Caught Vs. Taught – The Parenting Secret
In this episode of the Daron Earlewine Podcast “Parenting for a Purpose”, Daron and his wife, Julie Earlewine discuss the parenting secret: more is caught than taught.
Kids learn more by watching than hearing.
That’s why it’s so important for parents to model and demonstrate the right behaviors.
So whether you’re a new or seasoned parent, this episode is sure to help you in raising your children, because remember, more is caught than taught!
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Daron:
But I know that growing up in my life, I caught that from my dad, that dad calls people, he has a calling for people, right? And this is now what I talk about every week. And you can take risk and following Jesus, and he looks out for you in that process. And so I think it’s important to look at our lives, look at our marriage and say, what are some of the things that we want our kids to catch that we’re glad that we’ve learned from God and make them a part of the culture of our home, of our family, of what’s happening. Not just principles, but stories of how we’re living it now
Tagline: Created on purpose and for purpose.
Daron:
Everybody, welcome back to the Daron Earlewine Podcast. And once again, so stoked to welcome my wife Julie Earlewine to the podcast. Hi Jules. Hi. And we are doing a multi week series called Parenting for Purpose for a Purpose, and we can call it whatever, but that’s basically what it’s about. And we have been talking about doing this series for a while because parenting is hard and same time it’s unbelievably fulfilling and we’ve just kind of gone through a season in our own life as parenting, a first time our oldest son leaving the house and heading to college, chasing a dream. He’s playing football, college football up at Ball State University and trying to get a business degree. And it’s just been such a cool process. And as we’ve had conversations with people, we’ve realized I think maybe we’ve learned a few things, what to do and not to do in parenting.
And like I said in the first episode, we’re not experts. We don’t have a degree in this. We’re not licensed family counselors. We’re just parents who have been married for 22 years and have a 19 year old, basically a 17 year old and a 13 year old that seem to be turning out to be pretty decent dudes. And so we’ve talked about what are some of the things that we’ve actually done that has helped in that process. And that’s why I wanted Julie to come on because she’s an amazing parent. I’m so indebted to what she contributes to our marriage and to our parenting. We’re a good yin and yang, if you will, for each other. And she remembers everything. So there’s a lot of things for me that I’m like, we did some stuff I think when they were like six and Judith’s like you mean this when it was this, this, and oh yeah, that story.
So we need her memory and we need her guidance on this. And I’m excited that you’ve downloaded this episode. We really appreciate it. And so if you have questions as we’re going through this series, we’d love to do some follow-up stuff after we finish out this run of episodes. And so if you have a question, you have a situation maybe with your parents or with your kids and you just want to throw it into the discussion, you can always reach out. You can reach out to me as Daron@blackbirdmission.com, send me an email. You can comment, send me a direct message on any of the socials. I’m out there. Just search my name. Or you can text me 317-550-5070. And we will do our best to get back and have you join the conversation. So Julie, today we’re in episode two and it’s kind of a next door neighbor to episode one, but it’s another quote that we’ve said often in our life and we have a little bit of a different opinion.
I thought I heard this for the first time from a pastor in North Carolina that was a great mentor of ours, distantly through his son and good friends. Anyway, this is a quote that we’ve said. I thought I heard it from a mentor of ours. Then I searched it this week online and realized, oh, wait a second. Everybody stole this from John Maxwell, which is fine. John is great, and John says great things, but here’s the title of this second episode in the Parenting for a Purpose. This “more is caught than taught.” And if John was here, he would say, listen, friend, my name is John and I’m your friend. I want you to know in your parenting….
Julie:
What are you actually doing or is caught? Please stop doing this…
Daron:
caught…
Julie:
Please. I’m doing this.
Daron:
That’s a good John Maxwell. Coop, is that a good John Maxwell? Okay. Nailed it. See, producer co says it’s a greats, a great J Maxx. Okay. Anyway, John Maxwell did say that he said, more is caught than taught. And I hate this principle on the surface because you’d like to say, well, I can just teach my kids the right thing and they’ll just do it. Which you’ve heard that said before of like, Hey, what I say, not what I do. That feels better, way easier. Just learn some good principles, spew that out at your kids and boom, they’re going to be great. Problem is they actually replicate and learn who you are, not necessarily what you do or what you say. So along with this, John X will call called it the law of reproduction. We teach what we know, we reproduce what we are. And we’ve seen that that’s true, but it’s a difficult principle. When would you say, Julie, this hits back to the first episode. When can you remember seeing some of this as a reality in our parenting with our kids?
Julie:
I don’t know if really when, I think it’s more of an overarching thing. Our approach for our family in regards to, we really wanted their spiritual journeys to be a really organic natural experience for them that wasn’t something that was forced on them, but was something that was modeled to them to a way that they wanted to choose it on their own. And I especially felt very passionate of pulling out a lot of religious tactics and putting in a lot of Jesus grace tactics in our boys’ lives.
Daron:
Removing you mean?
Julie:
Yeah. I would rather, I wanted to take out the religious tactics we kind of were raised under and put in grace-filled Jesus-desiring tactics that allowed our kids to see Jesus for who Jesus really is. And I think that Daron does an unbelievable far better job at that than me and what I feel like right now because I remember things, but I feel like right now I’m seeing it in their spiritual choices, their desire to share Jesus love Jesus and honor Jesus with their lives. And we didn’t tell them we to didn’t take them to church every week. We didn’t do all of the methodical things that we did growing up, which I don’t regret a lot of those because I firmly believe they’re a giant part of who I am in my spiritual journey. But we just felt led to do ’em a little different and it’s been awesome to see them own that on their own.
And there wasn’t a lot of rules to it. It was just them watching us live a life where we loved other people and we love Jesus. And so now we’re reaping the benefits of kids that love people and love Jesus. And I think that’s kind of the main one. I feel like where we are right now, I mean, my kids are older when they were little. I mean if I yelled, they yelled. That’s the caught thought we kind of talked about in the last episode. It’s like if I got super amped, then they got super amped, then if I stayed, when I find balance, they find balance. Those were how you react is how they react.
Daron:
I love what…
Julie:
that’s not a good example
Daron:
but is is and I love what…
Julie:
I feel right now and the season I’m in right now.
Daron:
Well, I love what you brought the idea of seeing it in their faith. And there have been moments, we were talking with the boys when as they were getting in their teen years of where they wanted to do what they could to let their friends that didn’t know about Jesus know about Jesus or they wanted to be involved in things that were kind of taking Jesus outside the walls of regular religious things. And they were drawn to those environments and still are, still are. And we didn’t sit down and have devotions every, we did have demotions a lot with our kids, but we didn’t sit down and I taught ’em, guys, listen, this is what we do and here’s the principle behind this. And this is the thing.
Julie:
We didn’t force anything on them.
Daron:
We didn’t force it. But I’m saying, and I don’t even realize, I think what surprised me sometimes is not realizing that they were catching it where it’s like, what does my dad do? Well, my dad goes and talks to people in bars about Jesus, and we would share those stories. I would come home from an event and say we’d be at dinner or whatever. And what’s crazy, we had this story with this guy, we got to pray with this guy, and they were catching the idea that the way we represent Jesus have to be in church and it can be here. And people that are hurting that don’t know Christ are open to find him. These things were, I’m sure we talked about ’em, but I think what made them actually reproducible and maybe transformational in their life wasn’t that, yeah, we just told a story and talked about it, but we never did it. It was the fact that it’s like, no, that was actually what we were about. They caught that. And so actually the lifestyle behind it allowed the lesson and the principle to actually sink in because it wasn’t just information. It was actually a real lived experience in our home.
Julie:
Yeah, I think one thing that I thought about right now is I think is interesting is one thing that Daron’s always done really well around the dinner table because we’re a big dinner table family where as much as we could, we were very highly involved sports family, so family dinners could get tricky, but we modified time of dinner to modify time together, and it’s always been really important to be around our table. And when we were around our table, we really discouraged any phone usage and we really encouraged conversations. So Daron started years ago. I mean, they were little. Daron was like, okay, I need your high of the day and the low of the day, it was so simple, was your high of the day and your low of the day. And that I think that simple conversation when they were little created a space where they’ve been able to away from the dinner table, come to us with their highs and come to us with their lows.
And so it gave them a safe space to say, I didn’t like this part of today. And then when they were young, and I loved this part of today, and so now when they’re older and they had something great in their day, they come to us and they can tell us. It’s created a practice in our home, a safe space to be like, this is the best part of my day, but this fire was really bad and I don’t know what to do with it. And this was hard. So I think that little lesson of simplicity when they were little, which was like, oh, I loved being at recess and lunch was the best part of the day. And I got sad when I saw this kid get left out of school. And we talked about all these different subjects because of it. And then now what I notice is if we sit down and we’re not intentional at dinner, they’ll be like, excuse me, highs and lows.
So they now initiate that healthy conversation in our home of talking about the good and the bad. And I think that’s a mean simple practice. You guys could start tonight, what’s the high of your day? What’s the low of your day? It’s not a super spiritual practice, it’s just a really real practice in our home where we’ve openly conversed about the good and they heard our good and they heard our bad. If I had a bad client that broke my heart, they heard me talk about it. If I had a celebration with a client that the kid had a huge success, they heard about that, or if I was having a friend problem, they would hear about that. Or if something was going on back home with my family in North Carolina, good or bad, it just created an open space to catch that you can talk about anything. And Daron started that simple practice that now has become something that they start if we forget.
Daron:
Yeah, and I think part of that too is I guess in the good for the good, it’s not just for the bad, but for the good is we did what we could to purposely allow our kids to have access to those parts of our lives where they were catching how we were dealing with friendships and disappointments and we didn’t hide some of those things or some of those struggles from them. So they weren’t just principles. And I think that’s a part of it is as we’re trying to figure out working out our relationship with Jesus and working out our relationship with others, we tried to humble ourselves and be vulnerable enough to let them at age appropriate levels, but let them into some of that. So it’s not like mom and dad teach us all this, but we never actually get a chance to see how they’re learning to live it out.
And I think that’s a big part of it. And it comes back a little bit to what we said in that first episode is apples never fall from the tree, right? Fall far from the tree. You got to take care of yourself first. And the same thing is this is more is caught than is taught. And so looking at yourself and thinking of yourself, I’m maybe it’s too soon for this illustration because of Covid, but you are contagious. You have a virus called you, and when people are around you, they get infected. And so what are you infecting your family with? Because they’re catching something, it’s impossible for them not to. And if you’re looking at it, you’re like, maybe you’ve got a seven, eight year old, 10 or whatever it is, and you’re starting to realize, oh my gosh, Susie, she’s lying a lot.
We need to punish her, really wash her mouth there, do something because she’s becoming really little loose with the truth. She must have a problem. The question I would ask is to get real self-reflective and be like, is there any chance that when you’re talking to people on the phone, you maybe use some little white lies sometimes to get out of situations? Or when you and your husband are talking about plans, do you kind of lie about what’s happening so people don’t get their feelings hurt or whatever situation you can have? Have you paid attention to the fact that they may just be paying attention to that? Well, when dad doesn’t want to deal with problems, he just kind of makes up a story. So then when you come into a situation and go, Hey, did you clean up your room? Well, now you’ve presented them with a situation where they don’t want to really deal with it and they lied to you and you’re like, how did you learn to lie?
Well, dad had just been watching you do it all the time and you thinking it was no big deal. So one of the scriptures I thought about, this one that jumped out, and I want to share this. It comes from the Old Testament, from Deuteronomy chapter six, verses five through nine, where God’s talking about how the environment you’re creating around your house, what I think is interesting is here’s what it says, you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might. And these words that I command you today shall be on your heart. Then he switches a little bit here and he says, you shall teach them diligently to your children. Right? Here’s the teaching part. Here’s the taught part. You’re going to teach these things diligently to your children. So we’re not saying teaching’s not important.
We’re not saying you don’t teach the word of God your kids. We’re not saying you don’t teach them principles. There’s teaching that’s involved, no doubt about it. It’s just what is sinking deepest is who you are, not necessarily just what you say. It goes on and says this, and you shall talk with them when you sit in your house and when you walk by the way, and when you lie down and when you rise, you shall bind them as a sign on your hand, and they shall be as frontlets between your eyes. You shall write them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates. So he’s saying, listen, these principles, you’re going to teach all these things to your kids, but here’s where it starts you, not them. You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart so minded, right? And strength.
And you shall have these things in your heart. And that’s the encouragement in this episode is have you taken ownership for your faith in your journey? You want your kid to become who God has created them to be? Is that something you are doing? Are they seeing, are they catching? Are you making them contagious for someone that loves Jesus with all the heart, soul, mind and strength? Or have you decided, Hey, you know what? I don’t really know how to do this, so we’re to maybe we’re going to kind of export the discipleship process for our kids. You can’t do it. You can’t do it, right? The thought of, Hey, you know what we’re going to do? I mean, I’ve heard people say this, well, we don’t really do church really much of that in our, so I’m not really religious, but I’ve taken my kids a little bit to church.
They can get some values or we’re putting ’em in a Christian school so they can really teach ’em the right stuff. You can send ’em to Christian school all you want, and they will be taught things, but they’re going to catch what you really care about. They’re going to catch what really matters to you. And so we can’t export that. That has to come from who we are. And if we want to raise kids that chase God’s dreams for their life, guess what? You better be chasing God’s dream for your life. If you want to raise kids that know how to forgive and know how to be gracious to people, you better be learning how to be gracious and forgiving towards people and walk that process with them. Because it’s not some magic trick that just shows up one day that, well, I said all the right things to my kid, but I’m not sure what happened. Well, what may have happened is they caught who you really were, not just what you had to say. That’s a tough lesson to own though, right? One thing I want to encourage you to do is to tell stories about the things you want to see in your family. And this is something that I thought about in my family, and
I think it connects to the things that you really do want your kids to catch. And I remember as a kid, my dad would always tell the story whether it was in a sermon or distant times. He would talk about that when he came to faith late in life and when he felt called to ministry, he was driving a tractor on my uncle’s farm and felt God call him into full-time ministry. And he moved our family and we moved from where he’d always been to this town. And then just what I realized is through my life, and I didn’t actually realize this till late, is my dad could have taught me all the time, Hey, listen, you trust God with your life and you really risk and you do whatever he ask you to do. But if my dad had never done that, it’d been like, well, that’s cool.
That’s good advice. But I don’t know that that’s true, but I know that growing up in my life, I caught that from my dad, that God calls people, he has a calling for people, and this is now what I talk about every week. And you can take risk and following Jesus, and he looks out for you in that process. And so I think it’s important to look at our lives, look at our marriage and say, what are some of the things that we want our kids to catch that we’re glad that we’ve learned from God and make them a part of the culture of our home, of our family, of what’s happening? Not just principles, but stories of how we’re living it out.
Julie:
I think it’s like when I think about my family, how I grew up and realizing, we talk a lot about in our lives, if you hear people talk about generational influence, whether positive or negative, and one of the things Darin was kind of talking to me about was like, what’s something that was caught and not taught in my home? What was more caught than taught in our home? And as I was thinking about, I thought about two things. My parents very intentionally had really great friends, and those friends that they surrounded me with had major impact on my life, emotionally, spiritually. When I go back home to North Carolina, those people that my mom and dad had in our home, or they are, we lived our life with together. We lived our life with a lot of friends around. And those men and women had major impact on my life.
And they’re the ones that even now at 47 call me on the phone when my son’s graduating or they’re the ones still impacting my life when they’re in their late sixties and seventies, they’re still impacting me. And so one of the things that’s always been really important is to have friends around my boys, and I didn’t even really realize this until I sit here and think about it now, is it always been super important to me for us to have really good friends, for us to have people in our home that love on our boys and they can look up to and that impact them. And that has happened. Again, it’s a reverse. It was something that was natural to me that I think was really important to me to make sure our family recreated. And then now what I’m saying is our boys bring kids into our home that want to be there and they want to be impacted, and they want to be influenced by us.
And they say to Cole and Ty Knox that our home feels like a second home. And so that wasn’t something my mom and dad said, oh, hey, you need to have people in your life. You need to have friends over. You need to host. You need to need to be social. It was just what they did, which then became what I did, which is now becoming what my boys do by just loving people and having them in our life. And my parents did that. They just had people that loved me in their life. And I think that’s been such a spiritual gift and such a motivational gift for me to have those kind of people. And it’s repeating itself. I see it in my kids. It’s so exciting. And I was like, the second thing, another thing I really thought about is I used to make jokes about this when I was younger.
And honestly, I think when you get into different stages of your life, things become a different priority. But my mom and my dad, but my mom has had a little tiny spiral notebook beside her chair in the living room that she wrote down every prayer request that you can think of, one that some may think is silly to pray for, and ones that are major. And she has done that my whole life. She never told me I had to have a notebook. She never told me that I have to wake up and pray in the morning every day, but I have friends now that will call me. And their way of asking for prayer is to say, can you call your mom and have her put me in her notebook today because I have this need. And what it’s inspiring me to do now at an older, and I remember it about in my teens, is when I started seeing it and noticing it.
And now here I am with boys that are teens. I’m feeling the need to sort of have a notebook. And I was never told that. I just see now the generational and spiritual and long-term impact of that prayer book all my life has had on me and on my marriage and on my boys and on my brother and my sister-in-law, and then friends and just so many things. And then now it’s impacting my friends where they want to be in my mom’s prayer book. So it’s like, okay, it’s time for me to step it up and have that same prayer book. So then my boys see, oh, that’s what mom does. Now I’m not going to tell them to do that, but I want them to see that that’s important to me to be spiritually connected to God and that I trust him. And I think those are the two things in my family that I am so thankful that we weren’t forced, but we’re just naturally caught.
Daron:
I love it. So here’s what we want you to do for the application point of this. One is, and I use this all the time on the podcast, transformational in my life, and I think it can be in yours, is start to get compassionately curious about what you are contagious with. Pay attention to your life. Most of us in our experience, most people are unbelievably, they don’t have self-awareness. And you’re probably not very self-aware, so you’re probably going to need somebody to help you. And it’s tough to get people to be honest with you, which I think is a terrible thing to say, but it is. It’s like, Hey, can you be honest about what I don’t do very well in life? No, I’m not going to, because you can’t actually deal with disappointment or anybody saying anything negative about you. So I can’t actually tell you what you do can screw up because you’ll freak out and ruin our relationship. And then you can’t figure out why your seven year old can’t hold their crap together wearing at the mall, right? Because you can’t. That sounded mean. Didn’t mean to sound mean.
Julie:
Yes, it did sound very, not very sensitive.
Daron:
that wasn’t very compassionate. I want you to get…
Julie:
Daron doesn’t really like exude compassion.
Daron:
This is true. This is why this is a new thing for me. Compassionate curiosity. But so maybe pay a counselor, right? Well, because paying them, they have to be honest with you. Then you’d be like, I’m noticing this. They can say, yeah, it’s because you need some help. We all do some of these things we figured out because like 15 years into having a counselor that we pay to tell us, you’re a freaking train wreck. Cheers. Seriously, start getting compassionately curious and thinking about when people are around me, my kids are around, what are they catching? And then thinking about inspire yourself with this is what kind of things do I want my kids to be infected with? What do I want them to catch from me? And then figure out, okay, what do I need to do to start making this who I am, not just what I say?
And I think it’s got to be a team situation where it’s something that you understand as a team together as parents. Because if one of you’s trying and the other one’s not, they’re going to catch that, right? It looks like Dad doesn’t give a crap about spiritual things. He hasn’t even talk about mom. Whatever it is, it’s got to be a teamwork thing. But these first two episodes, what I want you to notice is talking about parenting for a purpose. We’ve not even really talked much. I don’t think about the kids because so much of it is about you. Are you becoming the person God created you to be? Are you becoming the most healthy, vibrant, physical, mental, spiritual, emotional self you can be? Are you living out the kind of life that you’d like your kids to replicate because they’re going to no matter what you say, because more is caught than taught. It’s a law of reproduction. It’s a law that means you can’t break it. If you do, you’re going to break yourself against it. And we don’t want to see that happen for or for your family. I think that’s it. Next episode. Do you know what it is, Jules? Well, this one’s going to be called, remember,
Julie:
Remember, I didn’t want to be here.
Daron:
That’s true. I tricked her. She doesn’t know where she’s at. Remember? Hey, you guys remember A team when they always made BA Baracus drink the milk with the knockout pill in it? Because he didn’t like to fly. They put him on the anybody A team. Remember that? 18.
Julie:
I remember the A team. I don’t remember a pill in
Daron:
Flying every time BA, Mr. T. He never liked to fly, so he would always, he loved milk though, and they would sneak this knockout pill in his milk, so he would drink it, and then he would pass out and they’d put him on the plane. They’d fly somewhere.
Julie:
I didn’t catch that.
Daron:
You didn’t catch that. Didn’t catch it. Well, you did. I gave you milk before we came here, and that’s how we got here. I put you in the van, knocked you out. You just showed up here. Just kidding. I didn’t drug my wife. Hey, the next episode, next episode is called this “Never Sever.” Figure out what it’s about when we come back next time. But until that episode, remember, this God’s for you. He’s not against you. He’s near you. He’s not far away, and he’s created you in this whole parenting thing on purpose and for purpose. We’ll talk to you next time at the Daron Earlewine Podcast.