lowrider magazine.

00:47:15.200 | And it has the exact opposite modification that I was into.

00:47:22.200 | But if I'd been raised in a different community where it was popular to have Lowriders and I bought all those magazines,

00:47:28.200 | then I would get super into Lowriders.

00:47:31.200 | And it's so dumb.

00:47:33.200 | One guy takes a Ford F-150, jacks it up, puts on 35-inch mud tires on it that he'd never see the mud,

00:47:41.200 | and he drives around tickled pink with how cool he looks.

00:47:44.200 | Another guy takes the same F-150, takes off those tires, drops the thing down to an inch away from the ground,

00:47:49.200 | puts on tiny little tires and drives around thinking about how cool he looks.

00:47:52.200 | What's the difference? What's the difference between these things?

00:47:55.200 | It's just a matter of what each guy has been exposed to.

00:47:59.200 | It's a matter of what he's into.

00:48:00.200 | I had a friend of mine who was super into car audio, and he spent thousands of dollars retrofitting his car

00:48:05.200 | and putting in the best speakers and the best subwoofers, etc.

00:48:08.200 | And he would subscribe to all the car audio magazines.

00:48:11.200 | He was into that. I wasn't. Why was he into it?

00:48:13.200 | Well, at some point in time, he started feeding this thing that he was into, and he became into it.

00:48:18.200 | And so we need to be very careful about the things that we bring into our life and bring them in intentionally

00:48:24.200 | because passion is something that is created and cultivated based upon exposure.

00:48:30.200 | What you choose to focus on is the thing that will grow in your life.

00:48:34.200 | And so it needs to be carefully analyzed from the least biased external objective perspective first

00:48:42.200 | and say, "Is this something that's going to be helpful for my life?"

00:48:46.200 | Becoming passionate about mountain biking may be a much healthier passion than becoming passionate about cooking Italian pasta.

00:48:58.200 | One of them might lead to you being fat and have a heart attack.

00:49:02.200 | The other might lead to you being skinny and in great shape.

00:49:07.200 | So be careful because you can cultivate and develop these passions no matter what.

00:49:12.200 | And we should teach our children that as well and be careful what they're inculcated with.

00:49:17.200 | So a lot of times the passions that we feed that relate to instability are just that.

00:49:22.200 | We've created this passion and this desire based upon what we've exposed ourselves to.

00:49:27.200 | But if we would expose ourselves to something different on an ongoing way, that would lead us in a different direction.

00:49:32.200 | So let's be careful. Let's pivot now to significance.

00:49:36.200 | And again, this is one of those fluffy things that is clearly important but it's hard to identify specifically.

00:49:45.200 | I think this issue is at the core of the modern identity crises that we see all around us.

00:49:52.200 | Men and women broadly, but specifically young men and women, teenagers, are desperate for a sense of significance, a sense of importance.

00:50:04.200 | They want to know that they matter. They want to know who they are.

00:50:07.200 | And they want who they are to be connected with something that is real and something that is admired, etc.

00:50:14.200 | And I believe that this is something that all children deserve.

00:50:18.200 | All children deserve to have a sense of significance, a sense that their lives matter.

00:50:24.200 | That they matter in an ultimate ontological sense and that they matter in a specific personal sense to specific people.

00:50:32.200 | And so we want to cultivate a sense of significance.

00:50:36.200 | The foundation, I think, of a sense of significance needs to begin from the most fundamental levels of philosophy, of religion and theology.

00:50:46.200 | Here is where I think religious parents have an easy go.

00:50:50.200 | I never questioned as a child my sense of significance because I know I'm a child of God.

00:50:59.200 | I'm a child of God Most High.

00:51:02.200 | How could I ever wonder about my significance if I believe that I'm a child of God Most High?

00:51:08.200 | If I'm fearfully and wonderfully made, how could I ever question that sense of worth?

00:51:15.200 | Now, certainly there are people who have that belief that do question, but for me it was just always a given.

00:51:20.200 | You compare a strong religious foundation to that sense versus I'm a speck of dust that's the product of accident caused by an impersonal force that is inexplicable and just add in enough time.

00:51:38.200 | Well, of course it's ultimately meaningless.

00:51:40.200 | Of course that's going to lead me in the direction of wondering about nihilism.

00:51:44.200 | Of course, because you have this basic foundation.

00:51:48.200 | Even at the level of the universe, this sense of intentionality is really, really important.

00:51:54.200 | Giving children a sense of where they are and the role that they play in the movie, where we are as a population.

00:52:02.200 | I was interacting with a listener on Twitter recently and we were talking about birth rates.

00:52:07.200 | I was sharing some of the data and whatnot on birth rates and all around the world we live in an era of population collapse.

00:52:13.200 | Worse in some places, better in some places, but I think one of the defining characteristics of say 2020 to 2050 is going to be our continual appreciation of the crisis of population collapse.

00:52:27.200 | It's a global phenomenon.

00:52:28.200 | It's a phenomenon that is pretty well established.

00:52:31.200 | There's virtually no going back.

00:52:33.200 | It'll be better and worse in some places, but it's something that we're at the front edge of.

00:52:40.200 | What's unfortunate about it is the demographics are basically irreparable, but the acknowledgement of those demographics is only just coming to the forefront.

00:52:49.200 | Yet we're still in a situation where people are wondering, "Is there a solution? Is there something that we can do?"

00:52:58.200 | I was interacting with a listener of mine and they were saying, "Joshua, if you were"—I forget the exact term, but the way I always interpret these questions—

00:53:07.200 | "If you were elected emperor of the world, is there something that you would do to change birth rates?"

00:53:14.200 | My answer was, "If I were elected emperor of the world, the thing that I would focus on to change birth rates would be to give a population over which I'm emperor a sense of destiny, a sense of meaning, a sense of purpose."

00:53:31.200 | When people feel a sense of destiny, that destiny can be, "We're going to put a man on the moon this decade," or there's a classic manifest destiny, a classic political theory in the United States.

00:53:42.200 | "This is our land. We're going to spread across the land."

00:53:45.200 | When people feel like they're part of a larger purpose, they want to contribute.

00:53:49.200 | And fecundity is highly correlated with that sense of destiny.

00:53:54.200 | This is why you look around the world and the most fecund populations are always religious fundamentalists of varying religions—religious Jews, religious Christians, religious Muslims.

00:54:06.200 | But devout fundamentalist religious people tend to have very large families because this connects to a sense of destiny.

00:54:14.200 | We are building for the future, and I certainly am no exception. I have five children and this is a big component of it.

00:54:21.200 | I believe that God wants a big family. From the very beginning, man was told, "Be fruitful and multiply. Take control over the earth. Take dominion over the earth."

00:54:30.200 | And so this is fundamental to religious identity, is that it is our job and responsibility to be fruitful and to multiply and to take dominion over the earth and to subdue it.

00:54:41.200 | For what? For the flourishing of human beings who are at the core of the universe.

00:54:47.200 | I personally do not believe in a heliocentric universe. I believe in a geocentric universe.

00:54:52.200 | I'm kidding, but I'm not. What I mean is that in a scientific sense, sure, we live in a heliocentric solar system at least.

00:54:59.200 | But on a real sense, the only place that matters, the benchmark and the yardstick by which everything else in the universe is measured is this earth, because this earth is where humans are.

00:55:10.200 | And that's what it is from God's perspective. That's because this is the place that he's put us and this is what he cares about.

00:55:17.200 | And so I was interacting and I said, "Well, is it possible for non-religious people to have the same desire to have children?"

00:55:29.200 | And my answer was, "Absolutely, of course." You look at Elon Musk, right? I don't know how many children he has now, but he has a lot.

00:55:35.200 | And he's not a religious man, so you can't have it. But there are exceptions.

00:55:40.200 | But the broad tendencies or trends is that people who perceive an eternal universe in some way, a continuing of the human race from its origins that are clearly demarcated to its ultimate expression that we're working forward to.

00:56:03.200 | As Christians, we understand, okay, God spoke the world into existence, there was a time in which space, time, and matter came into being, and there was a time in which human beings came into being.

00:56:13.200 | Okay, that happened. Now, what is the story of the human race since then?

00:56:17.200 | Well, Christians have their arc of the fall and then God's provision of his son, and then we have the growth of the Church.

00:56:24.200 | And the growth of the Church will continue until the world is systematically evangelized, until the Gospel is spread, until the Church is huge, and until Satan is—the gates of hell are destroyed by the growth of the Church.

00:56:38.200 | And then, when God decides that it's enough, then we know that he'll bring the end to history and we'll pass into eternity, into a different phase.

00:56:46.200 | There'll be a new heavens and a new earth, and that's shrouded to our eyes.

00:56:50.200 | These are the basic fundamentals of Christianity.

00:56:54.200 | But the point is that in that, you can see yourself as being part of a script, a long-term movie script.

00:57:01.200 | My example would be that if you believe that life is predestined, that there is order to human history, that there's an arc, there's a story arc,

00:57:14.200 | then regardless of whether you're living in one of those pleasant and euphoric periods of history or one of those difficult and grim periods of history,

00:57:22.200 | you can look forward to knowing that in the end, this movie is going to satisfy itself, is going to resolve itself satisfactorily.

00:57:31.200 | If you don't have that, if you don't have a religious belief or a religious worldview,

00:57:37.200 | if you're looking at history as a series of accidents, then you're in the middle of an improv script.

00:57:44.200 | Instead of a written movie that we can be satisfied there was a beginning and we know what the end is,

00:57:49.200 | and we're just in the middle somewhere at some point in the story arc, you're in the middle of an improv script.

00:57:55.200 | And you're making it up randomly from the beginning.

00:57:57.200 | We don't know where or when the improv script will end,

00:58:00.200 | because it's just the next words that come out of my mouth give you the fodder that you need to say yes and and move on to something else.

00:58:07.200 | And that's a very difficult sense in which to give a child a belief, a sense of purpose, a sense of mission.

00:58:14.200 | What is the mission? What is the purpose?

00:58:16.200 | Now, you can borrow in that perspective, you can borrow a whole lot from religious traditions that you admire.

00:58:24.200 | The best atheists are always the children of Christians.

00:58:27.200 | They're always those that come out of a Christian culture,

00:58:31.200 | because they borrow large swaths of Christian culture and then they become atheists,

00:58:35.200 | and they're freed from the things they don't like, but they keep all the things that they do like.

00:58:39.200 | And those are always the best.

00:58:41.200 | But it's hard to then make that pass along to the children, because what is the purpose?

00:58:46.200 | Well, there is no purpose, it's an accident.

00:58:48.200 | And so what is the sense of significance?

00:58:50.200 | Well, there is no sense of significance, because we're just accidental clumps of cells wandering around,

00:58:55.200 | and we happen to have sentience, we happen to have life, but there's no ultimate sense of purpose.

00:59:01.200 | You weren't designed, you weren't created, you weren't created with a purpose.

00:59:04.200 | We're in an improv script where you make it up as you go along.

00:59:07.200 | Now, that doesn't, let me hasten to add, because always for my unbelieving friends,

00:59:13.200 | that doesn't mean that atheists can't behave morally or upright, etc.

00:59:16.200 | You don't have to have this, this sense of belief in order for you to raise great children.

00:59:22.200 | I have plenty of friends who do not share my religious convictions, and their children are wonderful.

00:59:28.200 | And in some cases, there are great advantages by not being constrained to the baggage of one particular religious tradition.

00:59:35.200 | My point is broader than that.

00:59:37.200 | My point is that in order for you to give your children a sense of significance,

00:59:41.200 | then you need to give them a sense of where they are in the script, where they are in the overall story.

00:59:50.200 | I think you can do this as a humanist.

00:59:52.200 | Some of the modern expressions of humanism do not do this.

00:59:56.200 | Look around at the angst that so many of our young people are experiencing.

01:00:00.200 | Unlike, you know, I'm a big fan of, I don't know, I always admired, I love Hitchens, Christopher Hitchens.

01:00:08.200 | My favorite guy ever, just totally attractive guy.

01:00:12.200 | For all of his acerbic wit and biting criticism of religion, of Christianity, of Islam, etc.

01:00:19.200 | At his core, Hitchens was a humanist.

01:00:21.200 | He had a very clear understanding of what he did.

01:00:25.200 | And of course, I would argue this came from the Christian milieu that he was born into and raised in.

01:00:31.200 | And this is why second-generation atheists who are the children of Christians are always the best atheists.

01:00:36.200 | But, probably some of the worst too, I don't know.

01:00:40.200 | He had a clear sense of mission.

01:00:42.200 | Now bring that forward.

01:00:44.200 | And what is the mission today?

01:00:46.200 | You look at surveys and half the population often seems to think that the world would be better if humans weren't on it.

01:00:52.200 | They see themselves as a disease, as a scourge of the earth.

01:00:55.200 | Well, we're just ruining the planet because we have too many humans.

01:00:59.200 | This is a fundamentally crazy perspective to have.

01:01:02.200 | If you think you have too many humans, so you don't want to have children,

01:01:06.200 | which is a common affliction among many of our fellow citizens, what does that say about your own life?

01:01:12.200 | Is there any surprise that so many of us end our lives for all different reasons?

01:01:17.200 | I don't think it should be a surprise.

01:01:20.200 | And so, the way that you see the world in a strong multi-century, multi-millennia arc

01:01:31.200 | is going to fundamentally drive the sense of significance that your children have.

01:01:36.200 | So whatever your personal religious background or religious convictions or lack thereof,

01:01:42.200 | do your best to give your children a sense of significance.

01:01:47.200 | Human beings are not just another animal.

01:01:51.200 | We are human beings.

01:01:54.200 | We are the creature that matters.

01:01:58.200 | At least start there.

01:02:02.200 | Next, what is your broader identity?

01:02:09.200 | Now, here's where I think it is important to give children a sense of identity.

01:02:15.200 | I've thought a lot about this.

01:02:17.200 | I don't know the answers to a few of these questions.

01:02:20.200 | What are some of the common forms of identity that children are often given?

01:02:26.200 | Well, one would be national.

01:02:28.200 | In today's world, or the nation-state, there would be some sense of national identity.

01:02:33.200 | So this has been strong in some nation-states for positive effects and sometimes negative.

01:02:40.200 | Nationalism, I think, is a very dangerous thing that we need to be very conscious of.

01:02:45.200 | But if your nation-state is one that you respect and you can give a sense of national identity,

01:02:50.200 | that can be helpful.

01:02:51.200 | People look at ethnicity or race.

01:02:54.200 | And I'm super uncomfortable with focusing on this as a fundamental element of identity.

01:03:03.200 | I've thought a lot about it.

01:03:04.200 | I've never thought more about race than I have over the last five years or so,

01:03:08.200 | with looking at the intense race wars in our modern culture.

01:03:13.200 | But I am uncomfortable with any connection of race to identity.

01:03:17.200 | I think that just brings up all kinds of problems and doesn't present really anything positive.

01:03:24.200 | What about culture?

01:03:26.200 | Culture, I think, could be more accepting.

01:03:28.200 | But then the question is, what culture?

01:03:30.200 | What is the definition of that culture?

01:03:33.200 | And so you want to be careful, but think about a cultural identity that you can add.

01:03:39.200 | What about religion?

01:03:40.200 | Religious identity is generally tied hand-in-hand with culture.

01:03:44.200 | I like this phrase that culture is religion externalized.

01:03:48.200 | You can know what a culture believes in terms of its religious identity

01:03:52.200 | if you spend time just in and around that culture.

01:03:55.200 | Not in a religious building of some kind, but just around the culture.

01:03:58.200 | You know what they believe.

01:03:59.200 | And so religion is a core.

01:04:02.200 | What about place outside of the nation-state?

01:04:04.200 | Well, place can have a factor, right?

01:04:06.200 | I'm a New Yorker.

01:04:07.200 | There's an identity that is here.

01:04:09.200 | But at its core, I think that since those things are difficult for you to control,

01:04:14.200 | at the very least, it's important to give some sense of family identity.

01:04:19.200 | This is who we are as a family, right?

01:04:22.200 | You're a Sheetz.

01:04:24.200 | Tell my children, you're a Sheetz.

01:04:26.200 | If you're going to bear the last name Sheetz, there's a whole bunch of stuff that comes with it.

01:04:32.200 | It's not all great, but there's a bunch of stuff that comes with it.

01:04:35.200 | And this is what's expected of you.

01:04:37.200 | On the whole, I don't think it's a bad thing to give your children a sense of the expectations

01:04:41.200 | that this is what it means to be in our family.

01:04:45.200 | There is certainly an element where we need to be really careful about controlling our children's lives

01:04:50.200 | or trying to live out our unfulfilled dreams as parents in the lives of our children.

01:04:55.200 | There are many people who have had high expectations placed upon them by their family

01:05:01.200 | who turned around and rejected those things.

01:05:04.200 | And there's probably a healthy way to do it and an unhealthy way to do it.

01:05:07.200 | But at its core, I want my children to have a sense of identity,

01:05:12.200 | and a sense of identity in every level.

01:05:16.200 | And the smallest corporate sense of identity is going to come down to the family.

01:05:23.200 | So what can you do? How can you create this?

01:05:26.200 | Well, what does your family stand for?

01:05:28.200 | What are the values that your family has?

01:05:31.200 | What is your code of ethics that this is what our family will do?

01:05:35.200 | This is how we will do it.

01:05:36.200 | What is your code of arms, right?

01:05:39.200 | What's on it? What does it stand for?

01:05:42.200 | What does this family, this house stand for?

01:05:45.200 | And give that to your children as a strong sense of identity.

01:05:50.200 | And then in terms of their significance, significance as a person.

01:05:53.200 | At its core, it can be easy for children to get wrapped up in the collective

01:05:58.200 | and not to have a sense of individual identity.

01:06:02.200 | And as I observe parents, many times the ones that I respect the most

01:06:07.200 | are those who have a very clear sense of who they are as a family

01:06:11.200 | and who are very keen to understand who this particular child is.

01:06:17.200 | I really appreciate Charlotte Mason's philosophy on this.

01:06:20.200 | One of her fundamental principles of educating children is that

01:06:24.200 | children are born persons.

01:06:27.200 | Children are born persons.

01:06:31.200 | They are whole, complete persons.

01:06:34.200 | They are small, they are immature, they are untrained, but they are persons.

01:06:38.200 | And as such, they are deserving of recognition and respect for being persons.

01:06:45.200 | Created in the image of God, our fellow beings, our fellow human beings,

01:06:52.200 | they are deserving of all of the rights and privileges and responsibilities

01:06:56.200 | that come with being human.

01:06:59.200 | And it doesn't matter their size, it doesn't matter their maturity,

01:07:04.200 | it doesn't matter their intellectual capacity, they're persons.

01:07:07.200 | And as parents, our job is to give our children a strong sense of identity,

01:07:13.200 | of where they fit in the collective, and then seek out their opportunities

01:07:18.200 | to flourish as individuals.

01:07:20.200 | So those parents I respect are those who give their children a strong sense

01:07:23.200 | of identity to grow into, especially when that's values-based,

01:07:29.200 | something that's going to require becoming more, becoming better,

01:07:34.200 | becoming stronger.

01:07:36.200 | But mixed with it, at its core, we need to understand who this child is.

01:07:41.200 | What is this child? Because this child is unique.

01:07:44.200 | This child is peculiar. In all of humanity, there has never been this child.

01:07:51.200 | So what makes this child tick?

01:07:54.200 | And then, as a parent, our job is to study our children as individuals

01:08:00.200 | and understand who they are at the most personal level,

01:08:04.200 | and then help them to flourish and to grow and to express who they are.

01:08:10.200 | And that's the healthiest psychology.

01:08:14.200 | When a child knows that he is significant,

01:08:18.200 | and he has the collective sense of group identity that matters,

01:08:23.200 | he knows where he is in the arc of history.

01:08:26.200 | He knows where he is in terms of his sense of place,

01:08:29.200 | and the people that he is surrounded by, the people that he is like.

01:08:32.200 | He knows who he is in the sense of his family identity,

01:08:36.200 | and that he's wanted, and he's desired, and he's loved,

01:08:39.200 | and he is significant, and he is part of a family, a local family.

01:08:44.200 | And he also knows who he is as an individual.

01:08:47.200 | And it's that beautiful combining of the unique and the sameness

01:08:52.200 | that brings the strongest expression of a sense of personal significance.

01:08:59.200 | We want our children to know who they are,

01:09:02.200 | who they are broadly and who they are personally,

01:09:06.200 | so that as they matriculate out of our households,

01:09:09.200 | they have a sense of mission and a sense of purpose.

01:09:13.200 | We want them to understand that they are standing on the shoulders of giants,

01:09:17.200 | all of their forebears, who have fought and struggled to bring them into the world

01:09:23.200 | and bring them into a better world than they inherited.

01:09:27.200 | But we also want them to have a sense of identity to say and know

01:09:30.200 | that it is your responsibility to now continue this,

01:09:34.200 | and it is your responsibility to take this world that is around you

01:09:37.200 | and transform it for the better,

01:09:40.200 | so that you can leave to your progeny a better world.

01:09:44.200 | And that as we continue this faithful passage of the baton

01:09:48.200 | through generation, through time, through action, through the years,

01:09:54.200 | and we just pass it along from one generation to the other,

01:09:57.200 | then our dynasty collectively will grow, our influence will grow,

01:10:02.200 | and we will transform the world from its sickened state

01:10:07.200 | into an increasingly beautiful and more righteous state.

01:10:13.200 | It gives a child a mission, a purpose, and a sense of peculiar contribution to that,

01:10:19.200 | both a sense of collective belonging as well as a sense of individuality.

01:10:25.200 | Those are some big words.

01:10:29.200 | I love to think about them. I think a lot about them.

01:10:31.200 | These are big words.

01:10:34.200 | I'm doing my best to fill in the details of how to do it.

01:10:37.200 | I ask me in 30 years, and I hope that I'll have been able to do it effectively.

01:10:42.200 | But regardless, we've got to begin somewhere.

01:10:44.200 | So I've shared a little bit of my vision with you.

01:10:46.200 | I hope that some of it is useful to you,

01:10:48.200 | and that we will continue to work together collectively as parents

01:10:53.200 | to share and learn what works well, what doesn't work well,

01:10:56.200 | how to make these things a reality.

01:10:59.200 | We need to state clearly our vision, as I'm seeking to do,

01:11:03.200 | with all the positive characteristics that we can see,

01:11:08.200 | and then spend a lot of time working towards it.

01:11:11.200 | But even if you don't know how to achieve a goal, it's still important to state it.

01:11:14.200 | So those are, in conclusion, some of the thoughts that I have

01:11:18.200 | about investing into our children's spirits.

01:11:22.200 | It's less precise, more fluffy than some of the other topics,

01:11:25.200 | but it's no less important.

01:11:27.200 | At its core, it's probably the most important.

01:11:29.200 | Because regardless of how you do with nurturing your children's bodies and minds,

01:11:34.200 | if you nurture your children's spirits, they can fix all that later.

01:11:38.200 | You can change your body, change your mind, learn the skills, etc.

01:11:41.200 | All that can be done later.

01:11:43.200 | But if you just get the body and mind right,

01:11:45.200 | and you create a child with a broken spirit in some way,

01:11:49.200 | it's hard to get everything else right.

01:11:51.200 | And so this is, at its core, its most fundamental.

01:11:54.200 | Hope this is useful to you.

01:11:56.200 | Thank you for listening.

01:11:57.200 | I appreciate your thoughts and your listening.

01:12:00.200 | And I hope that you'll be able to take whatever I've shared that is useful,

01:12:03.200 | and you'll be able to implement it in your own life,

01:12:06.200 | and you'll be able to fellowship about it with your friends around,

01:12:09.200 | and that your community will be improved based upon putting these ideas into practice.

01:12:15.200 | Because the sign of our health as a society is the health of our children,

01:12:22.200 | the spiritual health of our children.

01:12:25.200 | And, friends, while it seems like one of those things that every generation fears,

01:12:30.200 | I fear for the spiritual health of our children.

01:12:33.200 | You look at the psychographic data that is collected, even self-reported health,

01:12:38.200 | and the percentage of our youth who don't think that their generation is doing very well

01:12:44.200 | is astonishingly high.

01:12:46.200 | And so for those of us who are doing well, and those of us who have advanced past youth,

01:12:51.200 | it is our responsibility to be involved in seeking for solutions to help our children to thrive.

01:12:58.200 | And all of our qualifications for really anything are going to be based upon how well we do this.

01:13:07.200 | One of the things that comes from Christianity is that in Christianity,

01:13:12.200 | all of a man's qualifications for public ministry come from his children.

01:13:19.200 | The way that you judge a preacher, an elder, a pastor,

01:13:25.200 | the way that you judge him primarily, his primary qualifications,

01:13:30.200 | is based upon his children, his wife and his children.

01:13:34.200 | Because if a man cannot run his family well, he has no basis,

01:13:40.200 | certainly not for being involved in running the household of God.

01:13:43.200 | That's what the New Testament teaches.

01:13:45.200 | But beyond that, if a man can't run his family well, I have a hard time wanting him to run anything else.

01:13:53.200 | At its core, the way that you run your family is the thing that both qualifies you,

01:13:59.200 | but also prepares you for other factors.

01:14:05.200 | One of the things that's interesting about our political day and age is,

01:14:08.200 | if I could, I can't of course, because we live in a fairly open democracy,

01:14:13.200 | a democratic public with just broad suffrage,

01:14:18.200 | and really anybody can be a candidate and this is not a component.

01:14:22.200 | But if I could, I would love there to be some way that national leaders, civic leaders, etc.,

01:14:30.200 | were vetted based upon their function and their performance in their families.

01:14:35.200 | Because if you think about it, all of the basic skills that we need as men

01:14:42.200 | are skills that need to be honed in our family,

01:14:44.200 | where we have the highest level of control and where we're the most directly responsible for our outcome.

01:14:51.200 | And so, I'm getting a little off topic here, but it is important to me that as a man,

01:14:57.200 | you are judged and you should be judged based upon your work in your family.

01:15:03.200 | That's not to say that there's some level of perfection to which you can attain.

01:15:08.200 | As a father, I'm deeply conscious of the shortcomings in my own work as a father and in my family.

01:15:16.200 | But on the whole, your qualifications for usefulness on a broader level,

01:15:23.200 | in your local community, etc., are going to be drawn from your work in your family.

01:15:29.200 | So give heed to it and give your children something to aspire to,

01:15:33.200 | set them the very best example that you can,

01:15:35.200 | and if there's trauma, if there's pain, change your family history.

01:15:39.200 | It can start with you.

01:15:41.200 | Every great transformation of a family lineage started with one generation,

01:15:49.200 | one father, one mother, who stepped up and said, "We're going to change this."

01:15:54.200 | And that is you.

01:16:00.200 | The holidays start here at Ralph's with a variety of options to celebrate traditions old and new.

01:16:06.200 | Whether you're making a traditional roasted turkey or spicy turkey tacos,

01:16:10.200 | your go-to shrimp cocktail, or your first Cajun risotto,

01:16:14.200 | Ralph's has all the freshest ingredients to embrace your traditions.

01:16:18.200 | Ralph's. Fresh for Everyone.

01:16:20.200 | Choose from a great selection of digital coupons and use them up to five times in one transaction.

01:16:25.200 | Check our app for details.

01:16:27.200 | Knauf's. Fresh for everyone.

01:16:29.200 | (upbeat music)

2023-04-19_934-How_to_Invest_in_Your_Children_at_a_Very_Young_Age_Part_15-Invest_Into_the_Emotional_Stability_and_Sense_of_Significance_of_Your_Children