Enter Their World (Even If It’s a Deer Stand)

Series: 5 Steps That Move Your Family From Existing to Engaged — Post 3 of 5 (Connection)

My father-in-law is not a hunter. Never has been. It’s not his thing, and for most of his life he never pretended otherwise.

Then his son, my brother-in-law, got old enough to really want to hunt. So my father-in-law, somewhere in his forties, learned to hunt. Not because he suddenly discovered a love for sitting in a cold tree stand before sunrise. He did it because his son loved it, and he wanted to be wherever his son was. He entered a world that wasn’t his because it mattered to someone he loved.

I think about that story a lot, because it captures something important about the step that comes after interaction, which is connection.

When interaction moves past simply acknowledging the other person is in the room, you start to get to connection. It’s the difference between two strangers passing on a sidewalk and one of them noticing the baseball hat on the other person and mentioning they cheer for the same team. Something in common starts to draw you together instead of just past each other.

For families, this usually means talking about, and connecting over, whatever your kids are currently into. For parents, connection with your kids often lives in whatever world they’re currently occupying. When my daughters were in different stages of life, connection looked different with each one. It wasn’t about manufacturing some meaningful moment. It was about showing up in their world long enough for something real to happen naturally.

Here’s where it gets harder, and I want to be honest about this part too. For a husband and wife whose kids have grown and moved out, connection can suddenly feel more difficult than it did when the kids were small. You built your relationship around the kids for so long, around the schedule, around getting through the week. And now the house is quiet, and you realize you’ve been interacting with each other for years without necessarily connecting.

A life of real connection is possible for every family. But it’s not automatic. It takes work, and it takes intentionality, on purpose, more than most of us expect it to.

So this week, try a few small entries into someone else’s world. Ask your kid to show you their favorite song right now, and actually listen to the whole thing, not just the first fifteen seconds before you check out. Share something you were afraid of at their age, something real, and then ask if there’s a fear they’re facing now. Tell your kid about a time you failed at something. Kids tend to connect over imperfection far more than they connect over your highlight reel.

None of these require you to become a hunter, or a gamer, or whatever the current version of that is in your house. They just require you to show up in a world that isn’t naturally yours, the way my father-in-law did, because someone you love is standing in it.

That’s connection. It’s not flashy, and it usually doesn’t happen on the first try. But it’s available to any family willing to enter someone else’s world instead of waiting for them to enter yours.

This is the third of five posts on the steps that move a family from existing to engaged. Next week, we’ll talk about the step where most families get stuck, even after they’ve found real connection.