Jeremy:
What’s up guys? Welcome to the Five Minute Fatherhood. Jeremy and Jeff here. We want to talk about daughters. We’d love to take some time, look at sons and daughters. I know that some of you guys may have a little bit less experience hanging out with girls. I know a lot of times I talk to friends of mine, and they’re like, “I totally get having sons. I’m completely confused by the whole daughter thing.” Each one is its own sort of different challenge and opportunity. So we want to talk about this separately.
I want to just ask the question. How do you win the heart of your daughter? There is a basic key to this that I think is really important. You need to, number one, adore her. Number two, show her that you adore her, in a way that she can understand it. Those are the two, I think, most important things to understand about having a daughter. This can be really challenging, and a lot of times it depends on which one of those you’re struggling with.
Are you struggling with the first one? Which is, we’ve got to be honest with … Sometimes we get really annoyed with our daughters. We don’t see them … We may see them as toys, or play things, or annoyances, or whatever, however you’re experiencing her. I remember, this really hit me when I first saw one of my friends have a daughter. This is before I had one. I watched him do this so well. He adored his little girl.
As I was a single guy, just sort of saw this happening and thought, “Oh my gosh, that was such a beautiful thing to watch.” I saw the kind of relationship that they shared. From that moment on I was so excited to have a daughter. I was actually more excited to have a daughter, when I saw that, than even having a son at the time when I was just in my early 20’s. God now has blessed me with four daughters. But there’s all kinds of nuances and challenges about this. So I was curious, Jeff, how you think about this idea? How do you really win the heart of your daughter?
Jeff:
I think first there’s two steps there I think. The first one is getting rid of all your baggage about male and female difference. In the sense if there is difference. I’m saying, I think … How do I say this? I think one of the biggest things is, I think sometimes dads because they feel like they don’t understand what it’s like to be a female, they then thus kind of retreat or pull away. Kind of like, “Oh, I don’t understand, so I’m just going to kind of remove myself from the situation. Connecting with my daughter can just be the wife’s job, or the mom’s job.” That already is step one, that’s I think seriously, seriously bad.
A lot of times I think I want to encourage fathers to go one step deeper there because it’s not always the case. But most of the time that’s actually that disconnect is because of some type of level of brokenness in a father or a male’s heart. We don’t want to push in there. We don’t want to push into, “Why am I uncomfortable with sensitivity, or tenderness, or connecting to my daughter?” There’s a lot of really, really serious brokenness, I think, in there because of our culture, because of our views of women, because of just a myriad of other issues.
That’s step one, in my opinion. You’ve got to get over that hump. You got to realize that that alone will just wreak havoc on your family, and in your relationships with your children, specifically with your daughters. So you’ve got to push into the hard work there or else you will have a serious disconnect that will totally run rampant in all of your family relationships in regards to health. It won’t be health. So, first step there. Get healing or at least kind of center in on the brokenness, or understand why you’re uncomfortable. Get there.
Then to actually connect, I think exactly what you said. You step into your identity as a father, and only then can your daughter step into her identity as a daughter. Like a daughter and a son, by the nature of the word, are not … like, you can’t be that without a father. The name and the identity is literally incumbent or contingent upon a parent, a father. So, the more you step into your identity, the more they can step into their identity as a daughter.
I think that’s how we see it as man. What does that mean then to be a father? Because if I step into that then they’ll be a natural kind of wooing, or calling, or orbiting around the father’s identity of the daughter becoming a daughter, and being adored, and winning her heart. I think that’s just … That one then becomes understanding the template of the father’s heart, the capital F Father, God in Heaven. That we find in Jesus, as tender, as meek, as righteous, as kind and gentle, protective, creator. You could just go on, and on, and on, but step into those kind of terms as what it means to be a father.
We see the father’s dynamic with Jesus even more explicitly in the gospel. So study those, rest in those, and say, “Am I being like that by the power of the Holy Spirit? Can I step into that?” I actually think when you do do that, that’ll naturally then outflow of winning the heart of your daughter. It comes out when you’re stepping into your fatherness in the righteous and right way. That’s what we would encourage you dads with today, is that is how you do it. Understand and look in your own heart first because you have to understand what it means to be a true father and live in God’s design for fatherhood. With that and in that you will start to see this rippling effect towards it winning the heart of your daughter.