WhatsAPundit

Well, Liz and I have one of each, and I've been spending a fair amount of brain power thinking about how we're going to handle certain situations that are likely to crop up.

Like adolescence.

Liz and I are both pretty brainy; both of us were child prodigies, and both of us are successful adults, and both of us have taken very non-traditional paths to get from point (A) to point (B).

So as role models, we may very well fall into the class of "do as I say, not as I did."

Our kids are going to be smart, if continuous intellectual stimulation from an early age is important for developing that. Both of their parents like puzzles, games, wordplay, and generally just poking into things to see what happens. I'm going to have a blast observing my children as their minds develop and grow.

On the flip side, both their parents are somewhat, ahem, non-conformist, and have trouble with authority figures in general. I suspect that those parts of our worldview will influence the twins' development as well.

So the question is, how do we deal with the strong likelihood that at some point our kids will have a "screw this straight-and-narrow stuff; I'm working at a different level here" moment.

Believe me, I know whereof I speak, and humility is one thing I wish I hadn't had hammered into me quite so hard by cold cruel experience.

(And friends -- or even casual readers -- may have different opinions on how deeply it has taken even now....)

Well, Mr. Johnson has given me an idea.

"Son, if you don't want to end up old and unlaid, get an education and get some money. The women you'll want will want you to keep up with them in the success department, and if you slack you'll end up a horny old man."

Actually, that's not a speech I'd give, but it is something to keep in mind when talking about or dealing with questions about education, and jobs, and peer pressure, etc.

Anti-intellectualism rampaged around me as I grew up, and my non-conformist tendencies actually pushed me to excel. But that trait worked for my only up until I hit college. What happened next, well.....

To quote the late great Warren Zevon:

Well, I met a girl at the Rainbow bar
She asked me if I'd beat her
She took me back to the Hyatt House
I don't want to talk about it

That was college for me. College was like a beautiful woman who abused me for her amusement. Largely because I discovered beautiful girls who actually liked messing around with moderately cute high-IQ non-conformists! So I guess college and me constituted a mutually dysfunctional relationship.

Am I digressing? Possibly, but this post is about raising children who will have to deal with raging hormones, peer pressure, and life choices.

If I'm reading the signs correctly, the declining performance of boys relative to girls is an indication that the problem is worse now nationally than it was 30 years ago. Too many boys are choosing not to make "success" oriented decisions. Pop culture obviously has a lot to do with this. Things may change in the next 10-15 years, but who knows?

With luck, our boy will buck the trend like I did; and fortunately I think our boy won't have massive culture shock moving from high school, so maybe any course corrections he makes won't be quite so violent. Whatever, what I hope to pass on to my boy from the moment he starts thinking that girls are kind of intriguing and well into the full rip-tide forces of young adulthood is this:

Girls like best guys who are jocks and Docs.

How's that for a plan?

Note: This is a blog post and very much a working draft of what I think. Also, I'm only talking about the riptides hitting boys, and of course the corrolary forces will be working on the girls, and I haven't even begun to think about those. (Which is probably why I'm more worried about raising the boy; I just haven't thought about raising the girl enough to get good and freaked out about that....)