This is the final part of my family culture series.
Part 1: Getting to the Next Generation
Part 2: Catching the Vision
Part 3: Conservative No More
I want to highlight a few things about family culture from these 3 articles:
Family culture is the identity our family takes on. Essentially, what we do & how we spend our time.
Most families experience generational estrangement because they don’t own most aspects of their family’s culture, they outsource it to media, peers and broader society.
Modern life makes it so the identity our family life produces is very often not the one we set out to make initially. Intention and a clear vision is required to stay on track.
Separating your family’s culture from the broader culture in any significant way will be painful and require creativity; “it takes what it takes”.
Family culture at its best acts as a proving ground for children and adolescents so that they arrive at adulthood confident, prepared and truly independent of the passing milieu.
To wrap this up, I want to double down on those last two bullet points and discuss passage & commitment.
Passage vs Milestones
Many people (including myself) have said we have no rites of passage or initiation in our culture. But this isn’t exactly correct. A better and more precise critique would be to say that in modern life we don’t have rites of passage or initiation, but instead we offer our children the choice of many different milestones and experiences, most of which are good and beneficial to their development. But few, if any, direct our children toward the truth of adulthood and the reality of life. Few ask them to become something new.
Here are examples of milestones and experiences many children go through that we may mistake for a rite of passage:
getting a smartphone
playing or excelling in a sport
performing on a stage
going to Disneyland or another theme park
birthday parties
passing tests
apply for and/or attend college
seeing progressively mature movies or media
getting their own bedroom
getting a driver’s license or a car
It’s quite possible for a child to experience much of what our modern culture has to offer and still arrive at maturity full of anxiety and completely unprepared for the reality of his (or her) adult existence. Indeed, I believe this is what we see more and more of within each passing generation from boomers on down: well-rounded, talented and smart achievers who look like adults but on the inside are still children; and nostalgic at an earlier and earlier age for their own youth.
And they can hardly be blamed for this. After all, were they supposed to initiate themselves? A friend of mine once pointed out to me that every generation complains about the younger generation and each time, they’re right. That is to say, each generation is further removed from passage and suffers for it.
A rite of passage is the hero’s journey. A rite of passage requires the death of the former, innocent self and the rebirth of a new, heroic self. Not to a generic goodness, not to a feverish fandom, but to a manly mastery.
The effect of a rite of passage was expressed by Paul in his letter to the Corinthians: “When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things.”
As an example of the kind of transformation that is supposed to take place, author Jon Tyson, in his book “The Intentional Father”, says that each boy must learn five essential ideas1 through his passage.
Life is hard
You are not important
Life is not about you
You are not in control
You will die
How many boys and young men understand this? How would their lives be better if they did? We as parents can’t hope to fill the lives of our children with enough milestones and experiences to compensate for the loss of passage.
The Mission
It’s our mission as parents to create the family culture capable of initiating our own children and reversing the generational estrangement occurring under our own roofs. This is extremely difficult because few parents have an example from their own life to learn from.
I don’t believe there is a checklist to follow to create a successful rite of passage for your boys. Such a thing can’t be so easily franchised. But there are principles that describe what parents need to strive for when incorporating passage into their family culture. Here are a few of them:
It should be difficult. Rites of passage which create heroes and represent death are of little value if they are easy. The hero in the heroes journey returns home a new being, with new power. Christ overcomes death and is a perfected, whole and complete being. Your children will need confidence in their identity and true confidence comes from doing hard things.
It should be relevant. When I spread the word that my son would be undergoing a rite of passage most people sarcastically asked if we would be drinking the blood of a sacrificial animal or dancing for rain gods or something. Rites of passage need not be bizarre for the sake of being bizarre, but will be most effective when they’re relevant; they’ll be most effective when what the boy is asked to do reflects the realities and truths he’ll face as a man, a father and a husband.
It should involve other men. Rites of passage which are taken seriously by all the adults in a boy’s life are more coherent than just something weird that “dad is making me to do.” The best initiations are ones that other respectable and praiseworthy and trusted men can confirm to the boy.
It should embody your family’s values. In Part 2, I included 4 questions that can help you form the outline of your rite(s) of passage. These 4 questions form a pattern that I find to be fairly universal. To become men, boys need to learn to strive, work, create and relate. Nearly every rite of passage I’ve heard of contains some version of those 4 elements.
It should come from the love and support of his father. I’ll borrow another line from the Jon Tyson’s book that I find especially helpful when thinking about the design of rites of passage for my children. They deserve to work along side us and then to replace us in all that we do. They start as a children, become our partners and then remain after us as our legacy.
“I do" “I do, you watch” “I do, you help” “You do, I help” “You do, I watch” “You do.”
For Latter-day Saints, serving a mission is a good example of an institution wide rite of passage. It’s hard and requires the maturation of the missionary to endure it. It’s extremely relevant to the missionary’s faith and ability to serve in the church. It’s taken seriously by the community and the missionary can easily find many other men who were missionaries and who love and honor what he is doing. It embodies the institutional values of “increasing in wisdom and stature, and in favour with God and Man” (strive, work, create, relate).
Of All The Things You Could Do
The family is under attack, but we often overlook that it’s we who are doing the attacking.
In a previous post I wrote about how relationships of all kinds are harder than ever because we each have such a high degree of customization in our lives that few if any others could ever match up with our highly specific micro niche interests and preferences. We don’t intentionally alienate others, it just happens because we like our comfortable choices and they like theirs.
This dynamic happens to families as well and can easily undermine family culture and the family’s ability to create community with other like-minded, rite of passaging families.
Just being together as a family is important but so many choices and options battle for our time and attention that scant opportunity remains to actually live out the family culture and teach the lessons we want to teach to our children. It’s difficult to do the essential things when all our time is taken up by important things.
Let me give you an example which many of you will hate.
Like most churches, my church offers teenagers mid-week activities, usually on a Tuesday or Wednesday night each week. The activities can be goofy or spiritual, or involve serious skill-building; there’s a wide range of possibilities.
Anyway, in recent years, it’s become more and more common for Latter-day Saint youth to not go to these activities on a regular basis. The ones skipping out are not bad kids out doing bad things; not hooligans and heathens who worry their parents sick for whatever they might be up to.
No, the kids increasingly likely to skip out of these activities are good kids out prioritizing milestones and having great experiences: high level sports practices or music lessons, earning money at a job, or putting in extra study time for advanced coursework or college prep.
These mid-week activities used to be essential communal elements, parts of the passage process from childhood to adulthood but, as the concepts of community and ownership over family culture has broken down, these church activities are competing directly with much more expensive and sometimes entertaining experiences.
As for me and my house, we’ve decided to prioritize those midweek activities because to not do so would be undermining a core aspect of our family identity and culture (our religion). It’s difficult to say to a child “this is who we are as the Perrone Family and this is what we do as the Perrone Family” and then not follow through, to become distracted by the newest shiny object.
This commitment of course comes at the expense of other good, important experiences; stuff like sports, music, or other hobbies, activities and interests.
A great thing about our society is that you can learn and do and become so many different things.
A terrible thing about our society is that you can learn and do and become so many different things.
A coherent family culture is one that commits to a few very specific things and in so doing, quite nearly abandons all other available options.
This is painful and stifling to our modern ears. But this sort of commitment is essential for passage: the creation of a new generation of men and women in our family’s tree.
Steady & Steader
Vision, intentionality, passage: this is how we send strong multi-generational transmissions up and down our family tree producing a commitment to a steady and life-enriching family culture. This is one way that the hearts of the fathers are turned to their children and the hearts of the children are turned to their fathers.
A fantastic example of a family culture in action is described in the posts of the Steader Manifesto, which you can check out or subscribe to below. I can whole heartedly recommend The Steader Manifesto as a resource.
Steader, like me and like you, is out creating, experimenting, putting in the work.
If you need help putting these principles into action, and I think we all do, reach out to me and I’d be glad to be of service.
Also, if you haven’t already, check out my book “Only The Weird Will Survive” which is a forward thinking attempt to envision the future of family culture and community.
I believe these rules come from another book originally called Adam’s Return and is 2 books down on my reading list.