Archbishop's web site Denver Catholic Register Parishes Catholic Pastoral Center
June 13, 2001
Father's Day: Just one day to relax
Applying rules of successful entrepreneurship to family life
By Tom McDonough
Well, you've made it through another year. Congratulations! Or perhaps this is your first Father's Day. Double Congratulations!! It's a great day to be a dad - but then, so is every day because fatherhood gets to the core of what we men are all about: initiating creation. That's a perfection of God the Father but to avoid levitation, let's borrow a term from commerce: entrepreneurship.
Who hasn't dreamed of "going out on his own"? Even bloated beauracracies try to promote entrepreneurship. An entrepreneur has a vision: some product or service that will benefit mankind. He responds with ingenuity and a spirit of sacrifice, building an enterprise to carry out this vision.
A father can think of his family in exactly this way. The analogy works even better when we imagine God the Father as an entrepreneur; initiating and bringing forward his business of creation. Similarly, a father's enterprise, his life's work, is his family, a much more lofty vision than any product or service. This vision focuses on what the children will be. Not what they will DO in the sense of career; this might be due to your own desire for control, impinging on freedom. The vision of what your children will BE is an orientation to their character. Through a lifetime of teaching and example, parents lead their children to become responsible adults who can demonstrate good judgement, courage, fairness and self-control.
Like his commercial counterpart, a father has to have the conviction that the goal will not be accomplished without his ingenuity and self-sacrifice, his involvement in every aspect of the enterprise. If there was ever a time when good families arose effortlessly, it's long gone.
Creative Fatherhood
Raising responsible adults requires lots of reflection, resourcefulness and leadership. Let's call it creative fatherhood: a fatherhood that is lively, imaginative, different, every day. It stays in charge by staying ahead. It demonstrates a love that's present, fresh and never routine. Often, your spirit of sacrifice is most needed to activate your creative energies on those evenings when you would most like to plop down in front of the TV and let the world take care of itself. But no entrepreneur would give in to such a temptation and the creative father doesn't either. He's not passive. He doesn't give merely "leftovers" of himself to his kids at the end of a hard day.
The creative father doesn't look for balance between family and work. Too much of looking for balance can give the impression that these are two "things" attached to, but outside of you, the individual. In God the Father and his business of creation we see a unity of "who he is" and "what he does". The creative father knows that the person is a unity and everything comes back to BEing, who he is. If work and family are not seamlessly woven into who the person IS, there's bound to be discomfort either at work or at home. I like to think of my work as part of a family business: the family of God, the business of "subduing the earth."
Let's take a look at a few areas where a father can be creative.
Unity and Diversity
We hear so much about equality in our culture that we might be tempted to take it too seriously. There is always equality of persons, but sometimes the inequalities are more interesting. For instance, between the sexes. Your family has arisen out of this happy inequality. The sexes are complementary, not equal. And you well know that your children are not equal. Your creative leadership is required to blend the talents and possibilities of each family member with what needs to be done, who will do it and how. "Pitching in" doesn't mean that everyone does the same tasks but that everyone is pulling in the same direction, sharing the same purpose for the enterprise.
Evening Meal
What enterprise can carry out its mission without unity, without cohesiveness? The family needs to come together frequently to experience itself as a unity and for the individual members to experience their participation in something greater than themselves. Traditionally, the family dinner has been one important "place" where this unity and cohesiveness are developed. The family is the first school of social behavior and dinner is a time for instruction in manners, thoughtfulness and polite conversation. Dinner is a time for humor and self-expression, a time to share experiences. A time for parental example. A time for the young ones to learn from the older ones.
Your creativity is required on many levels. Set a high goal for your own presence at dinner and figure out how to achieve it. Wrestle with how to organize each one's activities so that, together, you can preserve this tradition. Determine valid excuses for exemption from dinner. Will organized sports contribute as much to your child's character as the formation which can be attained around the dinner table? If your presence at the dinner table is impossible, what is an appropriate substitute?
Education
Let's go back BEing and DOing. Education addresses both of these and you are needed in both instances. The education offered at school is focused on making your child productive, aimed at what your child will do in the future. No matter how good your child's school, there is always a role for you. Manage your family's use of time on weekday nights, regulating TV and Internet. Think up some ways of participating in the educational process. Learn a language together. Read the books assigned for your child and discuss them together. Don't leave this exclusively to your wife.
The other type of education is character formation which is aimed at BEING and BECOMING. Being a good person. Becoming a responsible adult. This education can only come from you, your wife and a few other adults who will influence your child. It's much more important so it deserves the same self-consuming sacrifice that an entrepreneur puts in his business.
Teenagers
Teenagers especially need your attention. A friend of mine describes the teen years as .... It's a confusing time for them. Don't abandon them. Build on the bonds of friendship and trust formed in the early years. Challenge them academically and intellectually. Give them freedom but ask them to exercise their sense of responsibility. Getting into the details of how to do all this requires lots of imagination, experimentation, patience and dialogue. And mistakes.
Spend time with your teenage children, especially your daughters. I say especially them because being a teenage girl is beyond our experience. I've noticed that most guys don't have a clue about spending time with their teenage daughter. Hint: shop with her at the mall for Mom, for you, for her. A few bucks will buy you an opportunity to discusss your values along with some chit-chat, some humor and some joy.
Finally, don't do anything I've suggested above. It's your family. Work out your own plan for raising responsible adults. Keep to your plan and your children will see in you a reflection of the image and likeness of God the Father. And next year you will be even more deserving of Happy Father's Day!
Tom McDonough is Editor of Dad's Den, an Internet magazine written by Catholic men that can be visited at www.dadsden.net
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