As a dad you can always instill certain beliefs and ideology and hobbies onto your kids. You might not mean for it to turn out that way, but they are such a helpless mound of clay ready for your kneading. We, as parents, tend to do in conscientiously…sometimes. I’m always for trying to push my kids in a certain direction as long as I am not narrow minded or don’t mind them choosing against it. I’ve done the typical root for this sports team, play this sport, do this, try that. I wouldn’t say I pushed lil Eddie into playing a trumpet but I helped him choose the instrument I played as a kid. He could of picked the saxophone like he originally wanted, but he didn’t like sucking on the reeds.
Anyways, a lot of stuff I push on my kids to do has its own level into geekdom. You could analyze it all you want and tag watching and rooting for a specific sports organization as a level of geek. (Especially when the fan starts spouting out statistics, strategies, and historical revelations about the game or team.) The more wide range of stuff I introduce my kids to, I realize that I am that geek dad. I think I am more of a geek now than I was 2 decades ago. Good thing too, I probably would of spent more money and acquired more stuff lying around the house if I did this when I was single.
A lot of the stuff I pushed or encouraged on my boys would of come naturally as they usually do for young American boys. You know the typical superhero, video game, Pokemon, and war. Sure I helped guide them along by taking them to comic book stores, introducing them to video games other than shooters (jRPG), Magic the Gathering, and old fashion strategy board games. My wife and I also helped them pick out good literature from Star War novels, Harry Potter, Eragon, Lord of the Rings, Kingdom Keepers, and others. (Eddie reads so many books that I may have to buy him a Kindle. We have three huge bookshelves filled with books.)
We do puzzles, models, science experiments, etc. We watch Discovery and the Science Channel. We go to museums to see exhibits like King Tut, Star Wars, Pirates, and Narnia. (All social exhibits at Ben Franklin Institute over the years.) I try to explain the technologies I deal with at work. We build things. (We once took all their Hot Wheels tracks and built the longest raceway that spanned two rooms.) Lil Eddie and I almost stayed up all night playing video games.
I can’t wait for this summer to start some new projects. We got The Dangerous Book for Boys, which has a few projects in there. Plus Eddie has some other book with all kinds of cool stuff from making Zombie makeup to laser pens. I’m also considering getting the Geek Dad book series which outlines a lot of other fun projects.
Don’t worry. No matter how much reading and imagination they use, they still play sports and are a huge hit with the ladies. Which is good, no matter how geeky they become, they are not living in my basement. (I have plans for my basement…that’s my domain!) Now excuse me while we get fresh water for our dinosaur plants.
The first Saturday of May is becoming a special dad and son day with my boys. This Saturday is dubbed Free Comic Book Day. A day where your local friendly comic book store hands out special issues from publishers to all their customers. Each participating store will give out one free issue. Depending on the attendance to the store and their stock, you can get more. Our local store ended up giving us two issues each.
