I firmly believe that a parent is charged with raising up their children to be good, upstanding and productive members of society. I believe that a child’s moral compass comes from his or her parents and the beliefs with which they were raised. I also believe that talking at length about the important values and beliefs I hope to instill in my children, particularly without any context in which to frame them, is pretentious, presumptuous (I have not actually been a parent for a single minute of my life at this point), and incredibly boring. Instead, let me share a few of the less important beliefs I hope to instill in our children before I unleash them on an unsuspecting world.
1. Light bulbs work by magic. In the true spirit of the dad from Calvin and Hobbes, nonsensical explanations for everyday occurrences have got to be some of the most fun you can have as a parent. Light bulbs work by magic, cars move through the power of my mind, and the sky is blue because they ran out of green paint while working on the grass are just a few of the items of nonsense I plan to teach our children (feel free to steal these, this type of madness works better the more it is spread around). Will they be mocked mercilessly if they made it to school with these beliefs intact? Certainly. But I think in later life they will look back fondly on those days as the times before they had to have their father involuntarily committed.
2. Beagle is Your Older Brother. Wife is really not on board with this one, but I envision this coming up in the context of the “where do babies come from?” line of questioning. As I explain to our children that only married mommies and daddies are allowed to have babies*, I can then transition to my wife and I, who were not yet married when Beagle came along, so instead of having a real human baby, we had a dog. And he is their older brother.
“But what about Auxiliary Dog?” the child will undoubtedly ask.
“Don’t be silly, child,” I’ll reply. “He’s just a dog.”
* I recognize that this line will only fool them for the period between birth and their first glimpse of prime time television, but I’ll take what naivete I can get.
3. Han shot first. If I have to explain this to you, it will mean nothing to you. If I don't, then just keep fighting the fight.
4. Today’s children’s programming has nothing on the stuff we watched. This is not so much a belief as a self-evident truth. Yes, a lot of the cartoons I grew up with fail the test of time (beyond the nostalgia value, does any adult really enjoy the original Thundercats?). But, from what I have seen, today’s cartoons are almost uniformly crap, and the whole Saturday morning cartoon experience has been subverted to talk shows and advertising. I would like to accumulate DVDs of the best of my childhood - Bugs Bunny, of course, but also Animaniacs, Ghostbusters, Garfield and Friends, Muppet Babies (which may or may not be legally available, due to some of the Lucasfilm footage used in the closet shots), Rugrats, and classic Disney shorts. I am open to other suggestions from the eighties and nineties, but this is also an area where I am prepared to be proven wrong. Other than Phineas and Pherb (the only suggestion I’ve received from more than one trusted source) are their any modern cartoons, or non-cartoon children’s shows, worth 24 minutes of mine and my child’s time?
5. Dirt is good. Girl or boy, it doesn’t much matter - a chunk of their childhood needs to be spent outdoors. This is the closest to a spiritual belief I’ve included in this short list. It’s not that we are incapable of having fulfilling and satisfying lives spent primarily indoors (though one could make an argument). It’s more that *I* am incapable of doing that, so they have to come along for the ride.
The wife is not wild about this one either, so if anyone has suggestions for fully equipped cabins surrounded by wilderness? That’d be great....
I am open to other suggestions. What kind of oddball things did your parents do? What kind of inappropriately strong beliefs in mundane matters do you intend to inflict on your kids?
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