Last weekend my oldest son built the perfect campfire in our fire pit. He was quite proud of himself.
As dusk settled in, he directed his younger siblings to clean out the ashes from the pit, gather new kindling and wood; he then built the teepee and layered the wood so it would not collapse haphazardly as it burned. Later, he tended the fire as it burned low so we’d have the perfect embers to roast marshmallows. Finally, when the Pacific Northwest clouds started to loom and drop rain, and even the youngest child had grown tired of eating marshmallows, he directed his siblings in clean up and the fire was gone.
The look of accomplished delight on his young face was priceless.
When I wrote about the rite of passage he did last year, one thing I emphasized was that the rite of passage was just as much for his “village”, the other men he knew, as it was for him: reaffirming to all what manhood is. Rites of passage and rituals need to be grounded in meaningful context and not be bizarre or outlandish just for the sake of it. This campfire is an example of what I mean.
Earlier this spring we started to do a camp fire every weekend with my brothers who live nearby. At first the adults handled the fire while the kids ran around and played or tried to “help”. The combo of kids and fire being quite dangerous, we started to train them on how to handle it. My brother devised a simple approach I’ve seen elsewhere, but I’m not sure of the origin. It goes like this:
I do
I do, you watch
I do, you help
You do, I help
You do, I watch
You do
Getting a kid from “I do” to “You do” is perhaps the entire point of initiation and education. It gives shape to growth and development. It’s a simple, intuitive and highly adaptable formula that you can use in teaching your children just about everything you want to pass on to them. But it does require a large investment of time and intention. Which for busy parents can be a struggle. The song “Cats in the Cradle” tells of a father who never had time for his son and once his son was older, the son didn't have time for him. The song ends with a reflective father realizing:
And as I hung up the phone, it occurred to me
He'd grown up just like me
My boy was just like meAnd the cat's in the cradle and the silver spoon
Little boy blue and the man in the moon
"When you coming home, son?" "I don't know when"
But we'll get together then, dad
We're gonna have a good time then
The song captures the ugly truth that the “I Do” to “You Do” formula is how children are learning anyway, whether you intend them to or not: they will inherit the results from you. Anger, frustration, impatience, laziness, sarcasm, gossip, aloofness: they do what you model and what they watch you do later becomes what you watch them do.
Our atomized society makes this even harder as one parent, one dad almost never has the time, ability or knowledge to initiate and train his son in everything. It quite literally takes a village to build a whole man. Or a whole woman.
Confidence
The last couple of weeks I wrote in depth about how young people arrive at adulthood without the slightest idea how to attract a mate. But this doesn’t just happen in romance, but across the board and is the source of the hideous term “adulting”: untrained adults feeling accomplishment and relief at doing basic tasks.
But if in their youth no one started them with “I Do” and brought them all the way to “You Do”, then can you really blame them? As this pattern cascades through generations, feelings of incompetence and apprehension become an inheritance. Little wonder that younger generations struggle so much with anxiety: even their parents are barely “adulting”.
There used to be many organizations and 3rd spaces which facilitated this transfer of confidence and experience but most are long since gone. Others, like the Boy Scouts still exist in a hollowed out form but like many institutions still lumbering along, it’s too big, too corporate, too compromised, too irrelevant to succeed or to be trusted.
And so the parents of today and tomorrow are tasked with giving something to their kids that they themselves may have never known or been shown: confidence and experience. But even for them, the “I Do” to “You Do” formula is a great help because it forces the parent to either learn and teach or to connect with others who know and can teach. If you don’t know how to do, it looks like you’re going to have to build that village.
Going from “I Do” to “You Do” with my friends has filled gaps in my own confidence and experience. Despite coming from a family that included construction workers, general contractors and craftsmen, I myself arrived at adulthood knowing little more than how to use a screwdriver. But having sons has impressed upon my mind the need to be able to teach them how to be handy. And so since I became a father, I’ve learned all sorts of things from my friends such as:
Finishing, plumbing, HVAC and electrical repairs and upgrades
basic construction like framing and drywall & siding.
No one would mistake me for some master craftsman or hire me to build their house, but where as before the basic systems of my home were a mystery to me, through my friends, now I see and perhaps more importantly, my sons can see.
Parental Attitude
More important than the kid’s attitude in this formula is the parent’s attitude. Busy and overworked parents can often resort to nagging kids about chores or just doing it themselves because it’s faster and then they wonder why their kids can’t do anything! This never gets the child to “You Do” or if they get there, they get there resentfully.
Because I learned the aforementioned craftsman skills as an adult, it helps me to have greater patience when my kids don’t do it right at the start. The same principle applies to any number of topics and aspects of “adulting”, whether it be in your family’s finances, communication, manners, learning to cook, chores, praying, serving in church or an infinite number of other things. They don’t know how to do it, and it doesn’t matter how much time it takes for them to learn, they need to know how to do it.
It will be helpful when you see childhood and adolescence not as compartmentalized from adulthood, separate from your real life, not as an endless shuffle between school, screens and sports, while you work enough to pay for it all, but as an opportunity to intentionally train your offspring in the attributes of character and the components of skill you believe they need.
Your reward will be the look of accomplished delight on their faces, their ease at maneuvering through the world and the problems they encounter when so many others struggle with the very fundamentals.
What Will You Pass On?
I’m helping my mom go through and decide what to do with the several thousands of print family photos we have from the 1970s through the early 2000s. As I wander through the memories the photos bring, I recall more clearly what it was like to be a child; for every moment to drag out in impatience, but for the hours to go by too quickly; for the wonder of the whole world being new, while being content to do the same thing over and over again without end.
One of those things we did in our household over and over again, without end, was watch Star Trek. I knew this already but the photos offer proof of it: in the background of some of our candid family photos the TV is on and in almost every instance, Star Trek is on the TV. We were brought up as devoted, observant Trekkies; we learned the lore, we had the technical manuals, the official Chronology, the toys, and every episode on VHS. (We never learned Klingon however, so maybe we weren’t THAT cool.)1
But as a result, an undeniably large part of my family inheritance was Star Trek. This realization has made me hesitant to show any of my own children Star Trek, or shows of any kind. As an adult, I’ve come to appreciate how fleeting and precious childhood is and I wish to be both protective of my kid’s imaginations and also intentional about what they see me doing.
But mainly because the screen is so enticing that it very easily takes on an outsized portion of your kid’s inheritance. For you, it’s not Star Trek, but it might be some other show or film series, it might be sports fandom or endless social media doom scrolling. It might be family friendly fare or intense dramas, or it might be Mr. Beast or Twitch. But it doesn’t really matter what it is, for screens are thieves of intention - they’re regrettable, irreversible time machines: transporting you to a few minutes or a few hours in the future and you don’t even know what happened.
Do this enough and you can lose sight of the “I Do” to “You Do” model. Do this enough and what your children will inherit from you will not be what you intended.
There’s something special about coming together to discuss your vision, intentions and how to create an “I Do” to “You Do” strategy with someone else: energy that creates clarity, action and commitment.
To that end, I’m available to consult with you and help you succeed.
However, this knowledge has strong staying power. I remember the characters, the arcs, the moral lessons, the episode titles and strange facts like the Enterprise-D having a dolphin tank.
On point, as always. Thank you!