Formation lessons from a month with my daughter

Hi friends, quick note before I dive in today:

As you may have noticed, my pre-announced pause for the final road trip of summer (see below) went another week past what I intended. That's partly because I have lots of good news to share that is continuing to shape my capacity.

In light of all this, I'm going to try out just two posts per week: the usual column-length item will move to Tuesday, and I'll continue to do the media roundup on Friday. As always, comments and email are great ways to share your feedback about both content and feedback. OK, onto news!

Short term: I'm helping with promotion for the endlessly interesting Neighborhood Economics event run by my colleague Rosa Lee Harden and others. There are going to be some really interesting faith leaders involved, and promising idea-sharing and maybe even matchmaking around how churches can improve their financial situation and contribute to neighborhood financial health and well being at the same time. If you can get to Chicago Sept. 29–Oct. 1, I definitely think it will be worth your time. I'll be onsite Tuesday for sure. Oh, and scholarships are available!

Medium term: For at least the next ten months, I'm joining the team at the Diocese of Chicago as leadership development consultant. My work will include assessing diocesan-wide assets and needs for leadership formation, expanding our leadership development resources, and overseeing training summits held around the diocese as well as clergy Fresh Start.

I'm also really enjoying getting back into some short-term consulting and Christian formation leadership coaching, so please don't be a stranger if you're interested in connecting about those possibilities. I promise I work hard to keep my rates affordable and adapt to the budgets of potential partners whenever possible.

A week ago today, my daughter and I celebrated the final day of Daddy-Yona Month, the lemons-to-lemonade response to my layoff wherein we pulled F from daycare about six weeks before kindergarten launch and I got to try out being a stay-at-home-dad for the month after our family vacation.

You can read my general "I'm not crying, you're crying" reflections over on Facebook, but here I wanted to share how four weeks of very intensive parenting are shaping my ongoing approach to Christian formation. Also, let me say from the outset that I owe a huge debt to stay-at-home parents everywhere, especially moms, for the collective wisdom about how to survive and thrive together through this experience. You'll probably recognize a lot of that wisdom as undergirding many of these reflections.

Give it a name

This one sounds so dumb, but I have to lead with it. I insist on writing about the experience as Daddy-Yona Month because that is what we called it from the very first time we talked to F about why she'd be finishing preschool early.

The original motivation for this was purely emotional regulation. She made a lot of great friends during four years at Kinder Care, and we knew it would be hard to part ways, especially before most other kids would be. "Yes, you're not going to be able to see your friends and teachers, but you're going to get to spend a whole month going on fun adventures with Daddy!"

I found that the value of that concreteness went well beyond this roll-out strategy. Daddy-Yona Month became a kind of container for thinking about a particular kind of summer adventure, the kind we might not have time for under normal circumstances. Doing the intricate or messy crafts. Stopping at Mars Cheese Castle.

I think in a way it also became a lens for viewing about our relationship in new ways. There's an episode of Bluey where they make delightful fun out of those boring soliloquies where Dad tries to teach Bluey and Bingo a lesson. It's the family cartoon descendant of the Charlie Brown teacher trombone voice thing.

F has an appropriately blunt phrase she uses when I go into one of these: "Please stop telling me about ____!" But I've noticed recently that I'm hearing the converse a bit more. "Please keep telling me about ____." It happened just Sunday at the Bob Uecker tribute Brewers game on Sunday, and I've maybe never been prouder.

The more I work with young kids in educational settings (including but not limited to my daughter) the more valuable I'm realizing it is to give things these names. When we create the container, and use the name to keep holding that space, kids will find generative ways to fill and explore it.

Find the right balance of improvisation and planning

I am an improviser. Go ahead and roll your eyes as I share that I was a pretty serious jazz piano player in high school and for at least a few years beyond. I recognize that people who have this particular bug can be a little annoying going on about it.

But there is just something so exhilarating about making up on the spot a particular way of expressing an idea, responding to a collaborator's idea, and generally being creative-in-the-moment. See also surfing, improv, various kinds of art-making, storytelling circles and other well-facilitated group process experience, etc.

I have come to the conclusion over the years that improvisation, particularly a kind of "making due with what we have," is an absolute core value for me. But there's a structure that makes the improvisation possible, including enough planning to be able to navigate that structure. And no matter how much I wish I could just move through life and respond to circumstances in the moment, it ain't necessarily so.

As I've become a better planner (at work, in teaching, as a parent), I've recognized a kind of binary, pendulum swing attitude that is wholly unhelpful. "If I'm going to put all this work into my plan, then I'm damn well going to follow it!" And that stubbornness inevitably goes awry.

I realized that managing our Daddy-Yona Month calendar was almost exactly like lesson planning in this respect. The couple of days that went genuinely badly were days when we didn't have a plan at all. But some of our very best experiences were when we decided to call an audible and do something very spur of the moment.

Maybe it's because I love improvising and hate planning, but for me the very pinnacle of good teaching is when you can develop a sophisticated and intentional lesson plan, engage it with vigor, but also make decisive choices about when to deviate from it or even throw it out entirely. I appreciated this very practical reminder of that truth.

Try to do fewer things than you think you want to

Last but not least, and definitely a good follow up to the previous item, we learned during Daddy-Yona Month that we wanted to do less and give ourselves time to enjoy it.

On days when we weren't on a road trip, we found that a good rhythm for us was to leave the house once in the morning and once in the afternoon—and that one or two stops or activities on those excursions was plenty. In particular, I noticed that when we weren't trying to fit in "just one more thing," we had time to actually talk while we weren't driving. (I'm a big believer in the power of the car ride to catalyze important conversations, but it's also a container you don't get much control on the parameters of length, eye contact, talking+doing, etc.)

We have the commendable belief in the Episcopal Church that praying shapes believing. Ditto mission. Ditto fellowship. Living our faith deepens our faith. But I always want to add that these activities are more likely to form us if we also take time to reflect and unpack the experiences we're having. And that kind of reflection, assessment, metacognition, or whatever educational word we want to use, is almost always what gets crowded out by "just one more thing" thinking. (And I am a foremost sinner in this regard, trust me.)

The last thing I want to say is a huge thanks to the co-parents (and their kids) with whom F and I got to hang this summer, both friends we chose to be with and strangers we met along the way at playgrounds and pools and ice cream shops. Thanks as well to Kristin Saylor for being a superlative mom in this and every season. Hopefully it goes without saying that "don't try to do it alone" is the ultimate crossover lesson in parenting and teaching/formation.

And thanks to the now-kindergartner who spent her last month before this big milestone with a dad who is always thinking, sometimes too much, about what parenting has to do with everything else.