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Creators vs consumers

I’ve been convicted repeatedly this week how deeply the desire for significant work is wired into our children. A few weeks back, inspired by a whole lot of scrap wood, I built a dual workbench for my youngest children. I did this because they’re always underfoot whenever I want to use my workbench.

Happy craftsmen at their new workbench

They loved it for a few days. But eventually they realized their workbenches aren’t where they action is. Papa’s workbench is where wood gets cut and screws get driven.

Because their birthdays were upon us, we also got them miniature versions of their favorite tool: my Husqvarna chainsaw. These toys likewise took their attention for a few days, until they realized their saws were never going to cut anything, nor would their little weed eater do anything other than give the weeds a massage.

“This tree isn’t coming down, Papa.”

“Use your chainsaw, Papa,” they tell me, even though I was so sloppy with the last tree I took down that it yanked my chainsaw out of my hand when it fell, driving it blade-first into the dirt. I had to get one of my older sons to help me jack up the end of the tree and use a wedge and hatchet to free it. I felt literally unmanned. My kids of all ages thought it was a hoot.

I read an essay recently that’s stuck with me, in which the writer drew a distinction between the model of man our economists like to use, and the model of humanity most of us recognize as more genuine. The economists’ man is a lazy being who wants more and more stuff, at a lower and lower price, for as little work as possible. Maybe that describes too many of our teenagers, but it doesn’t describe our little ones, does it?

No, they come to us ready to work. They’re so primed for work that they won’t be sidetracked by phoniness. No little work benches and plastic chainsaws for them. No baby dolls and kitchen sets. They want to drive real nails, feed real babies, make real bread.

The benefit of teaching your child how to use an ax is that then you don’t have to use the ax.

Which means so much more work for you and I, doesn’t it? And why does that discourage us? Ironically, because we’re so intent on getting real work done. It took me literally five times longer than normal to build two 8 x 4 garden boxes last month, because I had toddlers helping me saw the boards, paint them with linseed oil, stack and dry them, then cart them to the garden, level and square them, screw them together, fill them in. Anyone who’s ever supervised a three year-old driving a 3-inch deck screw understands how limited can be the patience of man.

But they are our work of creation, aren’t they? More than gardens or cleaning, home repairs or day jobs. And what a cruel trick we let the world play, when we pacify them with trinkets and distractions, all so we can get “real work” done. And then, when they’re 17, we marvel at how lazy teenagers are, as if we had no hand in that.

One of the habits we focus on during every Intentional Fathering cycle is bringing our children alongside us. Engaging them in our work. It’s so important, and the good news is that it yields fruit no matter what their ages. Our children—even our oldest ones—want work that matters. (It’s why so many of them hate school, but that’s a separate discussion.)

Our hearts rightly go out to adults who find themselves without work, or who get stuck in jobs with no visible connection to the creation of meaningful value in the world. That instinct for mercy is right. Let’s extend it to our children. Engage them in the work of our lives while there’s still time.

Fathers, this is our work: showing our children how to be creators, not just consumers.

Little brothers want to do what big brothers do.

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In praise of the irritating child

Since this week we’re focusing on the habit of proper praise, I’m thinking about my stubborn teenagers. Each of them in his own way has managed to get under my skin over the years, and I haven’t handled it well. I’ve come to realize this is because I’ve harbored the notion that I’m entitled to a disturbance-free life.

You can see how children might undermine one’s desire for calm. Far too late into fatherhood, I realized how often I get irritated at my kids for being, well, kids. Worse, as I’ve learned about the habit of praise, I’ve come to realize how often I got (and still get) irritated at them for manifesting traits which are good.

My irrepressibly active son now thankfully takes out his aggression on people other than me.

Qualities like honesty, persistence, and intensity can be challenging when they begin to bud. Thank God they’re hard to squash, though I wonder how many children this world manages to mangle permanently, what with our widespread desire for easy parenting, the prevalence of mind-numbing entertainment, and schools geared for somnolent obedience over the cultivation of virtue and action.

Since I’m also learning that the path to world reform begins with yourself, what all this big talk means in practice is that I’ve had to work on catching myself when irritation sets in, and asking whether the irritating thing my child is doing comes at least in part from a good place.

I’m realizing, further, that I should ask this about anyone’s actions, especially my own. Too much of my behavior-management has been superficial, aimed at the leaves rather than the roots.

My persistent bike-rider has graduated to even more nerve-rattling feats of daring.

My 15 year-old, for example, has an uncanny ability to sniff out hypocrisy. Once, when I complained about a jerky driver in front of us, he noted three or four jerky things I had recently done as a driver. My first instinct was to slow my truck to a less lethal speed and push him out the window. But the kid was right.

When he was four, my now 18 year-old insisted on riding a bike, repeatedly launching himself down the driveway and crashing. I pleaded with the boy, as his knees slowly turned to hamburger, to just use a bike with training wheels. But no, it was essential to him for some reason to ride a big-boy bike.

My 20 year-old, meanwhile, has always been like a hunting dog with a scent. Once he locks in, there’s no distracting him. No reminding him that there are other things he should be doing. No suggesting that perhaps his obsession with learning how to build a computer, or training like a Navy SEAL, or building a survivalist go-bag is, perhaps, overdoing things a bit. He always seemed to have just two gears: Disinterest and Overdrive.

My hyper-focused one-track son is now a United States Marine.

Not only have they irritated me, these boys have produced a fair share of chaos, epic messes, broken bones, and poor grades in subjects that bore them. I’ve worried whether each of them would survive childhood, and whether I would survive them.

Now I’m seeing how many of those irritating qualities sprang from strengths that are the best parts of them. Thank God they’ve been more persistent in becoming men than this man has been in conforming them to his desire for comfort.

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Future workers

Something you can’t comprehend until after you’re a parent is all the work involved. I don’t just mean the labors of feeding, changing, washing, and supervising the little turkeys. I’m not even talking about the added work of home repair, which, with sons ranging in age from 20 to 3, I’ve found to be, well, significant.

All that work aside, there’s the added burden of just accomplishing everyday tasks. Unloading the dishes, once you’ve got a toddler interested in “helping,” means pulling out dishes while you quickly scan the racks for something he can “put away” (i.e., shove into a random cabinet for you to hopefully find later) that won’t shatter when he drops it. Painting a door means giving him a little brush and a cup of water for paint and repeatedly steering him away from your open paint can.

A nice thing about building a workbench for three year-olds is they don’t know enough to judge your craftsmanship.

It’s easy to adopt a mindset that our little ones are obstacles around whom we must work, rather than workers in training. We’re busy enough as it is, after all. Teaching them how to help with a task makes it take three times as long.

But they’re wired to work, aren’t they? It’s why they get into our toolboxes and climb onto our desk chairs and pretend they’re us. Even the busiest parent has noticed how working alongside us can calm and center a child.

When my oldest son was four, I cut an attic door in our ceiling and nailed in plyboard flooring. He put on his toy tool belt and hard hat, and was so insistent on helping that I finally took him up and put him to “work” hammering and painting. It was a summer day in the South, and the attic was sweltering. But he stayed up there with me for hours, his attitude far better than my own.

When my 15 year-old was three, he would follow me on his tricycle as I drove our riding mower. When it came time to push mow, he’d get out his toy mower and push along behind me. And when I started in with the weed whacker, he’d follow along with a hockey stick. He’d spend every minute of the three hours I was out there in the hot sun, working just as hard as I did. And he loved it.

He hasn’t yet figured out why his chainsaw isn’t taking this tree down.

Now that several of my sons are older, I look back on all the ways I squandered their inclination toward work. I was too busy trying to get my own projects done, forgetting that my most important work is raising them. Even today, when I conjure work for one of them to do alongside me, that cheerful camaraderie returns, and it makes me feel the way I imagine we were crafted to feel about work, before we made it about the dollars we pocket rather than the things we create.

And because in many ways I’ve had a restart as a father, with these unexpected toddler twins, I’m trying to do better.

Our littlest ones celebrated their third birthday last week, and even though the rest of the world is quarantined they don’t know it, because their parents and every brother but our Marine are here, and that pretty much is their world. We had a wrestling tournament in our back yard, and a nail-hammering contest, and limbo (we needed something a three year-old could win), and other feats of daring. And as I watched my older sons take care of their little brothers, I realized there’s another work they lean into with joy, which is the work of fathering. And I certainly can’t claim an ounce of credit for it. It feels like something that happened in spite of me, with all my grumpiness and self-obsession. It feels like something entirely unearned. It feels like grace.