For Fathers of Sons
“There in the delivery room, moments after he was born, the nurse handed me my son, Nathan. he was beautiful. I was beaming with pride for him and what Christy had done. I was a father - what a feeling!"
Yet, even then the same doubts raced through my mind.
I don’t know if I’m going to be able to raise this boy. Do I have what it takes?”
Jon Tyson, The Intentional Father
Jon Tyson is an extremely interesting character.
Australian born, he came to the United States as a young man, full of vision and vigor.
He has a blue collar work ethic, having dropped out of High School to become a butcher, but he has the mind and ability of a scholar.
His preaching reaches the intellectuals of New York City, where he pastors, but his heart really burns for revival.
At first glance, Jon Tyson appears to be a series of contradictions, but once you start listening and reading, it becomes more obvious that he is one of the most well rounded individuals you will ever encountered.
This adds to the impact when you realize that well rounded individual you are reading had to admit that he didn’t know if he had what it took to raise a son.
In his 2021 book, The Intentional Father, Tyson lays out the need for fathers to be deeply involved in their sons’ transition from boyhood to manhood, and he starts by going hard after the readers’ own experiences and presumptions. How much of our fathering is a result of or in reaction to our own fathers?
He writes in a personal style, and the book is quite funny at times, like when he acknowledges the irony in the fact as an Australian, his son’s favorite restaurant was the far-from-authuentic Outback Steakhouse. More importantly, we learn about his own feelings of inadequacy and failure as well as his best practices.
The book starts with a stark look at the current state of young men in our culture, and the honest thought that fathers carry more responsibility in helping them through this complicated season.
Young men, while attempting to self-initiate their way into manhood, are actually carrying their adolescence into adulthood.
Jon Tyson - The Intentional Father
Each chapter ends with several short assignments that help us reflect on our own experience or chart a different future for our sons. I spent more time on these assignments than I expected - not because they were complicated but because I found them so thought provoking. Several of these assignments have become working google documents that I return to regularly.
“What do you want your son to know about God, himself and life?”
Jon Tyson, The Intentional Father
I am a father of ten children, five boys and five girls. The boys range from 8 to 30 years old. A number of Tyson’s questions forced me to consider things I had never pondered about my own history and what I was handing down to my sons in the way of skills and values.
The Intentional Father spans a little over 200 pages, but it’s small in size and theoretically could be read quickly. That is, if I weren’t continually forced to let the book drop in my hands as I thought about the words on the page and applied them to my own situation.
No father gets it all perfect, but we can get it better than we have in the past. After reading The Intentional Father, I trust that my younger sons will have a richer experience than I was able to give my older sons.
I highly recommend The Intentional Father for fathers who want to let go of some of their inherited hangups and help their sons with the transition to manhood.
