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I'm interested in pushing the boundaries of what I can do in order to give my kid(s) a leg up in the future that may not be typical, strictly legal, or within the overton window of parenting.
The typical parenting strategies I already "get" and have plans for. Read early, go beyond school, foster the development of valuable hobbies and life skills, blah blah blah. My parents did a pretty good job IMO so I'm just really taking their formula and tweaking it.
I'm looking to optimize intelligence, SMV, athletic ability, and independence. Examples of things I'm considering but haven't done much research or fact-finding on:
Providing HGH at the optimal times to support height and muscle development.
Figuring out ways to accumulate wealth they can eventually access and avoid taxes.
Ways to give them maximum freedom of movement/flexible citizenship.
Ensuring they're guided away from porn/blue-pill sexuality guidance and (ideally) start off with more information on TECHNIQUE than I did. I think they'll figure this out themselves but I'm struggling to figure out how to do it without a profoundly weird conversation.
Put another way, I'm willing to take on risk to maximize long-term benefit for them, at what I think is a higher rate than the baseline parent. Off-the-wall thoughts and criticisms appreciated.
How do you plan on preventing your son from developing a video game or porn addiction or your daughter from scrolling TikTok for 4 hours before she goes to bed? Internet/phone overuse is a major failure mode for kids fucking up their future potential nowadays.
Im no parent, but I think everything you can possibly do will have to be done before they turn 13 and their peer group turns into their whole world.
I just think far too much is outside of your control.
I don't think I can stop it. There's the balance of enabling them to have social experiences with their peer group but trying to restrict what I think is most destructive. However, I've got a couple ideas:
There's a ton of routers that enable MAC address blocking, and "quiet times" and there's basic parental controls for smartphones. I think dumphones until as long as possible.
I'm also considering allowing the kids to play older school single player video games and letting them "unlock" eras as they complete them. 2 birds here - there's a lot of history and excellent experiences they'd miss otherwise, and this will get them a bit of the itch scratched without being
I'm less pessimistic here. I think there's a valley of parental influence after 13, but it ticks back up later on. I see that in not just myself, but a lot of other people I've known.
I don't know about you or your kids, but if your kids are even remotely disagreeable this will backfire spectacularly.
There would be little worse than your kids telling their peers "oh my dad doesn't let me play those games and watch those movies".
I am very disagreeable, and whenever my parents used to try things like this with me, I would usually try to do it anyways, or tip the scales less in their favor somewhere else.
I'd classify myself as pretty disagreeable. My relationship with my parents was horrible from 13-21 because of it. The story I always tell is getting a PS1 3 months after the PS2 came out and I wasn't allowed on the internet on my own computer till 15.
Things were still so different then - you physically had to go to someone's house to LAN to do great multiplayer so that was still so much more social than how gaming works now.
It may end up blowing up in my face. I think a little bleeding-edge modernity would be OK in moderation. I've had someone else on this forum challenge me for giving my toddler fruit juice every once in a while which I really don't understand. I like having a cup of cranberry twice a week, and I don't know if I'd have the heart to say "You won't get to play VR shooters at all until you're 21!" They just won't be able to do it till 3am all weekend.
Ok, so what else are they going to be doing until 3 AM all weekend? "Hanging out with friends" isn't actually a bad default option; you'll have to provide something they want to get up for that's sufficiently early to keep them from that default state.
I've observed that parents can get into this fascinating mode-lock where one's child effectively stops aging at around 13, and aren't capable of recognizing them as older until they're married. I'm almost certain that's because 13-14 is the age one's biological clock says "you're a grown wo/man, and you need to leave the nest now!"; most pre-industrial societies had/have adult initiation rituals around this age for that reason, Judaism's being the most prominent surviving example (and this was also the way it worked in Western society until approximately the end of WW2- most of the Silent generation only had education up to grade 8-10 for a good reason).
Remember, optimizing for independence means you're optimizing for the ability of your kid to not only tell you "no, I know better", but expecting to have the ability to actually follow through (even if the decision is, indeed, objectively bad). "I'm going to get a summer job" necessarily implies "because I want stuff you won't buy me, and I expect to use my property the way I want, which is also the reason all my friends have them".
And you can either tolerate that... or you can't, but you can't also claim to "be optimizing for independence" in the same breath.
(And god forbid you ever tell them that's what you're optimizing for, or even imply it with your actions, when you're trying to deny them independence they know their friends have, because if you do that they'll absolutely give that line right back to you; and it's worse as they'll be in the right so you'll go "ugh why can't they be act like they used to, clearly
they're on their periodit's raging hormones", etc.)Might as well get them the "I thought I wanted this, but it turns out it's not worth it, therefore I'll think harder about it next time" trait while they still have help picking up the pieces/the benefit of no significant problems later, rather than going full rumspringa the minute they leave the safety net like college students are infamous for doing (partially for that reason).
I 100% understand where you're coming from. A job is a great example - I'll make the tradeoff of them learning to work in exchange for them being able to afford shitty fast food and a couple grams of weed.
Trying to limit access to porn until they're old enough to at least hear my speeches about what's good and bad isn't killing my ability to foster self-sufficiency. At the end of the day, parenting really is constantly testing risk/reward for asserting control over kids. I was allowed to make some pretty massive mistakes that I learned from, and that's still going to be the play overall.
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My hot take on this for optimizing: Americans have it backwards, the old school Victorian aristocrats had it right. Send them away to boarding school from 13-18, bring them back to live at home 18-marriage.
My parents would have had it way better if I'd been living somewhere else during my shitty annoying teenage years, and I was much better and more around the house useful at 18. And I had the capability at 18 to get into much more interesting trouble, I needed guidance then not at 13! It wasn't the time to set me loose with no supervision!
I couldn't have done all that much worse in high school anyway, and I think being away from my family might have helped me be less of a piece of shit teenager.
I was actually sent to a (far away) boarding school almost exactly in that age bracket. In my opinion it did not actually help our relationship with my parents much as we kept fighting as much as we used to in the 1-2 years prior, but this time over the phone and during vacations. But maybe this was still preferable to what would have happened if I stayed home, as I was an extremely disagreeable teenager and my parents weren't great at reasoning with me either.
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That is good advice.
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