Should I Get Dad's Permission When He's Home?

Leadership as Decision-Making and Burden Bearing

Leadership essentially is decision making and men are just way more qualified than women to make quick, simple decisions that involve like, you know, balancing a variety of variables anyway. So a lot of this is just men are more qualified to do this than women, even though they abdicate that role.

Part of why they're abdicating is because their wife like demands that they abdicate it.

Right. Tim, the question for today's episode is, should kids get permission from dad when he's home?

Definitely, man. That's that's what they should do.

Definitely go get permission from dad. Do not seek out mom or you've committed a grievous sin against God. Is that what you're saying?

As a generality, you know, if you were to think about this grievous, generally it's a think about this way. So, I mean, if if dad is functionally the king of the home or the ruler of the home and mom is the queen of the home, then I guess, you know, you can imagine a situation where, you know, dad and mom, you know, dad's sitting on his kingly throne and then mom is sitting next to dad on the kingly throne.

And then the kids walk into the court or whatever. Right. To get permission to do certain things. And if they just kind of go straight to mom and dad sitting right there. Right. Dad, you know, he he's not really having anything to do.

So they go straight to the queen instead of going to the king. I think obviously, I mean, everyone would just instantaneously assume in that kind of arrangement that the queen is the one who's in charge.

That would be what they would assume. They wouldn't necessarily assume that. I mean, it would be kind of a breach of protocol, basically. Right. That makes sense. Yeah. So it would be it would be a situation where everyone would assume that, well, she's the real power in charge of this kind of thing.

And that would be particularly pronounced if like it were the peasants in that kind of situation. Right. So like the peasants come into the courtroom, they go straight to the queen, they they address her, they ask her permission and she's deciding like matters along those lines.

Everyone would think, well, she's the real power here. She's he's she's the one who's in charge. So like in that kind of way, I mean, there's obviously, you know, scenarios that you can imagine along these lines where it may be fine to go talk to mom and ask mom's permission.

And most of the time, I mean, you know, with little kids in particular, they're they're in traditional homes where the dad's working and mom's not. What generally happens is the kids will go and they'll ask mom because they do that all day long.

So she's the one they look to. Right. To ask for requests in general. And then she's the one they look to to manage like all their conflicts they have in general. So they're just used to going to her.

But then, you know, does like the question is, is is this I mean, should there be a tangible shift in those kind of dynamics when the dad is home? And then, you know, even when the dad isn't home, is there a sense in which she's acting for him as his representative when he's not home?

Like related to these requests, so like should there be looming in her mind something along the lines of, well, dad has decided, you know, X, Y, Z, you know, as it relates to a lot of those things anyways.

And then when he gets home, would it be natural just to kind of funnel them to him to manage most of a lot of what parenting is, is managing, particularly when your kids are young, managing their conflicts and, you know, handling all their requests and things like that.

So is there is there a shift that happens when dad is home? Now, I mean, if dad has something to do, then, you know, I mean, if dad's like busy doing something productive or something like that, I mean, there's obviously like the question is not meant to be a straitjacket or something like that.

But then it is meant to ask, is there something that generally changes when dad gets home? Does the dynamics of the home change in any tangible way? So that's kind of right.

Yeah. Yeah.

The question's not necessarily trying to say, all right, here is the new prescribed law that, you know, all children must follow in order to please God. Right. It's more just a question of who at the bottom of it really is just a question of who is actually the one in charge, like bottom line, who's the one who is who's got the final say with these kinds of things.

And not only has the final say, but then like in the minds of everyone in the family, they all understand that this person has the final say in those things. Right. That's kind of what you're getting at here.

Biblical Leadership and the Curse in the Home

Yeah. So so so what's happened is with with a lot of people, they they don't actually understand leadership to be a concept that really has much of any meaning at all. So when you think about leadership, like in general, people caricature the idea of of leadership, like what I'm going to describe as an essential component of leadership.

So what they'll do is they'll strawman this idea. So they like on the one hand, they'll say, hey, leadership isn't bossing people around. OK. Yeah. So when with if I were to say, hey, yeah, the kids should probably go to talk to their dad and this kind of thing.

Then instantaneously in people's mind, what they do is it instantaneously goes to, oh, you must be some like if you're some dad who wants this to happen or something like that, or if you're saying that this is a part of what it means to be a leader like you, you're just some guy with the, you know, ego that needs to be stroked.

Yeah. You've got a God complex or something.

God complex, a megalomaniac or a tyrant or whatever you conceive of leadership as bossing people around and all that. And, you know, it's like mom's an adult to dad's an adult to, you know, they can go to whoever is closest to them.

It's not really a big deal. But then functionally what's actually happening is like the children, like children, often they do go to. Who they perceive to be the natural leader in any given situation, so if mom's making all the decisions, that's kind of like there is a very real dynamic as it relates to, you know, just the curse in general.

That the woman will desire to supplant her husband, like his role as being a leader of a family. And there's a lot of families that are like very matriarchal and how they run. So when there's decisions to be made, everyone knows you, you know, in a matriarchal home, you go to mom because because if you go to dad, dad's just going to say, hey, go ask your mother.

I, you know, and a lot of that's just him abdicating his role.

Right, right.

So a lot of that's him abdicating his role as the leader of the home or just say, hey, go. I don't want to deal with it. Go ask mom. But then what happens over the course of your life, if that's routinely what's happening, like mom actually is bearing the weight of making all the decisions within a home throughout the whole childhood of the of their kids.

Right, right.

And so they know that I go to mom, mom decides everything. But part of like part of like how men justify this kind of thing is they say, hey, I'm just delegating, right?

I'm a master delegator.

I delegate. But then the problem is like, what is leadership? Like you get behind the question, you have to ask yourself, well, what what is leadership here? Like, what is leadership really like at its core?

And leadership is burden bearing. It's like a lot of leadership is making those decisions. And, you know, it can be very like a lot of people think that this is just about like some man who needs his ego stroke or something.

But it can be pretty stressful on a wife to have to make all these decisions routinely all the time.

The Husband as Representative and the Blessing of Delegation

Yeah.

To be the one who has to deal with all the kids conflicts, managing all their conflicts, to make all these decisions. And I mean, that's leadership essentially is decision making is and men are just way more qualified than women to make quick, simple decisions that involve like, you know, balancing a variety of variables anyway.

So a lot of this is just men are more qualified to do this than women, even though they abdicate that role. Part of why they're abdicating is because their wife like demands that they abdicate it.

Right.

And empower them to do that kind of thing. But then like women get really stressed out when they're having to make all these decisions all the time, whereas a man can just, you know, as a husband, even in my home, I can make these decisions really easy.

It's not really that big a deal. It doesn't stress me out. It doesn't it's not it's nothing, you know, it's nothing to make like these kind of decisions over and over again to just kind of quickly decide, OK, yeah, that's what's going to happen.

And and and what happens when like families embrace this kind of thing, like often like ladies will fight it for a little bit, but then they'll realize it's like such a big blessing to have that burden off of their shoulders in general, where they don't have to decide all these things and they can just point them to the husband.

The husband can take care of it. And often it has a way of just like like the kids, if they know that they have to go through dad, like they like, so you have you have a fight that you're trying to get someone to manage.

You know, you have to go through dad. It does have a way of getting them on their best behavior, figuring out is this something we really want to talk about, you know, that kind of thing, too. So, I mean, there's just a lot of blessings that come from doing this kind of thing.

And, you know, when you think about it, I think that's just that's what the what the Bible means when it says leader, when it talks about leadership in general. And this is just something that people don't understand as a necessary aspect of leadership, if that makes sense.

So, so, I mean, there's there's that example of the man who's asking Jesus to heal his son. And this this this is kind of a throwaway passage that people don't understand that has a lot to do with what leadership actually is.

But then, you know, he looks at Jesus and he essentially says, hey, you don't have to go. You don't have to come to heal my son. All you have to do is say the word.

Right, right.

Say the word, because I'm I'm a man under authority. Right. So I tell people to do certain things and they do it. Right. So I tell one man, go this way and he goes this way. You know, I tell another man to come and he comes.

And so he's basically looking at Jesus saying, I understand how authority works and authority looks like giving like instructions and giving directions. Right. And so then you you you have authority over the sickness.

All you have to do is tell to go away and go away. You don't even have to be there. You know, I understand how Jesus, you know, marveled at his great faith and everything else. So like along those lines, that's that's just a necessary aspect of what leadership is.

That's like, you know who the leader is, who people look to. Now, I mean, I think that there's plenty of situations where like a husband might delegate in a non spineless way to his wife. So, you know, in particular, if my kids are asking me about food requests, I say, hey, yeah, yeah.

Go ask your mom about food, because she's the one who, you know, buys the groceries, has a meal plan. She's the one who manages that thing. That's not in my area of expertise or knowledge. I don't want to mess up something that she like.

I don't want to tell you you can eat something that when she has a certain plan that she's trying to run, that is not necessarily in my mind. So you got to talk to her about that. But I mean, I think that the vast majority of things that kids are going to be coming to are not like maybe when they get older, it starts to become more and more about food request.

But I mean, particularly when they're younger, I mean, it's I go to dad. I think that's a good practice that everyone can get in. And that's good for the kids. It's good for them, for the wife to remind herself that she has someone who's in authority over her to, you know, to where dad's that's when he's charged.

We're looking to him to make these decisions. We're going to follow him and what he's what he decides.

Free Biblical Counseling and Final Exhortation

OK, fair. And please know that we also offer free biblical counseling, which you can take advantage of by emailing us. Now, go boldly and obey the truth in the midst of a biblically illiterate world who will be perpetually offended by your every move.