Looking at the cloudy crystal ball of the future known as “American children and their parents,” I offer now a primer on the possibility that our future may be doomed to become a Leftist future, given what too many parents – wittingly or unwittingly – are teaching their children in word and by example.

The following guidelines have been deduced from the last 20 years of observing parents and children at various private and public schools of various economic levels, as well as at the playgrounds and malls and family gatherings, and go beyond just my experiences, but include items from other teachers and assorted professionals from throughout the country.  Obviously I will still not claim any kind of scientific accuracy behind the observations: and yet, when one hears so many similar stories from parents and teachers at conventions throughout the country throughout so many years, when one reads so many similar stories in so many sources, it does make one wonder how widespread the following tendencies are.

And so…

Starting as early as possible, do not let your children experience ANYTHING negative!  Fuss and flutter and hover around them constantly, placing pillows at the end of the slide, assuming that the slide is not TOO HIGH to begin with, and be sure to say: “BE CAREFUL!” so much that your children become risk-averse and want to just sit in front of a nice safe video-screen.

NEVER let your children, when they are old enough (9, 10, 11…),  go to a playground alone, or play outside alone, or meet with a group of other unsupervised, unparented kids to organize a baseball game.  Make sure that the only time they play sports is with a gang of screaming immature adults lining the field and acting like idiots over a muffed ground ball or a fumble in football or, worst of all, over anything in a soccer game.  This will guarantee that they cannot deal with issues on their own and need to be told what to do by some authority!

Make sure that they are told all the time that they are all winners even when the truth is painfully obvious.  Tell them that the other side cheated, or that the referees and umpires are morons.  Tell them that you will file protests with whomever and try to change the outcome.  Criticize the volunteer coaches or managers as the ones responsible for the losses, and claim that they play favorites:  tell your children they are the best players on the team, but because of unfair favoritism among the coaches or managers they did not have a chance!  The deck was stacked against them!

Also important: show absolutely no personal discipline!  e.g. Be sure to pack on the pounds as the years go by, as you grow to become 80 pounds or more overweight.  Drink to excess, smoke the funny or the unfunny weeds, throw the first wife or the first husband away because you “have fallen out of love,” meaning that you were too stupid and selfish and undisciplined  to avoid that affair.  The children of divorce are always well-adjusted!

Buy things you cannot really afford!  Live in a too expensive house, drive a too expensive car, buy so many things that the garage is stuffed with stuff and you need to rent a “storage facility” to handle all the overflowing extras.

Show no discipline in what you do for your children: go overboard on everything!  Spend hundreds of dollars on each child at Christmas, buy them phones when they are 5, and computers at 7, complete with Internet hook-up, so that they can find out about Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Licentiousness at an early age. 

Reinforce the idea that they are entitled to all sorts of things without having to work for it!  Do not have them do chores around the house for a small wage: and if you do attempt to have them work for an allowance, give in to their whining when they want more than they deserve.  When they fail to do what they agreed to do, sigh and do the job yourself, because you got tired of nagging them.  Be the first to give into their power plays, and then hand them money whenever they ask for it without any conditions!

Accompany them to R-rated slasher movies when they are in the Seventh Grade, because you got tired of them whining about it, and anyway, at least it is nothing pornographic.  Speaking of whining, let your 10-12-year old daughters dress like street-walkers, because you cannot say No, and anyway, you do not want your daughters to be be considered Amish pariahs.  For the boys, buy those $150. gym shoes and sign the waiver for the tattoo: you do NOT want to be the uncool Dad with a loser son!  Indulge them because they really do deserve it, and it is just easier!

Stay unchurched or unsynagogued or whatever, or even better: drop your kids off at Sunday school or even send them to a religious school, but do not bother actually practicing your religion and entering a church more than twice a year, so that the left-wing sneering about religious people being hypocrites will seem true!

When they are teenagers under 18, tell them you will buy them beer or wine for parties you will sponsor at your house, because the law is really unrealistic and should not apply to you and your realistic-thinking family!

In school…where do I start?!  How about this?   Set an example by NOT reading anything much and by constantly watching TV or surfing the Internet.   When years go by and your child’s handwriting is still an illegible scrawl, just shrug your shoulders and say: “Oh well!  My handwriting’s no good either!  And anyway, who needs it in the era of the computer?”  Trust the A’s and B’s from your child’s public school (and even from some private schools) to mean that everything is fine: ignore your children’s inability to read beyond the 3rd or 4th Grade level , when they are in the 8th Grade.  Ignore their inability to handle fractions or decimals or any kind of higher Math. What are calculators for anyway?   When your 8th Grader is unable to write one logical paragraph, shrug it off: you can always download stuff from the Internet!  And do not bother going to parent meetings: the grades say everything is just fine!  Of course, the newspapers say that the school system has a 25% graduation rate, or is below the already ridiculously low standards set by the state.  But that is not the case at YOUR school!

But let’s assume that maybe your children attend a competent and challenging school!  Be sure then to complain about too much homework!  Argue with teachers about everything possible: if a foreign language is offered, be sure to tell your children it is irrelevant and that the world should learn English.  Pooh-pooh the importance of Art and Music!   And feel free to cheat and do work which your child is supposed to do, because the work is unfair anyway, and everybody else has parents cheating for them!  When grades show that your children are not the geniuses you believe them to be, complain about the unfair grading system, the unfair teachers, and threaten lawsuits unless your children’s grades are changed.

And whether your school is competent or not, if your children get into trouble, contest every detention and demerit!  Demand that their records be expunged, and threaten lawsuits unless your whining brings results.

Claim that everything your children say is The Truth.   Maintain that the teachers and administrators are lying!  When your children bring home wild stories about what happened in the classrooms, Believe EVERYTHING they say because Your Children Do NOT Lie!

This hypocrisy and plasticity about The Truth will help them become left-wing relativists, where the leftist end will always justify the leftist means.

And so…

Combined with the above tendencies to be passively risk-averse, of being unable to deal with problems on their own without needing an authority to dictate a solution to them, of expecting most things to be handed to them because of their winning and entitled natures, of lacking basic physical and mental discipline and refusing to suffer any consequences from any over indulgence, of believing that, because Life is about fairness and NOT achievement, the rules of society should not always apply to them, all of these will produce far too often by age 18 a true blue Democrat who will be unable to think of any reason why BIG BRObama is not the obvious choice for president.

People do change: we can only hope that the modern American children described above do not become a majority, and that somehow they find their way out of the “kulcheral” darkness all around them and can rectify the deviant paths in their backgrounds.