I am being selfish. I think there will be some dedicated fathers reading this. I would like to hear your opinions.
I wonder sometimes if I benefited from a father typical of his generation—born in the 1960s, unconcerned with educating sons, who taught me only how to shoot a rifle (I never mastered this), leaving me to figure out adolescence, marriage, fatherhood... I am a father typical of my generation, I suppose, who wants to teach his sons to do everything, who worries probably too much about the mental state of my offspring. How do you approach this?
I have one son so far. I figure the main thing I want for him is the stuff I would want in retrospect for myself:
1. great education in athletics (including bodybuilding), music, mathematics, and literature. You could include a larger set than this, but if you were skilled in these, you're basically in a really strong position. It's difficult to self-organize a great education on these fronts, and expensive to outsource, but we'll find ways.
2. great nutrition and physical development with all the latest broscience like mewing, high quality paleo-adjacent diet, high-protein, etc. Making damn sure he has good breathing and tongue posture to get a healthy facial structure and jawline. We're doing OK at this. It's hard to get cooperation from women and children on this stuff.
3. lots of rugged outdoors play, hiking, travel, living rough, self-directed adventure, etc. Becoming tough and independent. We're doing fine at this but again hard to get cooperation, and the logistics are tricky.
4. Plenty of chances for initiation into the good parts of the adult world. Maybe that's entrepreneurship, or school (if there are any good ones left), or our political-philosophical network, or some obscure but interesting thing happening on the internet. This is the hard one tbh, despite our great position socially. We need to build a more compelling society to initiate our kids into.
5. Plenty of opportunity for open-ended socialization and adventure with other boys of good birth and impressive quality. This is another really hard one in our age of social apocalypse. Especially with the way our family lives right now.
6. Loving parents, safe home base, etc. I benefitted from this, and it could have been even better. We've got this one in the bag, so no expected problems here.