415 | Your Superpower Is Hurting Your Kids, Creating Emotional Warmth at Home, and Why Attachment Is Everything – Part 1 (Jeremy Pryor)
Episode Description
If you just go with the flow in today's world, it will destroy you and your family. In this episode, Jeremy Pryor returns to share why the superpower that helps men provide and protect can actually be the very thing that pushes your kids away. You'll discover why emotional detachment is hurting your children and how to become the warm, present father your family desperately needs.
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Jeremy Pryor is the founder of Family Teams and co-host of the Family Teams Podcast with Jefferson Bethke. He's an author, speaker, and advocate for multi-generational family who has spent years studying ancient Hebraic family patterns and helping modern fathers build lasting legacies. Jeremy and his wife, April, have five children and four grandchildren and lived in Israel on and off for about ten years.
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The ability to emotionally detach is a fatherhood superpower for providing and protecting—but using it against your family will cost you their hearts.
Your kids can sense emotional distance, and they need to know that what happens to them actually impacts you.
The question isn't "Do I feel attached to my kids?" but "Do my kids feel attached to me?"
Learning from ancient Hebraic family culture can revolutionize the way we build multi-generational bonds.
Your wife has a relational map of the family that you desperately need—invite her advice and steward it well.
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Subscribe to DadAwesome Messages: Text the word "Dad" to (651) 370-8618
Family Teams Resources: familyteams.com
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JEFF
Thank you for saying yes to round three. So I think it was seven years ago, was the first episode, 66, you joined for the first time. And here we are, we're in the 400s now. So thanks for coming back for another round.
JEREMY
Absolutely, Jeff. Love being on here. Love what you guys are doing.
JEFF
Well, there's some voices, some mentors that are kind of like, to go way back in time, there's the man at the city gates, right? That as a young man, you'd try to spend time with, to learn wisdom from. And in the fatherhood ministry world, you've been one of those sage mentors, a coaching voice, a voice of wisdom, your resources, your podcasts, and then our conversations in an eight-year ministry at DadAwesome. Many of the things we offer have been shaped by your inputs that you don't even know about. So just another round of just saying thank you.
JEREMY
Absolutely, yeah. Praise God. This is—I'm so excited. There does seem to be, I think, an emergence of the understanding of fatherhood. So many cool ministries popping up and I love what you guys are doing in your podcast. And so, yeah, I feel like we're sort of at the beginning of something. So this is very exciting.
JEFF
Yeah, praise God. And we keep making these discoveries. But tell me this, who are some of the voices of wisdom for you? It could be book, could be people, movements that you're just paying attention to as you keep learning.
JEREMY
Well, I think I mentioned before when I was on, I am very influenced by Hebraic thinking. I love going back. I love studying ancient family, first century families, historical books about how things worked in various cultures. Those have been extremely helpful to me, like kind of firsthand accounts of, this is the way that family was being done.
And so there's not a lot of really great resources that are sort of contemporary anthologies of those things. So I have to kind of get into a lot of the—like when the Bible uses these words like family or oikos, household—what was going on back then. So I found those to be for me the most helpful.
And then there are contemporary examples that I love to dive into, families that are trying to do this sort of more ancient multi-generational thing. Our family lived in Israel for on and off for about 10 years. And just being in the Middle East was the most helpful thing. Just being around rabbis and Jewish fathers, there were some, and in the Arab community that were really influential on us, and just saying, okay, we have one way of doing family here in the West. They've got a very different way of doing family. We both have strengths, weaknesses in our cultures, but I have such an appreciation for the way that those Middle Eastern cultures think about family.
And I think if that ever took off within the Christian world alone, I think it would be absolutely revolutionary. And in a day where birth rates are plummeting and families are falling apart and divorce is constantly an issue, yeah, I can't imagine a more important thing than to actually look at, what's working? Where is there real fruit? As opposed to just like, what sounds good or what do I prefer? I think that I've really tried to follow the fruit.
JEFF
Could you give a couple of broad strokes when you say that our culture has some strengths and weaknesses and then strengths, just maybe a couple examples on each side to give a deeper example.
JEREMY
Yeah, so our culture is incredibly good at building up the individual. Like if you have a child in your family who's a potential violin prodigy, being in the West is amazing. You will find tutors, everyone will be excited. We build up individuals really well in our culture. And that's just something that as a gift we have, and I want all of my kids to experience that. That's the strength.
The weakness is that we are hyper-individualistic, which means that when we see a group that is potentially asking the individual to sacrifice for the greater good of the group, we immediately recoil from that. The problem is the family actually fits in that category for so many of us. There are a lot of times where what is best for the family is also something that doesn't really go along with my preferences or my wife's preferences or one of my kids' preferences. And so how in the world in a hyper-individualistic society do you actually navigate that?
So that's an example of like, love the strength, let's definitely hold onto that. If your kid is incredible at football or whatever they're good at, if they're an academic, man, praise God you live in a Western context where that actual gift from God is going to be accentuated potentially to its fullest in the way that we've developed things. But you also have to understand that that makes doing anything communally difficult for us.
JEFF
And then if you jump to the life of Abraham and the culture that we see from the Jewish people, like what would be a strength weakness on that side?
JEREMY
So, that Hebraic context I'm very inspired by. They seem to understand intuitively the design of the creator. Okay, this is—and then they just fit into it and they understand the patriarch and the matriarch and how they work together. And so there's within that culture an ability to create multi-generational bonds and to talk about, for example, the story of your entire multi-generational family.
Wow, like let's talk about—many of us, I have a really hard time finding information about—I don't even know how my family got to America. It's just really unfortunate because these stories could be fueling the identity of my family for generations. But unfortunately in our culture, we just don't preserve those stories. And so we don't have access to them.
In the Jewish culture, you have right in the Bible the ability to trace your genealogy all the way back to Abraham, and God wanted them to have that. So oftentimes you're in your Bible time and you're reading in a genealogy and you're thinking, why in the world is this in the Bible? Like, why did the Holy Spirit leave this in? Is this supposed to inspire me? But the Bible is, if you've ever read through it, it's just absolutely chock full of genealogies. And God is a multi-generational God who cares about that consistency and how that works. So that's a really amazing part of that family.
One of the challenges that exists within the Abrahamic world, the Jewish world, that Jesus, I think, really came to rectify is that there tends to be a sense in which this is for our family. And so when I talk to Jewish people, sometimes they're like, well, yeah, we do Shabbat, we do multi-generational family. We love these things, but these are Jewish traditions as opposed to—I think that when you read the Bible, God actually wanted Abraham not to be the exception to every rule, but the demonstration of the rule. He was the model father.
But oftentimes I think, there's historic reasons why this happened, but also cultural reasons where it's like, look, the Jewish faith is not an evangelistic faith, like Christianity is, or even like Islam. It tends to say, look, this is a part of our family identity. The problem of course is if there is one truth, then I want access to it. Like I want that to be a part of my worldview, my understanding of reality. And so sometimes it can be difficult to create conversations and sharing where it's like, okay, you guys have access to things we desperately need, and they're not just for your tribe, they're for all of us. And so I think that getting through that has been really important, but sometimes challenging.
JEFF
Yeah, well I know we can spend the whole conversation in that sphere, but I want to turn and head into the area of emotional availability. And this was a conversation I got to hear you and Jeff Bethke having recently and the concept of the warmth of the father, but specifically your take on this fatherhood superpower of our ability to emotionally disconnect, but then also it being the—it's what takes us down.
And I don't know how long ago you guys recorded what I just watched, but I'm like, man, if you could just expound on this for us, it would be so helpful. And this is an area that I need and that I get wrong so often is that I don't fully give myself to feeling the feels of my daughter and like entering with them. And I keep them at a distance sometimes and I know I cause hurt. So yeah, can you take us into this area?
JEREMY
Yeah, yeah, I definitely feel like for me, this is probably the thing I've struggled with the most as a dad. I like being very stable emotionally and that requires me to cut myself off emotionally from people that are chaotic and families are pretty messy. And so sometimes I can just like, hey guys, you got your problems over there. I want to make sure that it's not disrupting the peace of my life. And so you can distance yourself from members of your family emotionally.
And one of the problems I discovered is my kids can actually feel that. Like they are like, whoa, if something were to happen to me, I think dad would be the least affected. I think his day would be fine. Like if I'm really struggling. And I really think that does hurt children. I think it can really distance ourselves from our wives as well. I think, like you said, I think it particularly can be difficult for daughters. I think daughters want to know, does my dad actually really love me?
And one of the things I think you have to ask yourself—and I used to, I think I used to ask myself the wrong question—is, do I feel attached to my daughter? Right? And that's actually not the right question because you might feel very attached to your kids. The question is, do they feel attached? And one way to understand that is to ask if something were to happen to them, do they think or do they see or sense or feel, are they experiencing how that's impacting you emotionally?
And the reason why this is really tough for men is because actually I think we do have a superpower to detach for good reasons. Like we need sometimes just to perform, to provide for our families or to protect our families. You don't want to break down in those moments and say, can I make this about me and my emotions? Like that's not an appropriate response as a father in a crisis, for example. And so we need the ability to say, okay guys, whatever else is going on in the world, I'm going to disconnect emotionally so I can do the hard thing that needs to get done right now. That is awesome. We need that. We need that ability.
But the problem is sometimes we take that superpower and we use that against our family to distance ourselves from them. Sometimes, one of the reasons we were bringing this up in our podcast was we're trying to talk through how do you handle the black sheep phenomenon? What creates a situation in which a child begins to distance themselves from a family? We're very used to this culturally, but this is actually very unusual. If you look at many times in history, it was pretty unusual to have a child distance themselves from the heart of their father in very warm cultures where families are designed to work together.
In our culture, it's unfortunately very common. We come from fairly cold cultures when it comes to emotional warmth. And many of us just raise our kids in such a way that they are identifying and forming bonds with many people outside of our family. Sometimes the family bonds can actually feel like a threat to them. And so we can create this disconnect generationally.
And so we have these problems with our culture. And so part of it is just like, we have to have this conversation. The father has got to warm up his presence in the home and create that situation where he is becoming emotionally transparent.
One way—we're moving close to Christmas season—I have a friend who calls, my friend Blake, he likes to, when he looks at that show, the Christmas Carol, the Dickens book, he says like, fathers need to give the Fezziwig speech. And I don't know if you remember that point in the Christmas Carol, but Fezziwig was this merchant who was employing Ebenezer Scrooge. And there's this really cool moment and it wasn't unusual back then, but it always did strike me as a dad today that he kind of gets up at the business Christmas party and says, you know, ladies and gentlemen, it's been a good year. Like just displays his heart and the meaning of this event.
And one of the questions I often ask fathers is, do you ever do that in front of your family? I mean, does a family ever pause and you just like for five minutes share your heart in a very vulnerable way? Like, guys, it meant so much to me. I just need you to know this. When the two of you, like when you really helped your sister, wow, like I cannot tell you how much that touched me. Thank you for doing that for our family.
Like that's incredibly counterintuitive to me. I would literally go my entire fatherhood and never say anything like that if I was running on default. And I began to realize that, no, no, no, there is a role that the father has of just being this—the heart, like his heart is so impactful to his children. Kids are fascinated by what captures the heart of their father if the relationship is strong. And so while you have those close connections, you want to be building into those by becoming that emotionally available father in the home.
And this does require for many of us, and this is true for me, I need to go through some healing. And I needed to get some actual skills or I needed somebody to actually teach me, like, okay, Jeremy, you're feeling something right now, say something about it in front of the whole family. What? No, no, I don't want to do that. And so this was very difficult for me to learn, but I'm still learning. I feel like a novice at this, but I believe in it and I can see the impact it has on my family.
JEFF
I've been praying to be emotionally strong for my family. So I'm not bobbing all over the place. I'm not reactive. I can respond with strength, but I think there's something missing. The answer to that prayer is good for my family, but you're actually saying allow myself, my heart to ache because of what's happening or to struggle in view of my little girls. Am I hearing this right?
JEREMY
And I would say that there are two sides to that like you described. I do think that you don't want to be jerking your family around by your emotions either. I think that fathers need to have that part of their life healthy and in control. But I think part of that is to express that appropriately to your family and for them to understand and see that there's something that is impacting me.
And I think this is why when you see kind of—there are cultures where men are much more warm, and you'll see dads cry, you'll see dads hug, you'll see their emotional connection is much stronger and much more consistent. If you ever enter a culture like that, you just see these very tight bonds being developed between father and son, father and daughter. I think this is not a mystery, so we have to become aware of that.
I think another thing that really helped me a lot, there was a book called The Other Half of Church. And he makes this one chapter where he makes this very fascinating observation. He says, you know, we have a problem with the word love because we have this one word and most cultures, most languages have many words for this. We just have one word. And he said, if you were to replace the word love in the New Testament with—I think the word in English that they're getting at, it would probably be the word attachment.
In other words, Paul is saying over and over again things like, you know, I long for you with the affection of Christ Jesus or with tears. He's constantly referring to how what's going on in that church is impacting him emotionally. And this is kind of what love is all about is that I make myself emotionally available to you to hurt me, to bless me. And that's what makes our lives rich.
But the problem is if you ask many fathers today, do you love your kids? They would say, of course I love my kids. And then if you say, well, are you emotionally attached to your kids so that they can impact you? Well, no, actually. I actually would prefer not to be. And it would be very threatening to all of a sudden turn around and tell their dad, well, I don't think you love your kids. Whoa. Because we have this one word, it gets very confusing.
And I think that we now need to kind of break it down and say, guys, I think we are commanded—when we're commanded to love each other, I think, and this is, we try to practice as a church body, it's like we have to become somehow vulnerable to each other in such a way that this interdependence, it really fuels energy towards this desire. The reason why you're going to get up and cook that meal for that family in your church is not because there's a rule, but you actually emotionally feel attached to them. And so you're like, please, I need to have some way to express this. Thank you, thank you for letting me, I can cook a meal for you. That's amazing, thank you. I've been looking for something like that. That's what emotional attachment and interdependence looks like when there is an appropriate kind of attachment that happens.
And we're creating families in which—and like I said, I think even as a man, I had learned the secret to emotionally detaching from individuals. I understood how to do that. And so I was very excited to use this against my family in order to be that rock for them. I'll provide for you guys. I'll make sure that I do these things that dads do. But one of the things I would like to do is I would just like to remain somewhat emotionally distant. And as my kids were getting older, I noticed, wow, this is injuring them.
They sense that distance. This is not healthy. I'm going to lose my children. They're not going to love me because I didn't love them appropriately. And so I had to unlearn this and repent of this because this kind of self-protection is very destructive in a family.
JEFF
I think you've pointed to upstream. There's some healing, there's maybe counseling, there's an emotions wheel that I have in my closet that I can look at what am I feeling. Yes, there's upstream. A couple examples you gave, one was the speech to the family of like, hey, let me share my heart and call out things. We had a little thankfulness train that happened at the dinner table last night of I thanked one of my girls specifically, then she thanked someone else and there's this specific thankfulness and no one was interrupting. It was beautiful.
What are some other tactical, like, this will help this attachment, the vulnerability, the warmth, the heart connection? What else are some examples that would help this?
JEREMY
Yeah, with daughters in particular, there's kind of a trope that says, she's got her dad wrapped around her finger. That exists for a reason, because there's something that women really need from their dad, and that is that they need to sense, my dad really, really cares about me.
And so I have four daughters too, and I feel like part of what I had to learn is to actually say out loud, like, honey, that really hurts. Or like my second daughter, she just had a baby last night, this morning actually. Our fourth grandchild. And it's her first. I was up till like two or three in the morning. And the old Jeremy would have fallen asleep at 10:30 and had a great night's sleep. This Jeremy, as I become so attached to my girls—even though they're married and having kids—they know and she knew that I was right there and I cared about what she was going through. They had a home birth and she was an absolute champ.
But yeah, that cost me a lot to be that connected to her. And that was like 10 years of going deeper and deeper into her heart and trying to understand, sharing moments and becoming vulnerable. And like I said, I still feel like a novice at this. Some people listening to this are like, I do this so easily. So I just want to tell you guys, awesome, that's great, please keep going. Some of us are not that way.
Some of us have just for either temperamental reasons, sometimes it's just people have been really hurt in their past and they have a lot of walls around their heart. But we do need to go through some healing in these areas and try to get in contact with, okay, what is it that is causing me to be afraid of this kind of deep emotional connection?
And I think that one of the amazing things about being a dad is your children will naturally bring you out of that problem. I found that this would be true of all my kids and my son who—he's very emotionally affectionate and he has been extremely healing for me. Just my relationship with him over the years. And now we work together every day and he's still just very much like, I can tell he loves me. And he, in some ways, really guides my heart towards depth.
Just yesterday he was sharing my heart with him. And then a few hours later, he did something to really help me that shocked me. I didn't see it coming. He's just like, dad, I want to take care of this for you. And I was just like, my gosh, this is—thank you. I did not have the strength to understand or see that.
And so I just love the way God designed this. It's just like, wow, it's so beautiful. And every morning I try to write one thing that is the emotion that I—the strongest emotion I felt the day before. This is kind of an exercise I started working on when I was working on this. And so if you go back through my journal, I've been doing this for probably eight years or something. It's just, it really is a compass for what I find most meaningful in my life. And you'll see these moments where my kids just, they do things that really touch my heart. And now I recognize it and I kind of celebrate it.
And that's part of my prayer time with the Lord is just to go deeper into that and understand, wow, God, you've made my heart and you've given me these relationships and you brought real meaning into my life. And this is so beautiful. Thank you. God's design for families is so good.
But I could have lost or missed all of that if I just decided, look, I'm just gonna—I did enjoy my introverted, very kind of walled off heart. I was getting a lot of benefits from those practices. Long-term, that would have really hurt my kids and my relationship with them would not be the same.
JEFF
Are there any other daily or weekly kind of anchoring habits, that habit of the next day reflecting back in the previous day of key emotion? Any other that maybe we set aside the weekly Sabbath because we talked about that back in our last conversation. But anything else daily or weekly that you're like, it's something that you prioritize right now?
JEREMY
Yeah. Well, I think I would say one of the greatest things that has helped me is April—my wife—has this uncanny ability to see the emotional relational map in the family. And so I would say there's a daily conversation that happens between me and April where she is sharing with me, hey, honey, I think that really hurt this daughter. Or, hey, I think this one really needs you right now. Can you take them out?
And so I could see those as really annoying, like, another thing to do. And I think there was a time where that was sort of my reaction to this fact. And by the way, one of the real problems of not fully appreciating how different God made men and women—to understand like part of the reason why girls are suffering so much from social media is because they have this superpower, they can see the relational map. And so even like, you know, you've got this poor 12-year-old girl who's like, why do they like their posts but didn't like my post? This is why social media is just such a disaster for middle school girls.
But I think what we don't talk about is the other side of that, which is that they have this emotional relational map in order to build a multi-generational family that's healthy. And part of that is they become an exceptional advisor to others in the family, especially their husbands.
So my wife, who doesn't engage much on social media, she has this superpower and most of your wives have this as well. And so I think you have to develop this dynamic connection with your wife where you need to really ask her if she's not doing this or if she is doing this, invite this, say, please, like if you ever sense a disconnect happening between me and one of the kids or you can sense something's going on—I'm dense, I'm probably not going to see it. You're probably going to see it way before I am. And we're just not built the same, but I want to participate fully in creating those connections.
And sometimes she'll sense something, but I'll actually have the key to what needs to bring that child back into the family or help them understand and connect with what's going on or heal a sibling conflict or whatever's going on there.
And so she's just constantly advising me, texting me on a daily basis, we're talking about it. And she knows that she can assign me—this is just a very training wheels kind of way to do it—but she basically has a free pass to assign me a one-on-one with anybody in the family every week. And so she'll say, okay, Jeremy, this week I need you to meet with so-and-so.
Now that we have in-laws and grandkids, they're all a part of that map. She can somehow sense the entire thing. We have five kids, four grandkids, three in-law kids. And so there's, you know, my parents live with us. So there's a lot of relational complexity in a multi-generational family. And so that map has become so valuable. And thank God that he's made women with this ability.
JEFF
The way you describe that is almost like a conductor or someone who is like, she's adjusting your schedule, she's putting things on your to-do list, she's texting and welcoming that. So this is a real problem for me right now. This is not a problem for my wife. She actually has this vantage point, this wisdom. She has such perspective that I value. But I often receive that perspective in a moment that I'm feeling at the max of my capacity and at the edge of overwhelm.
And I respond in a reactive way. So I'm giving signals every day to stop advising me, stop advising me, or I receive it as a personal, like, this is what you've done wrong in the last week as a dad. And probably because I lead a fatherhood ministry, I take it even more, like I start to process all these insecurities and shame and all this stuff.
So somehow, and maybe you can give me the answer. This is a major area that will affect in such good way a relationship with my wife and with my girls. What would you, how would you coach me to respond and welcome versus push back in defensiveness?
JEREMY
Well, for me and April, there was—I don't think we actually understood what was happening. And so I did interpret initially a lot of these messages as, like, are you serious? Like, do you realize I'm better than 99% of dads and now you're gonna give me one more thing that makes me feel like a loser? I certainly had those feelings and we've had those conversations.
But what I think started happening with us was I actually needed to sit down with her and talk about this very explicitly and say, okay, I need you to understand a few things. Number one, I am a man, you're a woman, I'm extremely dense. What's obvious to you is obvious to you. And so when you communicate these things to me, you gotta act like I'm a dense man and not like another woman. Maybe if you thought that I—but it's not obvious to me.
And she was really good at this. She had a father that she had so much affection for and he was an incredibly, incredibly active, loving father who was also pretty dense on the scale. Okay, that helps. Like I am. So she had that experience. Some women, especially if they grew up in a very, very maternal environment, they might have not developed proper intuitions around the way that men are wired. Or maybe there's a culture, there are some family cultures that just denigrate men for being dense as opposed to say, okay, we've just got these different superpowers.
So the tone—I think I did have to basically, the way I kind of coached April was I don't want it to come across as judging or I don't want it to come across as a power grab. What I need is advice. And if you give it to me as loving advice, I will take it and I will do my best with it. And please allow me to try to do this in a way that I think I can handle because you can't see necessarily all of the challenges or bandwidth constraints that I'm dealing with on a day-to-day or hour by hour basis.
And so there is like a mutual respect. So if it comes across in a respectful, loving tone and I can demonstrate to her that I can steward that properly without her needing to increase the volume through something, then eventually it turned into this really amazing dynamic kind of partnership. But that definitely took time.
And so I think one of the things I always tell people is like, yeah, if that's not happening right now, it is worthwhile to explicitly invest in that partnership and to really kind of frame it that way and say, look, I'm going to need—
And one of the things I told her is, I need at least like two or three, please send me two or three messages a week about the things that you believe are most important for me to understand about what you're seeing in the family. And then give me time to process and don't assume you know the solution.
One of the things sometimes—they say this in marketing when they're doing product research—they say that your customers are incredibly good at discovering the problems, but they're not as good at the solutions, but they think they are. They're like, I know how to fix your problem.
So I think it's similar in this dynamic where I think April is incredibly good at diagnosing the problem. But the solution sometimes is something that I might actually be able to figure out more easily than she can. I just can't see the problem. And so part of that is like, she was like, no, no, I know this is the solution. I'm like, honey, I don't know if that's the solution, but I completely agree. That's the problem. Can I pray about that and think about that?
And certainly, so we've learned to really trust each other, but this dynamic has taken some time to choreograph properly for sure.
JEFF
Well, and one of the pieces I'm taking away is the pause between observation and my—the pause gives me the ability to pray into, affirm what she's seeing and then offer versus on the fly. I just do poorly.
JEFF
Thank you so much for joining us this week for the first half of my conversation with Jeremy Pryor. Next week, we're gonna go deeper, we're gonna go heavier, not in a bad way, we're gonna go heavier from the angle of, man, there's a lot of weight, there's a lot of gravity, but we actually bring a lot of power into this role of the direction of our families. So I want to make sure you get back and join us for episode 416 next week. Hey, I'm praying for you guys. Let's be dads of action. Thanks for being DadAwesome.
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"Your kids can actually feel that distance. They're like, 'If something were to happen to me, I think dad would be the least affected.'"
"I need to go through some healing. I needed somebody to teach me—okay Jeremy, you're feeling something right now, say something about it in front of the whole family."
"This kind of self-protection is very destructive in a family."
"God's design for families is so good. But I could have missed all of that if I just decided to keep my walled-off heart."
"Your wife has this uncanny ability to see the emotional relational map in the family. That superpower exists to build a healthy multi-generational family."
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