Great Ideas ranjeet on 07 Dec 2006 02:25 am
Jazzing Up Parenting
(note: originally written in 1998)
I’ve talked to a few people. No, really. I’m not kidding this time. And a few of those people are not imaginary. And a few of those few people are my age. Being the seriousness minded people that we are, sometimes we talk about our futures and what will become of us as we enter our twenties and thirties. And some of us want kids. This is almost beyond me, I must admit. I never saw the joy and excitement in waiting hand and foot on something that will do nothing but give you grief a few years down the road, but maybe it’s something to do with getting attached to something you’ve had for awhile. I know, I just lost my TI-82 of 4 years, and it physically and emotionally traumatized me. For these reasons, and more, I think that parenting would suck.
I’m not alone. My friends, who aren’t as extreme as me perhaps, agree that there is a certain age where kids become decidedly not fun. So I realized that someone needs to shake things up. Unfortunately, that person won’t be me. I don’t have the charisma and initiative to push this one through. But someone else can freely take these ideas and follow them all the way home, and all I’ll ask for is permission to gloat freely in public.
First thing is that nasty baby backlash. Even I’ll admit that babies are cute. And great fun. That peek-a-boo thing could keep me entertained for hours, weeks maybe if I had an IV put in me or something. You may find it hard to believe, but even I was cute at some point, although long ago in prehistory, perhaps when I was a zygote. Today, you’d agree with me that I am decidedly not cute. Well, according to some theorem that some math guy thought of long ago, if I was cute once and am not cute now, there was some point at which I stopped being cute. I would identify this as a point where the parenting experience started to depreciate rapidly. I think we need to take a cue from the highly successful automobile industry. We need to introduce baby leasing.
With car leasing, you get to drive a new car every three years, and avoid that massive depreciation and the problems that come with a really old car, and the only drawback is that you never own the car and therefore do not have that asset, although that is reflected in the price. Well, with baby leasing, not owning the baby is a plus anyway, because the only thing you’re missing out on is supporting their “cool” lifestyle and probably a massive college bill! This is truely a win situation for the parents. The only problem I see is after the first few years, there will be a massive used baby market emerging, as the first round of trade-ins go to work. But I’m counting on moderate retention (I know some people are going to get attached to their kids) to keep the numbers down. Any leftover babies can be sold at a greatly reduced price, encouraging families who can’t afford a new baby but really want one.
The next step isn’t as ready to order as baby leasing. In fact, this will take a buttload of work. But in the coming decades, I’m sure we can develop the necessary technology to see this work. We already know that geneticists are always hard at work, tinkering with our genes and splitting and splicing and messing with other species’ genes to do what they want. It’s only a matter of time before they start messing with people themselves. We all know that they’re just messing with animals for practice anyway. Well, it’s my opinion that kids suck because they’re so irrational. Being the wonderful, understanding, rational person I am, I can’t deal with them. I think the worst time to parent must be when the child has the physical capacity to do what you don’t want them to, but doesn’t have the ability to understand why you don’t want them to do what they want to do. It’d be great if we could just skip that phase altogether.
But of course I wouldn’t mention this if I didn’t have an idea. I think we should get all our geneticists together and change the very DNA of humans. This way, we could create humans that pupate. And then, when they’re old enough to behave, they emerge from their cocoons/chrysili and they’re ready to rock. There are some drawbacks, but I’m sure after a hundred years we’ll work them out. First of all, they won’t get all that wonderful stimulation and teaching while pupating. If you’ve read Aldous Huxley’s “A Brave New World” you’ll see that it’s possible, at least in imagination, to teach people things while they’re developing. Secondly, you might say that unless they pupate until they’re 20, you’re gonna get a nasty youth when they come out. Well, I’m a well-behaved unsurly teenager, so there’s no reason these kids can’t be. But my biggest problem is that since they go into cocoons, we’ll have to identify them as larvae before then, and that’s just not cool. Plus, you know there’s gonna be some kids who come out looking like beautiful butterflies, and that’s pretty and all, but it’s not what we’re going for.
In conclusion, those are my two ideas for the future of the human race. I’m sure after careful consideration, you too will agree with me, and someday we can put all this in action.