About SciFiParenting
Welcome to scifparenting.com! My name is JB and I am the father of a nearly three-year-old boy (Aaron) and have another baby on the way (code name Spiderman). I love pop culture, especially the sci-fi and fantasy genres of movies, television, and books. So the goal of this blog is to take the wonderful things that can be learned about raising children from my favorite cultural influences and see how they might apply to parenting. After all, who wouldn’t want to be able to enjoy all of his favorite leisure-time activities and learn how to bring up Junior simultaneously?
Think about the possibilities: while your wife or husband spends hours pouring over the works of Dr. Benjamin Spock, you can be reading about parenting Mr. Spock. Or, while your partner is jonesing about what the doctor told him or her to do, you could be learning from what Dr. Henry Jones told Indiana to do.
Of course, some parents tend to be a little symbolic in these genres. Take young John Connor in Terminator 2:Judgement Day. His mother is locked away in a psychiatric ward, doing pull-ups and planning for the prevention of the end of humanity, and his father is a time-traveling freedom fighter who was there for young John about as much as say, Darth Vader had been there for Luke Skywalker and Princess Leia prior to the capture of the Tantive IV above Tatooine. But, as even the most delinquent of fathers can do, Kyle Reese finally showed an interest in his kid’s life once he found John (in his own time and two sequels later). That being said, taking a gander at the T-800’s pseudo-patriarchal relationship with his charge might give us some great insight into parenting from the future. After all, my son will probably be about as old as John around the time that Arnold gets sent back for T2 in that timeline. I need to start boning up on these lessons now so I can have clever catchphrases to pass along to my kids. You do too. How great would it be to hear your kid tell his college friends about the fantastic advice he got from his parents about his intent to return in the future? I can say that I would burst with pride until my son’s mother melted me in a gigantic pit of molten metal (in which case I would probably evaporate).
The other problem in parental distillation from these works to our own lives is that many of the events that we witness are fantastic or even impossible as we know in our world. For example, the idea of passing on to your son a Kryptonian crystal that explodes into the Fortress of Solitude, albeit desirable, just doesn’t have inherent practical applications to this existence (yet). So I will translate these things into something more relevant, in this case building a house for your son.
Lastly, I highly recommend that you familiarize yourself with the work I am analyzing. If you are unable to attach my insights to specific events of the film or book, then you will be more lost that when you started reading.
Join me weekly for updates on the necessary parental skills that can help you navigate through modern times, futuristic times, and even a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away…
JB