“reading to do”, part of the Parenting & Epistemology series
I have spent a lot of the last 4-5 months as a stay-at-home uncle. Coaching calls and blogging woven through dropping my nephews and niece off and picking them up, making meals, cleaning up magnatiles, changing diapers. Doing any of the “ops” available in the little company that is My Badass Sister’s House.
I love these little people. I have had to learn a lot. There’s regular emotional and intellectual challenge in the work. It reminds me in some ways of teaching at Carver High in New Orleans’ 9th Ward. It reminds me in others of living in Nantes, France, which I did for a few years right after college.
Lots of cross-cultural ambiguity.
Lots of trying something out in a situation with interpersonal stakes just to see if it will work.
Lots of feeling incompetent and invisible even when surrounded by people you like and who like you in turn.
Toddlers are really confusing people. They have access to tools that older people use. They use those tools, too. But they do so clumsily, hilariously, harshly. I have a voice! I will yell with it! I have language! I will scramble it and lace it with chile oil! Also sparkle syrup! You must tell me this is delicious!
Parallels between coaching professionals and (co)parenting kids keep showing up. One is that all those books that snide hipster me scoffed at in the airport and stores - those are now like gold coins from foreign lands. I can’t get enough of them and I don’t care at all if the words on them are hard to understand or point to heroes I’ve never heard of or oversimplify something very complicated.
I want them and I want to use them. This is to say - I’ve started reading parenting books. I find myself really grateful for them, even the ones I find cheesy or out of touch.
There’s a meta-move here that Ben taught me to make a long time ago. Maybe best summarized as “reading to do”.
Devour books on the thing you’re struggling to do well.
Withhold judgment as much as possible of the voice, politics, and writing chops of the author. You’re walking through Lowe’s not a literary salon - there are tools in here you can put in your hand to make something look different.
Do stuff the books talk about. Try it. Observe. Experiment.
The last step is the crucial one. This kind of reading is particular. Don’t read just for the ego boost of being “the kind of person who studies their craft”. Don’t read as a problem preference that allows you to pubnt work that needs your attention.
Read to find moves and mindsets. Then make those moves and try on those mindsets.
This approach has developed a whole generation of leaders at Collegiate Academies (just celebrating their 15 year anniversary), which Ben founded. I’m using it now with hope that an earnest, inexperienced stay-at-home uncle can become the right kind of caring adult for the little people he loves most.
-Eric
