All products featured on WIRED are independently selected by our editors. However, we may receive compensation from retailers and/or from purchases of products through these links.
There are many effective ways to parent your children, as well as many ineffective ways. There are multitudes of books dedicated to the subject, exploring many different styles of parenting from authoritarian to passive to straight up aggressive. I prefer a mix of all of them, based on the personalities of my children applying a little scientific theory to the process.
There are other influences in life that can assist with parenting, especially in regards to creating allegories to life. Many of those references come from the inane amount of sci-fi that we consume in my house. From books, Star Trek, Star Wars and the plethora of sci-fi available on channels dedicated to it, there are plenty of lessons to learn from sci-fi. Most of those lessons are terrible ones, clearly not based on any semblance of reality. I suppose that's why it's called science fiction. The cliches in sci-fi are abundant, so it's easy to take any of them and say to your kids, "that's not real." But how easy is it to generate a life lesson out of those same cliches? Well, here's my attempt with parenting according to sci-fi cliches.
Teleporters, popularized by Star Trek of course, are neat to watch and fantasize about. Children, while not be expected to fully wrap their heads around it, should understand that this is the most absurd sort of fiction. Teleportation basically is explained away by claiming it breaks down matter into energy, then beams it across space. This would be the same process as obliterating someone with a phaser on kill. The very basic reason it violates all the scientific rules mentioned above, is that position and momentum of particles cannot simultaneously be known. The reason this applies to parenting is two-fold.
First, the part about position and momentum. Children are creatures of intense habit, but also of random chaos and unpredictability. They are particles in constant movement, providing little in the way of predictive movement, unless you preset the movement to make it predictable. They need routine as much as they need freedom. While it may be difficult to explain how the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle applies to their lives, it shouldn't be as difficult to explain to them that like a transporter (no, not that Transporter), their movement between two states of being can be controlled.
It's quite simple really, and takes the core of the word teleportation. Port. Transport. As parents, we are the transporters and our cars are the teleportation devices. We move children from one state of being to the next. To school, a mostly sedentary existence, to the kinetic soccer practice that is a great place to learn about energy distribution. If we think of it that way, while it may be a more manual process to the science, teleportation is not that obtuse of a concept. This line of thinking may foster a greater respect for the effort put into the constant movement and shuttling in their lives, done on their behalf by the parent. It also might just elicit a smart-ass response like "why don't we just get a transporter like on Star Trek?"
The universe is a large and mysterious place. We have only discovered a tiny fraction of the known universe and are relative light years away from fully understanding the science of the universe. Yet, it appears as equal a mystery that the universe tends to revolve around a singular child. Similar to early theories about the rotation of the planets, children believe they are the Earth and we are nothing more but hovering planetary objects stuck in their gravitational pull.
While some days we may feel like helpless asteroids wondering listlessly among the stars, it's not a hopeless effort to explain to children that they are not in fact the center of the known universe. Not to mention, there is more in the universe in relation to their little lives that is left to be explored. When these cliche moments present themselves in sci-fi, a correlation to real life can quickly be made.
There is much about the universe that is unexpected and unexplained. Who's to say that our universe is not similar to the world of the Who civilization? Sitting atop a flower, floating through another world? The point of all this is breaking down the singular view of the world that occupies children's brains. By pointing out the mysteries in life, teaching them to expect the unexpected and find the mysteries of life, they may start to expand their little universes to encompass more than just them.
This cliche is especially present in sci-fi and adventure aimed at children. There always seems to be the one smart kid in the group that can either hack anything with little or no apparent effort. Either that, or some droid plugging into a foreign computer system with relative ease and disarming the security. The quick lesson learned here is that this kind of stuff is easy. Need to break into an ATM or the school's computer - no problem. How about starting World War III by simply hacking into a military installation?
The deeper lesson here is how easy the hackers make the task appear. Yes, the reality is skewed but if the hacker is human, the assumption can be made that these skills were not intuitively learned by some sort of strange osmosis. Instead, a learning opportunity can easily take place. With any skill in life, practice and education are equally as important as intuition. Chances are, that really smart kid hacking into a military mainframe spends a great deal of time working with computers.
While this can make a great segue into the importance of going to college or learning a craft, it's probably better not to push it too much with their young minds. Instead, focus on more tangible things, like playing with LEGO leading to architectural design, or how HTML is used to build web pages. Most kids with a willingness to learn will be able to make these connections in life. They'll be able to see the building blocks of higher learning and will be electronically changing their grades in no time, saying to you "there's an app for that. I wrote it."
h/t Kevin Makice, and his great "everything I learned about parenting I learned from..." series of posts and John Madden for jump starting my brain this week.
Follow us on Twitter @cebsilver and @wiredgeekdad
Image Credit: FORS1, 8.2-meter VLT Antu, ESO
