Bringing Up Geeks

Men and Women seek someone to marry that has similar ideas about things. Therefor Geeks will marry someone similar to their Geekhood and will usually have kids that are Geeks, because that’s what a couple of married Geeks would be expected to do.

Also of note, there seems to be more Geeks now than in prior decades. These Geeks will thus produce more Geeks.

I am aroused and offended by Tom's questions re: Little House on the Prairie, inplying that this author is some kind of off the grid freak. I want to know what her values and methods really are, not whether or not she is some kind of out-of-touch creep.

Growing up through junior high and high school, every child there knows the social dynamics much more intimately than these parents; every child is a better navigator of the social climate. Just leaving high school (I'm 18) and on my way to college, I feel that what these parents are doing, perhaps unconsciously, is a tragedy. The way I see it, they are removing the most important aspects of a child's life: the ability to experience the world first hand, to make their own decisions, and most importantly, to make their own mistakes.

The very idea of having a child call home to ask permission to watch a movie (in the same category as monitoring their television programming [banning MTV, for example] or disallowing cellphones until high school) is sickening to me. Do you honestly think your child so insecure or unintelligent or vulnerable as to not be able to make their own decisions about what movies they want to watch? Even if, for example, the movie is something you, as a parent, feel they shouldn't be watching (because surely you as a parent have a duty to take away your child's opportunity to make a decision for themselves and, again, a chance to make a mistake [better to let them make a mistake so absurdly trivial as watching a violent movie than later in life when it could be far, far, more serious]).

Believe you me, parents and concerned readers, if a child is a geek, he will be a geek. My social loop is living proof. We were, are, and I will forever try to be unmoderated in my actions and communications, living and free to experience the world, make my own choices and mistakes. I watched violent movies when I was young, with and without my parents consent. I was online and on IM's exploring the tremendously obscene world of the internet without my parent's knowledge, and I was going to parties unsupervised by parents with loud music and dirty dancing, and so were all of my friends. What do I do now?

I'm on this website arguing that your idea of a 'geek' is not only going to develop out of a misconceived idea of good parenting by sheltering and moderation. I love my parents more for the freedom they gave me than anything else, and I am by all standards a geek. I am a geek, however, by my own nature, not because my parents wanted me to be one.