When somebody feels disconnected, sometimes we're tempted to pull away from our child, particularly the dad. I think sometimes dads are like, oh, I'm getting all the success and I feel really good and competent. As men, we love to feel competent. I feel so competent when I spend time with these two or three kids. This one, this one's a puzzle for me and kind of gets under my skin. I'm going to sort of subtly, like, pull away from that

child. That is a disaster. That is a black sheep ready to happen.

Hi, welcome to the Family Teams podcast. Our goal here is to help your family become a multi-generational

team on mission by providing you with biblically rooted concepts, tools, and rhythms. Your hosts are

Jeremy Pryor and Jefferson Bethke, and we can't wait to chat about all things family.

All right. Welcome back to the Family Teams podcast. I know what you're thinking. Wait,

who's this person talking? If anybody, if we haven't met, my name's Blake Allsmith, and we're trying

something new where I'm going to try to host and facilitate. Don't worry, we still have Jeremy Pryor on here. We have April prior on here. We have Jeff Bethke on here. And so the idea being, I'm going to try to ask these guys some questions. And we're going to dive deep into a new theme. Actually, for this whole next month, we're going to jump into the topic of winning your children's hearts. And so, I mean, if you've been around the family team stuff, you hear about order, you hear about meetings. I think sometimes we can start to think, like, where's the heart in this thing? I would say at the very core of it, you really can't create order or discipline or systems in a family unless you've really captured your children's hearts.

And so that's going to be the theme that we're going to be hitting again and again this month

in the podcast. So on that theme, the first thing we want to talk about is the topic of avoiding

the black sheep effect. And as a middle child who maybe myself, I maybe had been a black

sheep from time to time. We want to

try to dive into this and something that's near and dear to my heart. So maybe as we kick it off,

Jeremy, before we go any further, frame this for parents. What is the black sheep effect? And why is it

such a quiet killer of connection in families? Yeah, we all know that we desire identity and we get

our identity from our families. And so

oftentimes in a family team or in a family system, you have the one child who feels like, hey,

I just don't feel like I fit quite in this family. And they're getting that idea from comparing

themselves to their siblings. They're seeing their siblings like really succeed or whatever.

And so they start to figure out, where do I fit in this family? Am I the musician? Am I the funny one? Am I the like? And they just can't figure it what they fit. And they're like, you know what? Forget it. I'm the anti-family. And this dark kind of identity sort of falls over this child. And you don't know quite what's happening, but they're just fighting you and they're actually finding and drawing identity out of the family system by being the anti-family child. And so we need to be aware that this is just a dynamic because we are identity formed creatures. We need an identity. And so this is, this actually is so common, especially in larger families,

that we now have this really well defined or well described cliche for it, the black sheep

or somebody just says, hey, that person is the black sheep at the family. So we want to just as family

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