Chapter 2

Your Child Is Uniquely Unoriginal

Your child is a special, one-of-a-kind human being the likes of which the world has never seen. And chances are they’ll lead an ordinary life not that different from your own. Right now, there are literally billions of amazing, creative, and brilliant people who will never do anything particularly amazing, creative, or brilliant. Never believe anything you read in a letter of recommendation. Or an obituary.

That’s okay. Your kid doesn’t have to be a once-in-a-generation talent to lead a good life. Being a genius at something doesn’t come with a high job-satisfaction rate. Tortured artists seldom die of old age surrounded by loved ones. It’s almost impossible in a world of drugs, guns, and sandwiches on toilets.

That’s not a message overachieving parents want to hear. They expect their kid to set the world on fire and earn the rewards that come with it: wealth, prestige, and—if there’s time—happiness. But your child will turn out better if you don’t try for any of those goals—not even the last one. The best things in life happen by accident.

To succeed as a parent—and outperform most overachieving parents in the process—you simply need to raise a kid who hits these three benchmarks:

1. They can support themselves.

2. They aren’t a social deviant.

3. They don’t blame you for everything that’s wrong with their life.

Your goal as a bare minimum parent is to achieve all three in the easiest way possible. The result will be a functional adult you can be proud of, or at least one you can make move out of your house. Don’t be intimidated by overachieving parents who aim higher. The only thing they’ll hit is their kid. When you shoot for the stars, the bullets fall back to earth.

Boiling down child-rearing to those terms makes raising a kid seem easy, and in the parenting world, easy means wrong. But not in my book. Here’s a closer look at all three benchmarks to show you why successful parenting is so simple even I can do it. It’s hard to set the bar any lower than that.

And Stay Out

The fastest way to tell if your child turned out okay is if you can get rid of them. Gently shoving a kid out the door is the crowning achievement of any parent’s life. But your kid isn’t going anywhere unless they have a job. That’s why raising your child to support themselves is the first benchmark of successful parenting. Without gainful employment, your kid will live with you forever—unless you’re okay with them being homeless. After the tenth time they put an empty milk carton back in the fridge, you just might be.

As a bare minimum parent, you mainly want your kid to pay their own bills and not hit you up for money every month. At some point, the freeloading has to stop. It’s just a shame it doesn’t end earlier. Good luck getting grocery money from a toddler.

When it comes to your child’s future job, the money matters, because if they don’t make any, that money will come from you. Interpretive pottery-making might be a fulfilling career, but unless your child can find someone to pay for existential angst as expressed through clay dishes, you’ll have to support them financially until you die. Or until they die. Kilns are more dangerous than they look.

Never encourage your kid down a path that could lead to them living in your basement. You don’t have to actively discourage them from choosing a fun but impoverishing career. Just sit back and watch as the invisible hand of the free market slaps them in the face. The best lessons are the ones that leave a mark.

The Price of Luxury

Successful children need enough money to make it on their own, but not much more than that. Contrary to what over-achieving parents might tell you, your kid doesn’t need to be a millionaire for you to be proud of them. Far from it. Rich people are some of the biggest failures I know. Well, that I know of. You’ve read enough of this book to guess I don’t have any rich friends. Or any friends at all.

Once your child is no longer living paycheck to paycheck, wage increases don’t make life much easier. Sure, extra money can speed up retirement or help put the next generation through university, but in terms of day-to-day living, there’s only so much that money can do. The truth is the average person in Western civilization today is better off than the richest kings in Europe centuries ago. If you want pepper, you get it by going to the supermarket, not by sending a fleet of galleons around the world. Although you’ll still complain if you forgot your coupon.

The biggest benefit of wealth is not what it lets people do, but what it lets them get out of doing. The upper class can pay someone to do all their grunt work for them. Unpleasant tasks like cooking, cleaning, and child-rearing can be foisted upon the hired help. Anything worth doing is worth paying someone else to do for minimum wage or less.

But rich people who rise above life’s trivial hassles find a new level of even more trivial hassles to complain about. We all do it to some degree. History is just a sliding scale of grievances where people get equally angry over increasingly minor setbacks. Someone who lost their entire family to the plague in the 1300s complained just as much as someone today who suffers from slow Wi-Fi. Don’t count on them to gain perspective, either. It would take too long to Google it.

Rich people’s complaints are on the same sliding scale of grievances as everybody else. They’re just further along, which puts them at grave risk from the rest of us. It’s hard to hear a CEO complain about their heated toilet seat being too warm without wanting to punch someone in the face. Revolutions have started for less.

If your kid grows up to have a fridge full of food, a drinks cabinet full of booze, and a TV full of channels, there’s not much more they need. There’s no reason to push them to be rich. In fact, keeping your kid middle class could save their life. No one wants to be caught on the wrong side of the toilet seat rebellions.

One of Us

Life is not a popularity contest. With that being said, if everybody hates your kid, you lose. There are times when it pays not to be the least-liked person in a group. Elections come to mind. So do overladen boats where you have to decide who to throw overboard.

That’s why, as a parent, you must stop your kid from being a social deviant. Your child doesn’t have to be the most beloved person in the neighborhood. Just keep them from being singled out as an enemy of the state. Obvious marks of failure include exile, jail sentences, and viral articles that make everyone despise your kid. Next time, don’t let your child write a post titled “Why I Hate Kittens.” Or at least disown them first.

This is another benchmark where overachieving parents fall short. They want their kid to be loved by all, not from a desire to spread peace and harmony, but because of their own egos. If an overachieving parent is the best, then their child must also be the best. And if you refuse to acknowledge their kid’s greatness, well, just be glad pistol duels are illegal.

It’s unrealistic to expect everyone to love your child, regardless of your kid’s merits. People hate each other for good reasons and bad reasons and no reason at all. At best, we grudgingly tolerate other humans—and the annoyances that come with them—to stop civilization from collapsing. If people expressed how they really felt when they heard someone chewing cereal, every family breakfast would turn into carnage. Keep those napkins handy.

You’ll never truly know how much other people like your kid, but chances are it’s less than you think. That’s fine. Just make sure your child isn’t so bad that people express their displeasure by forming an angry mob. If your kid’s only exercise is running from torches and pitchforks, you’ve failed as a parent.

Beyond those basic criteria, the socialization goals for bare minimum parenting are pretty, well, minimal. A successful child can, when necessary, interact with other human beings without causing an incident. If your kid can go to the shops without setting anything on fire, you’ve done a passable job of raising them. And if they can’t resist burning stuff, there’s always online shopping. Just block the sites that sell matches.

Different Kinds of Social Deviants You Might Raise

Deviant	Pro	Con
Burglar	They can support themselves.	They might get hired by a party of dwarves.
Ninja	They’re quiet.	It’s hard to enforce curfew.
Gang Leader	At least they showed some initiative.	They won’t let you join.
Furry	Animal costumes will keep them warm.	It would’ve been easier to get a real dog.
Heavy Breather	They’re well oxygenated.	They could become Dark Lord of the Sith.
Open-Mouth Chewer	They eat what you cooked.	They make you lose your lunch.
Late Library Book Returner	They’re literate.	They’re evil incarnate.

Not My Fault

The third benchmark is the one that will come up the most in your daily life. For you to be successful, your child must blame someone other than you for all their problems. I’d say they need to take personal responsibility, but that’s not how people work. Even when we make mistakes, it’s because someone else forced us into them. Nobody eats too much, drinks too much, or has too much sex through any fault of their own. Any excesses are a result of diseases or disorders brought on by bad genes or tragic life circumstances beyond our control. Except in the case of your child, it sort of is within your control. Because you’re the person who created them, both their genes and their life circumstances are your fault. Way to ruin everything. You really are a parent.

This is yet another area where overachieving parents make a serious mistake. Rather than simply dodging the blame, overachieving parents try to solve the underlying problem. But if you try to fix something, you’re basically admitting it was your fault in the first place. That’s why the most adult thing to do as a parent when you notice a problem is to stick your hands in your pockets and nonchalantly walk away. Let some overachieving parent swoop in and take the fall instead. They can’t help themselves.

You can’t make someone love you. You can’t even make them respect you. But as a bare minimum parent, you can trick them into not blaming you for everything. The world is falling apart, and the damage trickles down to the rest of us. Use that to your advantage. Make sure any problems you cause don’t stand out above all the other issues plaguing society. You’ll be fine as long as you aren’t worse than global warming.

There’s no shortage of alternative scapegoats. Blame right-wingers. Blame liberals. Blame any word ending in “ism.” Blame corporations or protesters or university professors or rednecks. It doesn’t matter where you place the blame as long as it isn’t on you. The goal isn’t to further a social cause. It’s to stop your kid from slandering you behind your back for the rest of your life. When I say bare minimum, I mean it.

Forget to Smile

The most important benchmark is the one that’s NOT on the list: happiness.

To overachieving parents, it seems like there’s nothing wrong with keeping your child smiling. Happy kids whine less, throw fewer temper tantrums, and are less likely to write a tell-all memoir bashing your parenting. There are few things worse than having to read an entire book to find out why your kid hates you. That’s what passive-aggressive text messages are for.

As a bare minimum parent, I’m not saying you should give your kid a wretched childhood. But making their happiness your top priority is the fastest way to ruin their life.

Think about it. My two-year-old is only happy when she’s playing in toilet water. That doesn’t make her successful, even though she’s very good at it. There are no trophies for defiling a bathroom.

Happiness is an emotional pleasure response. When my toddler splashes toilet water everywhere, her brain is flooded with endorphins. But that doesn’t mean it’s good for her or anyone else. It certainly doesn’t make me happy when I have to bleach the entire bathroom.

If happiness is your only goal for your kid, you might as well buy them heroin. There’s no one more joyful than a drug addict in the middle of a high, even as it literally kills them. The lesson here is unmistakable: We don’t know what’s good for us, and too much happiness is fatal.

I don’t want my two-year-old to grow up to be a hormone junkie or a serial toilet-water splasher. That’s why I don’t beat myself up when she’s unhappy. As a bare minimum parent, I just want her to be self-sufficient, reasonably social, and reluctant to blame me for everything that’s wrong with her life. If that fills her existence with gloom, so be it. At least she’ll be a functional human being. Take that, everyone who’s trying to get their kids on reality TV.

Activities That Make Kids Happy

Activity	Pro	Con
Taking a Toy from Another Kid	They gain a toy.	They gain an enemy.
Eating Sweets	Buys you a few minutes of quiet.	Buys your kid’s dentist a new car.
Popping Balloons	Makes a fun bang.	Enrages evil clowns.
Drawing on the Walls	Allows your kid to express themselves through art.	Makes you express yourself through profanity.
Digging Holes in the Garden	You might find pirate treasure.	You’ll definitely find ways to kill grass.
Knocking Over Someone Else’s Block Building	Releases aggressive energy.	It’s potential terrorist training.
Flushing Random Objects	Gets rid of excess toys.	Only until a plumber pulls them back out.
Rolling Around in Toxic Waste	Might make them superheroes.	Will certainly make a mess.

The Road to Success

Happy or not, your kid needs to hit all three benchmarks to become a functional adult. Keep these metrics in mind as you read the rest of this book. Write them down. Get them tattooed on your arm. Or maybe just buy a highlighter. I don’t know, you do you.

Having a self-sufficient, nondeviant kid who doesn’t blame you for everything isn’t something new parents fantasize about. But after you’ve seen a few kids go wrong, you’ll appreciate the beautiful simplicity of my approach. You’re not raising the next Mozart or Einstein. But if you follow my method, you won’t raise the next Charles Manson, either. If you’re looking for a life goal, a good one is, “Don’t raise a serial killer.”

Instead, you’ll rear an average person who means the world to you but seems more or less unremarkable to everyone else. That’s what stressed-out, overachieving parents will end up with, too. They’ll just waste more effort getting there. They’re still trying to solve parenthood with an abacus while you’re using a supercomputer. If you run into trouble, don’t go back to the old ways. Just reboot and try again.

Luckily, you’ll have plenty of chances for a fresh start. Biology provides a margin for error that overachieving parents fail to take advantage of. The bad news is you’re about to make more mistakes than you can possibly imagine. The good news is nobody will remember them, not even your kid.