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How to Get Your Parents to Tell Family Stories

Jeremy:
One of the things that we’re constantly discussing is how do we get these upstream generations into our family’s life? And a really interesting conversation on the Facebook group. If you haven’t gotten in there and go to the Five Minute Fatherhood Facebook group and join the dads that are having great discussions in there. But my buddy Ryan who lives here in Cincinnati, talked about a victory. Now he was just listening to our previous podcast that we did on dad’s building teams about the nuclear family and said that he was really wrestling with what we were saying. And then he said, but, like in the midst of that, I really found a victory. So I’m just going to read you what Ryan did, and I just found this really, there’s a lot of application to this. So, Ryan, again, thank you so much for contributing to our community. I love what you’re doing, man.

By the way, Ryan also mentors my son Jackson on a regular basis. So he’s a really special person to our whole family. Yeah. So he wrote, “See, here’s my victory. The past few weeks I’ve been burned out doing bedtime with the kids and I’ve been FaceTiming family and asking them to tell the kids a family story. Their first response is initially, I don’t know. Then I clarify, how about a story from when you were a kid or tell us about your dad or mom. Then an amazing thing happens. They start sharing and I see my dad, my uncle, whoever, come alive, so to speak. It’s like they are designed for this specific purpose.”

So basically, you know, Ryan was saying he was kind of getting burned out, putting his kids to bed and the whole long process and said he just came up with this idea, because the quarantine, he can’t have necessarily a lot of interaction with his parents. And so he just FaceTimed his dad and put the phone there next to, or gave the phone to one of his kids as they were going down and just let his father put his, you know, daughter or son to sleep, you know, with a story, a family story.

I was like, yeah, me too, it’s like using technology in this way is so brilliant. And there’s a few things that Ryan did here with the prompts that make it really easy. But I think this is a huge win, but yeah. Jeff, how did you see this?

Jeff:
Yeah, I just thought it was such a cool way because there’s so many ways where technology hurts our relationships, hurts our families. And so I feel like, yeah, it’s just so fun to almost feel like a cool little way is to just try to redeem it, you know, and think of ways where you can actually use it to your advantage. You know, and of course some of us are Zoomed out and all that stuff, totally warranted. But, again, what are some other ways that you can use it? And so, like, one way I’ve been really enjoying lately is me and the kids will have like, we’ll watch like YouTube videos together or something like that, you know? And it’s really fun too because usually you’ll watch kid ones.

But what I do is it’s really fun to welcome them into something that I love. And so I’ve been trying to get into spearfishing last couple months. And so I watch a lot of like spearfishing channels, you know. And it’s fun how much they love it. You know what I mean? And how, instead of me just watching it by myself, it’s so much different and fun to just kind of envelop them in for like one little quick eight minute video, that’s like really special, kind of resets our family, they’re cuddling on my lap, they ask questions. And I’m like doing that every day now just for like little eight to 10 minute segments and that’s just super fun. So it’s just like ways to think about how to redeem it and how to use it. I think are super fun.

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