Don’t have kids. Or, if you must, have thick ones. Trust
me, you definitely don’t want a clever one. Quite apart from the risk of them becoming
smart arses and trying your patience into the next Ice Age you will feel
compelled, by whatever universal force drives good parents, to mortgage your
very lives to have them schooled as expensively as possible, only to find that
if this does indeed bring them huge success they then disown you and your
parochial working ways. Or else they drop out, grow hippy beards, turn vegan
and become objects of your own confused disdain. Or worse, they become politicians...
Of course, some of the bright ones have a chance of succeeding
despite the forces ranged against them, even without family financial sacrifices
– scholarships, natural intelligence, entrepreneurial curiosity and good
old-fashioned serendipity may all play a part in pulling up their bootstraps.
But don’t count on it. And don’t underestimate the potential resentment of a clever
kid who doesn’t make a mark. There are plenty of examples of intelligent
low-achievers who struggle to break out of the cycle of blaming their meagre
origins for their failure to achieve all that they aspire to.
No, on the whole having a child genius is just as likely
to result in misery and guilt as to be a source of pride. So maybe you think
you’d be better off with an average kid? Progeny who can cope with the Three
Rs, knuckle down and become good citizens, productive workers and eventually
the source of adored grandchildren. Sadly no, because you are condemning them
to a life of toil and drudge to pay for those squeaky wheels whose only instinct
appears to be the belief that the world exists to be their despised plaything. Those drains
on the public purse whose social bank balance will always remain overdrawn. If it’s inward investment you’re after, have
one of those.
Pop out a real thug of a thicko. At nursery his demands
will be legitimised by being identified as having special educational
requirements. He (or she, but statistically it will be a he) will quickly learn
that he doesn’t need to learn; all his whims will be catered for by a veritable
army of social workers, home visitors, special needs teachers, classroom assistants,
psychologists and sociologists and and and... They will toilet train him for you and do
their best to keep him out of trouble and a higher than normal per-capita
proportion of the nation’s wealth will be visited upon him with no demands for
repayment in usefulness.
If he is especially sub-human the state will fork out
ever greater sums to keep him in care, in various institutions, in prisons and rehabilitation
centres, in hospitals for the criminally insane and eventually in an old folks
home. He will be sent on holidays dressed up as developmental treatment along
with state-funded lackeys who will be described as therapists because we have
lost the will to hold people to account and instead reward their intolerance and
selfish sense of entitlement with undue deference that only reinforces their loathsome
behaviour. Oh and then they go on to have a multitude of thick kids of their
own.
Apart from the biological urge – and urges can be
overcome - I don’t know why anybody would ever have kids at all. It’s a bloody
minefield, a coin-toss… a lottery. Maybe the world would just be better off
with fewer children in it altogether. Two decades it take before you begin to
see a material return on investment and then probably another two before a vanishingly
small proportion of them start to turn a meagre profit. As a nation we’d be far
better off breeding pigs.
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