PUNK ROCK PARENTING: How should I keep my kids from being into art or music??

Funny stuff from Sergeant D over at Stuff You Will Hate today. I particularly like one of the suggestions in the comments that says "Give them whatever they want, but force them to do manual labor. Exposure to manual labor will also help instill in them a deep hatred of manual labor which will lead to business school." That is 100% true, as I can attest. My dad ran a construction company, and he made me work for him a few summers in high school. I promptly became the pussy-ass liberal writer that you see today. Wait, maybe that was his trick?

PUNK ROCK PARENTING: How should I keep my kids from being into art or music??

Since I’m an ancient fossil, I find myself thinking a lot about stuff like whether my next car should be Lexus SUV or BWM 5-series, that my 15-year high school reunion is coming up this year, and how I should raise my kids. I mean, I don’t actually have any yet, but I hope to have some in the next year or three, and I figure it’s a good idea to start planning my family now.

Naturally, my worst fear is that my kids will get into fggty stuff like art or music instead of sports, business, and other stuff that successful, rich people do. It would crush me if they ended up pursuing the same embarrassing, worthless stuff that all the other losers in my family wasted their lives on, so I thought I would turn to you guys for advice on raising my future children! How can I keep them from turning into betas, losers and outcasts??? Wut do??

I see a few potential ways to handle it:

1) Let them do whatever they want and support them no matter what, as long as they enjoy what they are doing. That sounds good on paper, but we all know kids are stupid and that most teachers are idealistic, liberal pussies who will probably try to talk them into “expressing themselves” instead of relentlessly chasing academic success, building a network of powerful friends, crushing their less-motivated peers and climbing the corporate ladder like I want them to (srs).

2) Demand they get good grades, play sports, join extracurricular activities and forbid them from doing anything creative. On paper, this sounds like a great idea, but kids have a habit of rebelling against whatever their parents are into. For example, my mother is all about organic gardening, spirituality, and community activism, which is why I eat at McDonalds, am an atheist, and try to be aggressively ignorant about politics. So as much as I like the idea of ruling over my kids with an azn-style iron fist, I feel like it would inevitably backfire. Which leads me to what I think is ultimately the best option:

 
Should I tape my kids’ eyes open and force them to watch Old Skull videos??

3) Force them to be hipster-hardcore artists and activists. From the second they pop out of their mom’s junk, I’ll give them temporary ironic tattoos of pizza, draw on fake mustaches, put little fedoras on them, and instead of buying them Big Wheels to ride around on like all the other kids, they’ll have baby-sized fixies. Their cribs will be custom-made to look like downtown LA loft spaces, and instead of lullabyes I’ll sing heartfelt acoustic versions of Rise Against and Defeater songs to them while I tell them all about how Americans are the REAL terrorists and school is just a way of brainwashing you into feeding the military-industrial-prison complex. This way, when they get to be teenagers and enter their rebellious phase, they’ll lash out at me by taking AP classes, attending Ivy League colleges and becoming investment bankers with happy, stable marriages. Sure, they’ll hate me, but I’ll rest easy knowing that I did my job as a parent.

Wat u think?? How do you raise your children so they don’t grow up to be artists, musicians or otherwise shame and disappoint your family??? Which is worse, finding out that you have a tumor in your balls or that your kid wants to go to art school?????

--SERGEANT D

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