The Wellness Compass Initiative is our partner community wellness initative that serves schools, counseling centers, nonprofits, universities, and other community wellness organizations. Each week Holly Hughes Stoner and Scott Stoner, who are both licensed marriage and family therapists, co- write a column for Wellness Compass and we are pleased to share it here on our Living Compass site. There is also a Wellness Compass podcast, where Scott and Holly elaborate on the topic of this column each week, at www.wellnesscompass.org/podcast. or in any podcast app (Apple, Google, Spotify, etc).
Root, Root, Root for the Home Team
Our hometown, Milwaukee, and the whole state of Wisconsin are still riding high after our Milwaukee Brewers clinched the World Series Wednesday night. To help you understand the joy this brings to our entire state, know that this is the first time in the team’s 57-year history that we have won the ultimate prize. So we, along with millions of other Brewers fans, have been cherishing every replay.
As a couple of family therapists doing a podcast and column about family wellness, we couldn’t help noticing how much of what the players and manager Pat Murphy have said about how they function as a team applies just as well to families. Here are a few quotes from the Brewers worth carrying from the ballpark to the kitchen table.
“I use love and discipline, in that order.”
Manager Pat Murphy’s simple comment about how he manages his players is as good a summary of healthy parenting as any we’ve heard in more than forty years of working with families. Children thrive when they receive both warmth and structure. Love without discipline (and remember that the root meaning of the word discipline is “to teach”) can drift toward permissiveness, and discipline without love can harden into fear-based control.
“We play for each other.”
The Brewers have talked about how much they prioritize working as a team, cheering each other on and picking each other up when someone is struggling. Everyone’s contribution is important, and everyone needs some support at one time or another.
Families get into trouble when everyone starts playing for themselves: keeping score of chores, protecting turf, needing to win arguments. A team that plays for each other asks a different question: What does that person need from me to do well today? Maybe it’s covering school pickup so your spouse can rest, or sharing in caregiving for a loved one. Playing for each other doesn’t mean losing yourself. It means trusting that when the team wins, you win too.
“Come over here, Aaron Ashby… let’s share this trophy.”
Moments after being named World Series MVP, William Contreras, the Brewers’ beloved catcher, invited his teammate Aaron Ashby (who many thought also deserved the MVP trophy) over and said, “Let’s share this trophy!”
That comment captured the soul of the team. It said, “It’s not about me; it’s about us.” In our families, that looks like being quick to lift others up and finding ways to share wins. As the African proverb says, “If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.”
“We are a bunch of gamers, not Hall of Famers.”
Pat Murphy said this about his team after they swept the two-time defending champions, the Los Angeles Dodgers, earlier in the playoffs. This isn’t a team of famous stars, but a true team where the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.
There is real freedom in this line. Many of us carry an unspoken expectation of perfection, whether of ourselves or of others: perfect grades, perfect holidays, perfect behavior. Gamers don’t play for perfection. They show up, compete hard, make errors, and come back the next day ready to play hard again. When the Brewers lost a tough extra-inning game to the Rays, their captain, Christian Yelich, said to the team, “Baseball is hard, but we signed up for hard. We can do this.” Wise words. Family life is hard, too, but we can do this.
And the good news is that none of us need to be Hall of Famers. We just need to keep showing up, apologizing when we need to, and being people who demonstrate that effort, resilience, and heart matter more than flawlessness.
“We wouldn’t be here without all the people who went before us to make this possible.”
Last year, Bob Uecker, the Brewers’ beloved broadcaster of more than five decades, passed away, and the team and the city continue to miss his humor and passion for the game. He, along with many former players and team leaders, was honored in the postgame ceremonies as a big part of the journey to this championship.
Every family stands on others’ shoulders: grandparents who sacrificed, mentors who believed in us, neighbors, schools, community centers, and faith communities who held us up through the years. Gratitude for those who came before grounds us and roots us in a story larger than ourselves.
“Root, root, root for the home team.”
The crowd sings this line during the seventh-inning stretch at every Major League game, and somehow singing it together makes everyone feel good about their team.
The old song has it right: the home team is ours to root for. Yet sometimes it’s easy to save our best encouragement for people outside our families and end up taking our families for granted.
And the song’s very next line, “If they don’t win, it’s a shame,” reminds us that real fans, though disappointed at times, keep rooting through a challenging season, whether on the field or in a family.
The championship high we are feeling right now in Wisconsin will certainly fade at some point, but its lessons don’t have to. And even if you’re not a baseball or sports fan, never forget to root, root, root for your home team.
We extend our gratitude to all who shared responses to our question last time of “How’s the Family?” Thank you for sharing the joys and challenges in your extended family.
We welcome your feedback as well as your questions. If there is a particular question you have about family relationships that you would like us to address in a future column, please email it to us. (You can simply reply to this email, or you can email Holly at holly@WellnessCompass.org or Scott at Scott@WellnessCompass.org.)
If we share your question and our response to it, we will guarantee your anonymity and make sure that no personally identifying details are shared. There's a good chance that if you have a question about something happening in your family, many other readers of our column and listeners to our podcast have a very similar question.
Our column and podcast will appear every other week through next Memorial Day.
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