Whistles. Uniforms. Naval discipline. Remember Captain Georg von Trapp? He managed the daily operations, scheduling, and logistics of his family with military-level precision. We laugh and cringe as we watch The Sound of Music play out with all of its charming predictability.
Georg ran a managerial family. Thank God Julie Andrews showed up.
The Managerial Household
There are moments when von Trapp’s parenting seems appealing. Parenting requires endless reminders, corrections, logistics, rules, outcomes, and crisis response. There have been times when I wanted a navy captain on my parenting team. If you want to run a strict managerial family, good news – countless popular parenting books, workshops, and influencers (Christian ones too) are ready to assist you.
Parents have to manage things, including people. Someone has to get the thirteen-year-old out the door, stop the siblings from hitting each other, enforce the phone rule, make sure homework happens, and deal with the disaster unfolding at 9:47 p.m.
Parenting, however, is about much more than making today’s problem go away. A managerial approach like Georg’s isn’t completely wrong, it is insufficient. Parenting is more than kid management.
Why Family Formation Is Different
Management deals with people within a limited role. Formation attends to the whole person.
Management is usually part-life work. It concerns a particular role, responsibility, or outcome. Family formation takes place in an all-of-life context.
We’ve all had a manager, and perhaps you are one. The art of management is built around the often-overlooked assumption that it is a limited task. You manage an employee, a member of a team, a project, or an organization. None of those situations ought to consume all of your life; or, if they do, it should only be for a short amount of time.
Managers see people in very limited contexts. Your boss should know how you do your job, but they likely don’t know if you emptied the dishwasher last night.
Family formation and family management are two very different things.
Parents see everything. The missing assignment, the kindness extended to Grandpa, the phone usage, the flash of creativity on a project, the… well, the everything.
There is a vast difference between the Prodigal Father and the Prodigal Manager. The Prodigal Manager renegotiates the employment contract, invites the team to Chili’s for lunch on Friday, and says he looks forward to seeing everyone again on Monday at 8AM. The Prodigal Father runs to his son, throws his arms around him, kisses him, restores him, gives him a robe, family ring, shoes, celebrates with the family feast, and so begins the rest of their life together.
From Behavior to Wisdom
Parenting must navigate short-term challenges while keeping long-term aims in sight. But how do we do this?
We must make an explicit commitment to our long-term vision and calling as a parent. Yes, parents must provide and protect in the moment, but also in a way that is wise.
Formation changes what counts as a win. When I was asked to coach my ten-year-old son’s basketball team, I was reluctant. I’ve coached high school basketball for decades and just wanted my son to have a good time and cheer for him from the stands. But no one else signed up, so Coach McGever stepped in.
One of the first things I did was hold an unconventional and controversial parent meeting.
This is what I told the parents: we are going to lose a lot of games – my goal isn’t to win – so if you want to win a lot of games, change teams now. Then, I told them why. I explained that on our team every player will end up playing every position and will get equal playing time, no matter what. I further explained that other teams in this league typically had one or two kids who played the entire game, didn’t pass, and took all the shots – and that those teams won a lot of games. My goal was to have fun, learn the fundamentals of basketball, and enjoy our time together. Two things happened: 1) we lost a lot of games and 2) my team had a waiting list to join for the next season.
Better-behaved children and teenagers are a common short-term goal, but there is lasting power in forming young people increasingly capable of wise and faithful action. Kyle Strobel makes a related point in his writing on spiritual formation: formation aims beyond knowledge and skill toward wisdom and love. Wise parents hope to form a young person who can increasingly discern and choose what is good when Mom or Dad is not standing there telling them what to do.
Sometimes the formative thing is to let the forgotten homework stay forgotten. Let the coach address the lateness. Let the teenager discover that spending all their money means they don’t have any later. Young people, especially adolescents, are looking for, and even wired for, learning through failure and consequences.
An Ecology of the Christian Household
To shift from a managerial to a formative parenting approach, develop the ecology of your household. By ecology, I mean the dispositions, routines, and norms that shape ordinary life together. The household is the formative environment parents have the greatest ability to shape and where they must be intentional.
As a runner, I admire legendary marathoner Eliud Kipchoge. Speaking at Oxford, he repeated an old saying: the best time to plant a tree was 25 years ago; the second-best time is today. Kipchoge’s success today has everything to do with what he has been doing for the last 25 years. The point is simple: formation happens slowly, so start now.
Start praying with your family.
Start asking your family for forgiveness when you are out of line.
Start serving and helping around the house in new ways.
Start listening more intently as you put your phone in the other room to be present.
Start saying yes to what you can do and no to things you can’t do; let your yes be yes and your no be no.
Start celebrating each other in bigger and bigger ways.
Start any and all of these things over again when they stall.
Make your own list and find your own routines and norms. Avoid looking for short-term “wins.” None of this is likely to transform your family overnight. It might feel like a lot of “losses.” None of this is easy. None of this is quick. That is OK.
I’ve had a lot of managers. I have one family.